Beyond Cotton Ball Sheep

Greetings from Nashville! I’m here at the Scarritt-Bennett Center enjoying the Partners in Education National Event, a gathering for educators (lay and ordained) from all over the United Church of Christ. Partners are the designated education gurus in their conferences, serving as consultants for churches seeking advice on curriculum selection, program design, volunteer recruitment, and other tough topics. (If you’re reading this and your church is part of the Penn West conference, give your Partners a call! We’d love to help you out.)

It is humbling to witness the years of experience and expertise represented in this group. These people know Christian education inside out. They’ve lived through decades of innovation and experimentation in educational resources in the United Church of Christ. I have so much to learn from them.

The main event here is the unveiling of the UCC’s brand new set of resources (”we’re not calling it a curriculum, but it’s rich enough that it could function that way,” said Ken Ostermiller, the denomination’s Minister of Curriculum Development), which will debut this fall. It’s called Faith Practices. And let me be the first to tell you: Faith Practices is sweet. I can’t wait to get started using it at Smithfield.

It’s also hard to explain, which is going to be its biggest liability; it takes a little while to wrap your head around what exactly it is, how it’s structured, and what it will take to get it working. Let me give that a try:

Instead of being structured around a sequence of Bible stories, or around the designated lectionary texts, Faith Practices is organized around spiritual practices - stuff we do to express our faith. Rather than teaching about Christianity, Faith Practices teaches how to be Christian; it’s a dramatic, well-nigh Copernican, shift. Spiritual practices are, of course, somewhat trendy in the mainline church at the moment (see the work of Dorothy Bass, among others). But they’re trendy for a reason: spiritual practices are ancient, time-tested ways to grow in faith, effective in a way that no worksheet or (dare I say) cotton ball sheep could ever be.

For the next six years, the UCC is going to publish resources on four practices each year. The first year will focus on Hospitality, Living Stewardship, Keeping Sabbath, and Playing & Living Joyfully. There will be unique resources available for each practice for twelve different “components” (age/setting groups), such as young children, older children, youth, young adults, adults, intergenerational, worship and arts, etc. And here’s where it gets really cool: within each component, there will be fifty-four suggested activities, with each activity taking about 15 minutes to complete. The activities will be grouped into a suggested sequence, but ultimately it’s up to the user which ideas to select for any given session. Faith Practices could be the only resource you need for a full year’s worth of weekly hour-long classes for all the age and interest groups at your church. Or, you can mix and match the activities and use them for shorter-term classes, in retreats and group meetings, within worship services … there are lots of possibilities. Given the very reasonable price ($600 buys you one year of access to everything: all 54 activities in all 12 components of all 4 practices, a total of 2592 activities!), you might also use Faith Practices as a supplement to another existing curriculum.

Let me give you an example, because I know this is unwieldy. Today in a workshop, I experienced one session of the Keeping Sabbath materials, targeted to Seekers & New Church Participants. This session was meant to take place about halfway through a unit on Keeping Sabbath, after the concept had been introduced and studied in scriptural and historical context. We completed three activities: tracing a finger labyrinth, slowly and reflectively walking through the chapel sanctuary, and singing and reflecting on favorite hymns of praise. After each activity, the participants had time to reflect on what we had just done, sharing a few words about what we noticed and how this activity might connect to the theme of Sabbath.

Too often, especially when writing for children, curricula seem to suggest activities just to fill up time and give something fun to do: today we’re making footprints out of clay because we learned about following Jesus. The activities often don’t relate very closely to the actual learning objective, or they make a metaphorical leap that’s beyond a child’s cognitive understanding (today we’re decorating light switch covers because Jesus lights up our lives!). The activities might be fun, and they might teach something, but they don’t actually help participants to grow in faith, which is what Christian education should be all about.

In contrast, in Faith Practices, the activities are the objective. Today, we did not learn about Sabbath; we experienced Sabbath. We didn’t just talk about Christianity; we acted like Christians. These new resources offer the possibility of cultivating real faith in new and exciting ways in our local churches. I hope that UCC congregations can overcome the program’s complex structure to put Faith Practices to work this fall.