Standardized Tests, Learning Styles, and Church
At Christianity 21 I had a fascinating conversation with a couple of educators about how No Child Left Behind with its extreme emphasis on standardized testing has ruined our schools and teachers. They were discussing the stress such tests put on students and the lack of real learning that takes place in schools these days. I totally agree with all that, but the timing of the conversation sparked a few new connections for me. You see, we had just all done the small talk thing about what sorts of churches we attend and why. I understand the huge role personality and preference play in our choice of church to attend, but this conversation helped me pinpoint how much my learning style and hatred of standardized tests effects where I go to church.
Growing up, I never had a problem with standardized tests. They didn’t stress me out. I didn’t have to cover for my teachers helping me cheat on the test like many students these days. No, I was the kid who always got a perfect score on every standardized test. I’m not saying that to brag (because I hate the things), just to say that I learned how to take tests. I learned very early on how to give the test or the teacher exactly what they wanted to hear. So I could parrot back right answers. I could fill in the correct bubble with my number two pencil. And as I grew older I could ace pop quizzes on books I simply skimmed or get an A+ on a 10 page book report on a book I never read. I knew the system, I knew how succeed in a “learning” environment where all I had to do was regurgitate the exact crap the teacher wanted. And I thought it was all a joke.
I hated classes where this sort of so-called learning was the norm. To me it was just a game of information and not true intellectual engagement. I felt silly at the grade-school assemblies where I got trophies for my perfect scores because I knew it was meaningless. I felt ashamed at good grades that meant nothing. So when I first started to encounter settings where real learning took place, I dove headfirst into the opportunity. In high school that was the IB program. Where the AP classes were just all about learning the right way to take more vigorous tests, the IB classes were all discussion based. With no more than a dozen of us in each class we would explore the books we read, discuss poetry, pull out the themes in history, and design our own science experiments. Our grades were based on long essays where ideas and not form were the point. Or we were evaluated by sitting down for hour long discussions with our teacher. I came alive in that environment as I realized that real learning involved interaction and engagement. In college , expecting more of the same, I could barely stand the classes where it was all about just playing the system and bsing my way through. I wanted to learn, not just make it through.
So understanding that about myself helps me see why I attend the church that I do. I really can’t stand sermons or liturgy. I don’t want someone telling me what I should think without giving me the chance to engage. Nor do I like feeling like I have to engage in the right rituals of the system in order to do church right. I get how those things work for people with other preferences and learning styles, but they aren’t for me. I need to engage, be a part of a discussion, to push back when presented with ideas, to be able to connect what happens in church to life, and history, and music, and politics, and movies, and parenting…. I don’t want to feel like I have to fill in the right bubble or spit out some pretty sounding bs in order to be a part of church. I’ve been there, done that, and it felt false. I was good at it, just as I was good as standardized tests, but it didn’t spiritually form me. So I get uneasy with the recent popularity of discussions upholding the traditional forms of church and the sermon as the only right way to do church. Those are hollow to me and represent a detachment from meaningful faith. Others can have and celebrate those things, I just need something different.
julieclawson(at)gmail(dot)com 
Love your post Julie and so glad to meet you at C21.
I’m intrigued. By the criteria of intellectual engagement with doctrine, the Episcopal church (my wife’s tradition, not mine) seems like it would be perfect for you. But by the criteria of liturgy, it fails stupendously.
As an art teacher turned stay at home mom learning styles as they relate to worship is something that I have spent much of my time thinking about in the past and even more so since we have recently moved and are looking for a new place or family of worship. We have come up dry so far in our search for the same reason you mentioned… I am looking for something more engaging, more visual and more creative than I have ever been a part of before. It is quite frustrating and I keep telling my husband that what we are looking for just doesn’t exist in this area… can’t decide if we just settle back into our old way of being a part of the nearest local United Methodist church and take our place as the black sheep of the group or if we just continue searching… and searching…
Isn’t there also at some point a need to surrender and cede authority – or at least significant deference – to something bigger than myself?
How do you avoid the danger this author writes about concerning her own spiritual smorgasboard approach:
“My senior college year I gained a startling insight: I realized that my selections [of religious beliefs] were inevitably conditioned by my own tastes, prejudices, and blind spots. I was patching together a Frankenstein God in my own image, and it would never be taller than five foot one. If I wanted to grow beyond my own meager wisdom, I would have to submit to a faith bigger than I was and accept its instruction.”
Is there a place for that? I can understand someone disliking liturgy or not wanting a sermon-centric church service. But there also seems to be a note of “I’m the final judge” not just on matters of service structure but on pretty much everything to do with faith. How do you avoid a religion of Christianish Julie-ism?
