Church life should be about learning

Education. Or “Education, education, education”, as a certain Mr Blair famously said. According to Pink Floyd, it’s what we don’t need none of (although more education could have avoided that egregious double negative). Parents are never satisfied with what’s provided by the system to which they entrust their little darlings from an alarming early age (in defiance of all research, which shows that the later children start formal education, the better they do academically). Teachers are never satisfied, which is hardly surprising given the ever-increasing demands on their time and energy. And as for the pupils – well most of them would much rather be at home and left to their own devices (devices on which they could probably learn much more than at school but on which they’re probably playing some implausibly explosive game…).

After a somewhat disastrous start in reception, where (being an August birthday) our son was only three weeks older than the nursery children, we put him in Montessori for three years. This was ideal, since at five a Montessori child is still in nursery, learning the social skills he so needed, but still able to progress academically due to the self-teaching nature of the well-designed Montessori materials. Alas, he wasn’t able to stay there after seven, and there followed a decade of change after change of school as we desperately tried to find him a place where he could both learn and be happy, with adequate support for his additional needs  – but I won’t go further into that sad story. He got through school and university and ended up with a degree and his own business, so it can’t have done too much damage. 

The need for self-directed learning

What I really want to focus on is the strange emphasis we Christians have on teaching. I can’t tell you the number of churches I’ve been in where the person in the pew has muttered: “What we want is more teaching.” Surely, on the model of the Montessori self-directed method, what we actually need is more learning? And that can’t come from the front; it needs to happen in the pew or chair or adult Sunday school room if you’re in America. I can’t help but suspect that, when the people clamour for more teaching, what they actually want is to be told what to think. We don’t want to grapple with all these difficult world issues by ourselves, or even in home groups; we want ‘Christian answers’. We face challenges all week at work or in our families – do we, when we go to church, just want a good rest and to be spoon fed?

When the people clamour for more teaching, what they actually want is to be told what to think

One of the things I loved about my now-defunct Mennonite church was that we were never told what to think. We still had sermons, though no pulpit (we rented an upper room above an Irish bar), but they were designed to help us think, rather than to make us think the ‘right’ things. Sure, they gave us background information and plenty to ponder. But there was no obvious ‘party line’, and if we did want a church policy on a particular issue, we would thrash it out painfully in home groups and business meetings until we had reached some sort of consensus. The basics of Mennonite tradition were there: an emphasis on peace and justice, on community and mutual support, on seeking to follow Jesus in life rather than simply to worship him. But beyond that there was a lot of scope for disagreement, listening to each other and, yes, learning. That’s what I call ‘church for grown-ups’.

Interestingly, we didn’t have the gender imbalance that most churches complain of. We were small, but we attracted men, and very good-quality men too – in fact towards the end of the church’s life, we had a distinct shortage of women! And this, despite mostly having more women leading worship and preaching than men. This didn’t, as some suggest, put men off joining. Could it be that men actually liked the challenge of being called to think for themselves? 

It’s true we were a rather highly educated church, having started as a student fellowship in the London Mennonite Centre when it was an international student hostel. We had more than our fair share of theologically qualified members to resource us and stop us from going wildly astray. A song we loved to sing was the Fisherfolk ‘Celebration Song’ – it includes the line: “For our life together, we celebrate”, which I was often tempted to turn into “In our life together, we’re cerebral.”

However, I think we got one thing right: we never talked very much about teaching. Yet our whole church life was about learning. You could call it something else: discipleship. Discipleship, discipleship, discipleship, as Mr Blair never said. That’s what it’s all about.