Latin American Journey: Insights for Christian Education in North America by Robert W. Pazmiño
I would like to draw your attention to one more book on Christian education, this one from the perspective of a North American Hispanic man (my last post highlighted a Christian education book by an African American woman). Robert Pazmiño is a professor of religious education at Andover Newton Theological School, who felt inspired to learn more about his Latin American roots with his family. He journeys to Costa Rica and his ancestral homeland of Ecuador. The resulting book is a way of applying his lessons learned on that journey to his profession in equipping Christian educators.
In the first two chapters, Pazmiño reviews Latin American liberation theology, particularly those ideas related to pedagogy. He discusses the threats (“destroyers”) to life as God intended and calls to action as proclaimed by folks like Gutierrez, Boff, Guillermo Cook, and Orlando Costas. His discussion of education and its relationship to liberation theology appropriately centers on the work of Paulo Freire.
Pazmiño takes the rest of the book to flesh out what those theories look like in North American Christian education. He outlines how lessons from liberation theology help us in leading transformative Christian education. He also provides the reader with a tremendous resource for wrestling with multicultural challenges in North America. Any educator in the church would be wise to tackle this book along with Wimberly’s (see last post) in order to consider out-of-the-box ways of approaching educational ministry. As for me, I will be looking for ways to adapt these insights into the academic classroom in my search for creative pedagogy.
Soul Stories: African American Christian Education by Anne E. Streaty Wimberly
Continuing the theme of education from my last several posts, I’d like to take a moment to review a book that explores a particular angle on pedagogy for the African American community. Anne E. Streaty Wimberly’s book, Soul Stories, pays attention to the importance of connecting narratives, what she calls “story-linking.” Specifically, Wimberly suggests that one way to help people move towards ethical living in Christian education is by examining the relationships between an individual’s story with biblical narratives and also with the stories from their African American heritage.
The first phase of the story-linking process is somewhat autobiographical and introspective. The student/participant considers her identity, her social contexts, her relationships, key events in her life, and the basic meanings that she assigns her life. In the second phase, the leader/teacher guides participants through biblical passages, engaging them in ways that help participants “enter into a partnership” with the biblical characters. They also begin to envision God’s action today in light of the passage and their ongoing response to God. As a biblical scholar in training, this second phase makes me the most nervous, but I also recognize that it is perhaps the most important.
Phase three is what makes this approach somewhat different than the typical “Bible study” of a traditional Caucasian church (I can’t speak to what Christian education actually looks like in African American churches). This is where participants engage in exemplars of the past, both widely known and local heroes of faith in action, with whom they can identify. Finally, phase four is when the leader helps the participants to gather all of these stories and develop them into a way of discerning God’s call for ethical decision making today.
As you might notice, the process need not be limited to African American communities, though the way Wimberly engages her own African American heritage is insightful and instructive for other communities. Every person has a heritage that they can draw from which to draw in this process. There will surely be challenges in discerning meaning in biblical stories, as there would be with any study of the Bible at the lay level. One potential danger is that participants will simply mine biblical texts for images of themselves, rather than being challenged and convicted by them. There would certainly be hurdles in multicultural situations, but such hurdles may make the story-linking even more beneficial. The process may take some creativity for those who do not know much about their heritage. In the end, though, it’s a process seriously worth considering for all sorts of educational contexts and Wimberly’s book is a helpful jumpstart.
Many Conversions in Process (Part 2)
In my previous post, I mentioned how I have thought about conversions this quarter. Since it is relevant to my vocation as a scholar and educator, I would like to reflect a little bit on my “intellectual” and “sociopolitical” conversions. I can point to a definitive moment when I had my major moral conversion (see my last post) and also my Christian conversion (at Christian youth event in high school). But for my intellectual and sociopolitical conversions, it is more difficult to nail down. In Donald Gelpi’s book, Committed Worship, he describes his own intellectual conversion:
Then came the day when I realized that I did not believe some of the things one of my professors taught. . . . I finally decided to formulate my own position on the subject. With that decision, I believe, I began to come of age intellectually. [25]
Something like this happened to me a couple of times. In my last post, I mentioned how I was a pretty bad kid in early adolescence. Not only did I cause trouble, but I was a very poor student. My dad told me that I made one of my elementary teachers cry because I was not living up to my potential. That was only the beginning. My academic low point was probably eighth grade (the same year I made my moral conversion).
My mind was truly captured for the first time after I became a Christian at 16 and attended weekly Bible studies. It was the first topic that I was so excited that I actually began to read . . . a lot. I read as much of the Bible as I could and asked lots of questions during the studies. What I didn’t realize was that I was being spoonfed a particular brand of biblical interpretation (some may call it fundamentalism).
Then, when I (barely) made it into college and began my study as a Bible major, I was introduced critical thinking. The Bible was no longer simply an “answer book,” a repository of information at my fingertips, but a complex compendium of documents written in vastly different historical and cultural contexts than my own. My early studies at Messiah nudged me out of my high school fundamentalism. Later, I began to develop the tools to question what my undergraduate professors were telling me.
Like Gelpi, I started to find my own intellectual voice. During this time, I became Anabaptist. Reading Anabaptist literature profoundly affected my intellectual outlook, but I also found that I was not walking in lockstep with all Anabaptists. I eventually found a way to be both committed to my Anabaptist faith and live with tons of intellectual questions.