We’re all always the “final judge” on these sorts of things. Even if someone decides to “cede authority” to someone else at some point, that’s still a decision based on what was best for them in their own judgment. Unless you’re literally being coerced into going to a church you don’t want to be in, all of us have at some point made a choice about what we think works for us and what our faith will be.
At the same time however, what Julie is talking about isn’t just individualism. A church where you engage and collaborate and co-create is not a individual exercise, it is a communal one. It it the community that keeps it from being a merely individual faith. And that is still significantly different from a church where the community isn’t allowed much room to co-create, but merely has to accept whatever is handed down from on high.
Great post–I resonate with a lot of what you said about learning. (Yes, school was relatively “easy” and I do best in environments where I can participate and wrestle with ideas.)
When it comes to worship, though, I’m somewhere in between. I love traditional worship and how liturgies can connect me with Christians across nations and generations. But I also really appreciate other forms of worship that offer space for reflection, dialogue, and other ways of experiencing God in community.
Anyway, thanks for sharing your insights and making me think about my own experiences with church and worship.
I don’t think the main point of the article was the authority of the church, but about learning styles.
I love the church. I do submit to its “authority” in the sense that I take seriously all the voices within the history of Christian tradition.
What Julie seems to be talking about is thinking about and considering all these voices in the way that we do church. We don’t want church to just be another public education system (depersonalized, disengaged, and full of teachers only propogating a broken system).
I am also big on education reform. As a future teacher, I want to try and bring some of these ideas into my own classroom. I know it may be naive, but it is always worth trying. =)
Julie, I’m another of those who never met a test he couldn’t ace, who could do book reports on books he never read (not because I wasn’t reading, but because I didn’t feel like reading that particular book at that particular time), and much of the rest. However, as a child in the seventies (an era of educational ‘experimentation’), and because we moved a lot, I got to experience a lot of different school, classroom, and ‘teacher’ styles.
Based on location and options, I grew up attending a mix of public schools, secular private school, Episcopal school, and Catholic school. The latter two were when we lived in Houston inside the loop. Back in the seventies, many of the public schools in the particular area we lived were pretty scary places. At one point in 4th grade, when we lived in rural Mississippi for a few months, my brother and I were even homeschooled after my mother saw that the public schools were still thoroughly segregated. (Since one of my mother’s professions is as a teacher, that implies less of a change than it might otherwise have meant.)
There was also not as much standardized testing back then as now, so when I aced the Stanford one time, I got to spend some months taking much more interesting tests (for which I never got the results) and exploring various topics with someone there.
I never encountered a particular “program” as I gather you did. Doubt they had them as such back then. (Though there was this cool ‘learn and progress at your own pace by individual subject’ approach I went to for a few months at a public elementary school that was a lot of fun. I covered a couple of years worth of material in those months in the classes I decided to like and had a lot of fun testing out of class and into another quickly.)
In almost every grade though, I usually found at least one teacher to engage in at least one subject as I moved up and usually more than one. We often diverged from the classic learning plan when I was involved. It could be the third grade teacher who had to deal with the fact that I had taken my little group of kids through the entire reading book and workbook in the first month of class or the math teacher my junior year who, after we had mastered trig, started taking those of us interested through abstract algebra.
Of course, I was a teen father, twice married with two kids before I turned twenty (and divorced the second time not long after) with a host of other things going on as well. So my college experience has been spread out over decades as I could fit it in and focused more on getting specific tools that would help me feed my family than learning for the sake of learning. Therefore, while I’ve definitely enjoyed the classes where I’ve been able to explore (usually by turning the class into that experience as I often did from childhood on), I’ve been pretty pragmatic and utilitarian in my approach. Had I been able to take the more self-actualizing approach to higher education, I had always been more inclined toward theoretical mathematics or theoretical physics (of one sort or another). Still, I enjoy programming and I’m good at it, so I don’t really have a beef with where I ended up instead.
Hmmm. That was quite a ramble. Guess your post triggered my self-reflective side since it was a similar experience in many ways to my own. As far as the connection to Christian worship goes, I’ve had a wide array of thoughts pop into my head. But they’re really more the stuff for a relaxed, in-person dialogue than for a written time-delayed exchange. Many of them are half-formed thoughts anyway, which means I would almost certainly express them poorly at first. So I’ll keep them to myself.
It’s always nice to hear when other Christians have found a place where they feel they fit.
being part of a group of people who have created and continue to create the faith community julie is talking about, i can attest to how difficult it is to live in that liminal space between there being a set of right answers on the one hand and there being total chaos on the other. what mike suggests is true for my experience as well – it’s about being in community together … and bringing whatever and whoever we are … and then having lots and lots of room to be in it together. questions invited. i find that this model creates ways for people not to be stuck in their own theologies or answers, but rather to be open to sharing together and learning together. and it’s active learning, the kind that sticks.
