Robert Frost's image of the future is a familiar one. Life is a journey in time. The journey presents us with choices. We experience those choices as forks in the road. The future of Christian education depends on choices we make as we come to those junctions in our journey. These choices are not to be taken lightly. The future of Christian education in the Disciples church depends on choices made by the denomination (Part One). The future of the Disciples church depends on choices made by Christian educators in the church-both professional and lay (Parts Two and Three).

The future of Christian education: Part 3
Learning by doing

Dorothy Bass, perhaps more than anyone, has observed the power of paying attention to the contemporary cultivation of spiritual practices. Bass‘s book Practicing Our Faith should be on every Christian educator's reading list. In that book she includes essays by a number of writers who describe distinctive Christian practices: hospitality, household economics, keeping Sabbath, forgiveness, etc. These are important, but there is an even more basic set of practices that should inform the future work of Christian educators. If the church, influenced by our efforts as Christian educators take this road, they will engage congregations in:

• Practicing talking about God morning, noon, and night: This practice emphasizes learning to read the Bible, talking often with others about what one reads; i.e. to develop a theological vocabulary for making sense of contemporary events and relationships.
  
• Practicing hospitality: This practice is expressed in the repeated activity of eating together in our homes, in our congregations, at the Lord‘s table, to ensure that all people have enough to eat and experience at the same time, the nurturing care of community; it is more completely about providing a place at the table, literally and metaphorically, for all God's people.
  
• Practicing prayer: This practice includes singing, preaching, listening and worshipping. It cultivates the capacity to discern and embrace the mystery of God.
  
• Practicing the love of neighbor: This practice engages us in the stewardship of the earth as God's partner and the mutuality of caring for each other as children of God. This practice shifts our attention from consumption and competition toward compassion and service.

This is not an original list. Nor is it an original task. They are similar to those proposed by the Deuteronomist and the early advocates of the Sunday school. A future filled with hope for the church through its education lies, in a recommitment to cultivating practices of discipleship responsive to contemporary challenges of faith. What does that commitment look like? You undoubtedly have good examples. Let me share one from my own experience.

In the mid-1990s, I made the decision that it had been too long since I had taught children in church. So I volunteered to teach in the Sunday school of our little congregation of 250 members representing thirteen different nations. This congregation could not assume any common vision of community; it had to create a common vision from the varieties of the experience of its members and for that vision to have meaning and power we had to practice it.

My partner teacher was from Liberia. Teaching those children in that congregation helped me identify several principles for the education in congregations that seek to build a future for themselves in part, through their children and youth.

1. You can't talk about God if the stories of God are not deeply embedded in the recesses of your memory; indeed in your bones. So we practiced reading the same biblical text many different ways for at least a month assuming it was better to know a few passages of scripture deeply as a window to the rest of scripture than to encounter and forget many.
   
2. Talking about God requires a hospitable environment-one filled with welcoming and redemptive relationships particularly across the generations. So, for one example, we asked senior members of the congregation to share their favorite bible stories and hymns with the children in Sunday school as a way of building sustaining relationships between them.
   
3. Talking to God requires practice in the disciplines of talking to God. Every week we practiced praying-offering sentence prayers, memorizing historic prayers and creeds of the church, memorizing hymns of the church, sending copies of prayers home to be memorized, practicing to lead the congregation at least once a month in reading scripture, a hymn or prayer during worship.
   
4. Loving neighbor requires practice in listening-a difficult task in a multi-cultural congregation. So we practiced "listening" to each other‘s words. And we created opportunities to "listen" to others. The children of this congregation, for example, joined youth and adults in serving lunch to homeless adults.

In exile the Jews established the synagogue to ensure a future through education. At the edges of an expanding nation, our ancestors established the Sunday school to ensure a future for the church. I do believe that once again, as a church and a society, we may find ourselves creating a new institutional form to ensure a future for the church through its education. What that institution will look like, I do not yet know. I do know however, that whatever it will look like, it will emerge from the efforts of Christian educators helping people to practice habits, dispositions and values for living into the stories of God (Foster, 1994).

For Further Reading

Dorothy C. Bass, ed. Practicing Our Faith: A Way of Life for a Searching People. San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 1997.

Charles R. Foster. Educating Congregations: The Future of Christian Education. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994.

Ronald A. Heifetz and Marty Linsky. Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2002.

Christian Smith, et. al. Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

—Dr. Charles R Foster presented this keynote for the Association of Christian Church Educators breakfast during the General Assembly at Portland, Ore. Foster is Senior Scholar for The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Professor of Religion and Education, Emeritus at Candler School of Theology, Emory University, Atlanta, Ga.