I won’t go into the whole of my sociopolitical conversion, but suffice it to say that my inquisitiveness led me to question not only theological, historical, or literary ideas, but also present day cultural and societal norms. In turn, I’ve become an activist of sorts, perhaps a mild activist (e.g., I’ve never been arrested for civil disobedience), but I am engaged.
As I connect the dots with another earlier post on holistic teaching, I imagine these are the sorts of stories that I will meet as a pastoral kind of educator. My hope is that I can the kind of guide that my professors have been for me in my intellectual and sociopolitical conversion process.
Many Conversions in Process (Part 1)
I have thought a good deal about conversions this quarter, which I didn’t expect to happen when it began. In my preaching practicum, “Making Doctrine Live,” I was assigned the text of Acts 16:25-34 (conversion of the Philippian jailer) and instructed to relate it to the doctrine of conversion. A few weeks before I was supposed to preach the sermon, we talked about conversion stories in my “Congregation as Learning Community” (CLC) course.
I have always thought of conversion as a process, more than the instantaneous transformation of one person from unbeliever to believer. When we discussed conversions in CLC, Mark Lau Branson pointed to the work of Roman Catholic theologian, Donald Gelpi. Gelpi outlines five areas in which conversion has both an initial moment and an ongoing process: affective (emotional), intellectual, moral, sociopolitical, and Christian (or religious). Branson adds “local congregation” as a sixth category. In these categories, Gelpi borrows from secular definitions of conversion, in which conversion constitutes:
“ . . . change from irresponsibility to responsibility that includes accountability, in which persons acknowledge a duty to render an account of the motives and consequences of their decisions to someone or to some community of persons. Conversion is possible in natural and supernatural spheres, which are interrelated.” (“Branson on Gelpi on Conversion,” in-class handout).
In other words, conversion is not as simple as we might believe if we listen to most television preachers. For example, I actually had a moral conversion before my Christian conversion. As it happens, I was a pretty bad kid as an early adolescent. In those junior high years, I shoplifted and generally got into lots of trouble with a buddy of mine that was my partner in crime (literally). During this two year phase of mine, my parents couldn’t do anything to change my behavior. Then, one day, my buddy and I got picked up at a local department store for shoplifting some junk food. It wasn’t the first time I got caught, in fact it was the second time that week, but this time was different.
Rather than pick me up herself, my mother decided to let the police escort us home. The officer that came to pick me up happened to be my DARE officer from sixth grade. I had tremendous respect for this man, who had taught me to “just say no.” So, when I saw the look of disappointment on his face and heard it in his voice, I was suddenly transformed. I stopped hanging out with my fellow hoodlum and concentrated instead on singing in school choir. I stopped my criminal activities and became good friends with a fellow choir member who eventually introduced me to the Christian faith.
This is an example of how one conversion was both “initial” and “ongoing,” while it also led down a path towards other conversions. Thinking about these conversions in class not only helped me see new and interesting things in the jailer’s conversion in Acts as I planned my sermon. The exercise also helped me consider what it means that conversion is a process in my own life.
This theme stood out so strongly to me, I think I will write a second post on some of my intellectual and sociopolitical conversions. The two categories are intimately connected for me.
Dynamics of the Classroom/Congregation
During this quarter, part of the home stretch in my seminary career, I have been thinking about education in the context of a congregation. In “The Congregation as Learning Community,” we’ve been emphasizing a holistic kind of education, using buzzwords like “discipleship” and “missional church.” I came into the class thinking that we’d be mostly covering practical aspects of education within a church. But we spent a great deal of time thinking more about the purpose of the congregation and the people who fill it. We should not merely be dumping information into people’s minds, but educational leaders in the church should be guiding and equipping people in becoming transformed disciples.
It makes me wonder: how do we conceive of the student in the classroom? It seems like its easy to forget that students are whole human beings and not just warm bodies behind desks, or numbers on an excel spreadsheet. I have often thought of my pursued vocation as not only a professor, but as a pastoral kind of professor. If I connect the dots, then, I should broaden or deepen my understanding of the people I will be teaching in the future. I should also broaden or deepen my understanding of what my role is as a future educator.
“Disciple,” after all, is just another word for “learner” or “student.” Isn’t it natural to connect the dots between the two? Just like at any church, there will be a hundred different things on the minds of those who show up. Just like at any church, those who come are hoping to “get something out of it” for themselves. What if we could transform a classroom in the kinds of ways that the “missional church” movement is trying to transform the church? How can we not only engage the minds of students but provoke them towards action? How do we not only impart information but also help students to grapple with cultural implications to what they are learning? How do we make contextual connections inside and outside the classroom? I am certain the answers will differ from one topic or classroom to the next. But I think it’s good for me to start asking these questions before I dive headfirst into life as a full-time educator.
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Elsewhere . . .- Blog titles beginning with "A" to "Z" on your reader Mark Goodacre
- Of making many books there is no end Chris Brady
- Free Online: The Liddell-Scott Jones Lexicon S and C
- Does Higher Criticism Attempt to “Destroy the Bible”? II agathos
- Steven J. Friesen and the Identity of Satan’s Throne in Pergamum alan
- Does Higher Criticism Attempt to “Destroy the Bible”? agathos
- Bloomsbury buys Continuum Mark Goodacre
- Imperial America Peter J. Leithart
- C.F.D. Moule on the Birth of the New Testament d. miller
- Responding to Kostenberger (with comparisons to Marshall) Jeremiah
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