Hoops & Hurdles

One of the frustrating things on the road to achieving our goals is that there always seems to be some sort of requirement that needs to be fulfilled to satisfy someone else. While these requirements are often put in place with the best of intentions they can easily become bureaucratic hoops that take more time and energy to jump through than they are worth.

The report from the chair of the Evangelism Committee took less than a minute of the council’s time. “Most of the people in the neighborhood are either black or Indian, and they have their own churches they like to go to, so there isn’t much for the Evangelism Committee to do.”

I sat up in my seat, ready to take the chair of the Evangelism Committee to task for missing the whole point of evangelism. Besides, there was a less-than-subtle hint of racism buried in his observations. The pastor of the congregation, who was sitting next to me at the table, pressed his hand against my leg to get my attention. He silently mouthed the words, “Not now,” and shook his head ever so slightly. Reluctantly, I held my tongue.

For my Contextual Education class I had been assigned to an urban church on the north side of Minneapolis. It had thrived in the city expansion of the post-war 1950’s. But in the 1960’s and 70’s an exodus of people to the suburbs started a steady congregational decline. The people who moved into the neighborhood didn’t look or live like the affluent suburbanites that returned to their home church every Sunday morning. By the time I was assigned to the church in 1989, the beautiful sanctuary that was capable of seating over 400 people, regularly hosted about 60 every week. Most of the Sunday school rooms had been repurposed for special groups since only four of them were used for their intended purpose. The gymnasium echoed with emptiness every time I passed by in the hallway.

The point of contextual education is similar to teaching practicums for people who are studying to become teachers. Even though everyone has been in a classroom as a student, being the teacher is quite a different experience. Sitting in a pew every week and teaching a Sunday school class is different than being a pastor. Since the seminary is responsible for training qualified pastors, making sure that people know exactly what they are getting into is important. Contextual Education is the way to do that.

But Contextual Ed assumes that a person has never been on the business side of the church. For many people this is true. But some people came to seminary with years of experience in congregations. They were aware of the behind-the-scenes squabbles, the infighting and the politics of local congregations. They had years of teaching and leading experience. Yet they too were required to work with a church.

I was probably somewhere in between. I had experience with the inner workings of a congregations having spent so much time in churches. What I needed was experience leading the leaders. Leaving someone unchallenged when they were so clearly in the wrong about the church and about the people who lived in the neighborhood was not the kind of training I needed. This was a teaching moment for everyone at the table. It demonstrated the kind of thinking to which so many churches adhere. Unfortunately, the chance to inspect the speck in our own eye, so to speak, silently slipped by.

With any experience in life there is an opportunity to learn. I met some wonderful people in that congregation who were genuinely loving and worked in unofficial ways to reach out to the surrounding community. But there were some in my class who didn’t need Contextual Ed experience because they had it before they came to the seminary.

I will admit that some requirements for certification or graduation that felt like hoops at the time ended up being valuable learning experiences. I don’t always know what’s best for me at the time. But creating one-size-fits-all models of education can waste a lot of valuable time and energy as people find themselves jumping through hoops and fulfilling requirements that don’t teach what they are meant to teach. It’s simply a way of making it fair to everyone. Creating individual learning programs for students is more work for the educators but it is not impossible.

Maybe it’s time to stop putting hoops and hurdles in front of people and calling it faith development. Maybe we, as a church, need to find ways to let life teach its own lessons if we are willing to learn.