I don’t like a take it or leave it approach to faith, either. As a fellow standardized test-acer and top student w/o ever cracking a book I can relate to what Julie is saying. It wasn’t until college and grad school that I really experienced the thrill of interactive and dynamic learning. I agree with Mike that at a point each person has to make a choice to affiliate with a given way of doing or not doing faith. And insofar as the post was just about different learning or worshipping styles needing to find their place in the church, I’m all for that.
But what is being described with this subtext of co-creating, reinventing of the wheel so my faith feels like a personal suit of clothes tailored just for me and my community, does sound to me like the direct descendant/orphaned child of the worst of evangelical bible-churchdom. “We don’t need no stinkin’ tradition or denomination. Just us and the Bible, we’ll figure it out.” Except maybe now we add “us, the Bible and a smattering of stuff from history and some other social science disciplines that our benighted evangelical forebears didn’t know” – but we’ll still figure it all out ourselves as we choose from the smorgasboard what happens to fit our personal views and tastes – usually views and tastes we already brought TO the faith experience rather than had shaped and formed BY the faith experience.
I resonate more with C.S. Lewis’s view of theology (and by extension, at least some tradition and worship) as a map, and the individual (or even individual community) experiences of God as being very real, but also muddled and elementary and in need of a map to make sense of them:
“Now, Theology is like the map. Merely learning and thinking about the Christian doctrines, if you stop there, is less real and less exciting than the sort of thing my friend got in the desert. Doctrines are not God: they are only a kind of map. But that map is based on the experience of hundreds of people who really were in touch with God-experiences compared with which any thrills or pious feelings you and I are likely to get on our own are very elementary and very confused. And secondly, if you want to get any further, you must use the map. You see, what happened to that man in the desert may have been real, and was certainly exciting, but nothing comes of it. It leads nowhere. There is nothing to do about it. In fact, that is just why a vague religion-all about feeling God in nature, and so on-is so attractive. It is all thrills and no work; like watching the waves from the beach. But you will not get to Newfoundland by studying the Atlantic that way, and you will not get eternal life by simply feeling the presence of God in flowers or music. Neither will you get anywhere by looking at maps without going to sea. Nor will you be very safe if you go to sea without a map.
“In other words, Theology is practical: especially now. In the old days, when there was less education and discussion, perhaps it was possible to get on with a very few simple ideas about God. But it is not so now. Everyone reads, everyone hears things discussed. Consequently, if you do not listen to Theology, that will not mean that you have no ideas about God. It will mean that you have a lot of wrong ones – bad, muddled, out-of-date ideas. For a great many of the ideas about God which are trotted out as novelties to-day are simply the ones which real Theologians tried centuries ago and rejected. To believe in the popular religion of modern England [or postmodern America?] is retrogression – like believing the earth is flat.”
It’s interesting to me that I found resonance in the liturgical church for the same sorts of reasons that you you don’t find resonance there. (Which definitely seems to prove your point that we all have different learning styles and personalities and needs!)
For me, I feel like a co-creator in worship and an active, engaged participant in it when I am in a liturgical setting. My worship life prior to being a part of a liturgical church was one where there was nothing asked of me or required of me in worship. Worship was a matter of me watching someone else perform it. So I found freedom in the opportunity to actually participate in worship, through singing and praying communally, through the physical movement of the liturgy (including the act of walking up to the table for communion rather than having it passed to me in my pew), and through being given the opportunity to respond (even in a ritualized way) during the service.
That all being said, however, your post made me think of something far bigger – the question of why we choose particular churches and the question of what level of engagement we choose within that church. It is our tendency to conflate “church” with “worship.” When we do this, then we expect our churches to try to engage the spectrum of people’s various personalities and learning styles within the context of worship, and are either elated when worship happens the way we want it to, or dismayed when we feel disconnected from what happens in worship.
But if we believe that the church is bigger than just a personal, once-a-week worship experience, then I think there is more latitude to address a variety of learning styles and personalities through a wider variety of church programs and events.
Even as a pastor, I’m terrible at paying attention to sermons. But thankfully, I’ve had the opportunity to be a part of small groups and Bible studies in addition to worship. So what I didn’t get during a sermon I could get during one of these other conversations.
I suppose, at the end of the day, there are such a variety of learning styles and personalities that no church can successfully and authentically address all of them within the context of a worship service, which is why I’m glad that there are churches with structured worship, churches with unstructured worship, churches with liturgies and without, churches where people want to dress up and churches where people wear jeans and t-shirts. It’s a wonderful testament to the variety of people made in God’s image.
This is also why I hope that the church can do a better job of helping people understand that the greater church (and Church) community is just as important as a worship service, and that there are many different ways that we can engage and create and participate with and in our churches, not only through worship. Our churches are filled with wonderful, diverse, creative, talented people. It’s a shame if we limit our collective gifts to just a Sunday morning venture.
It’s kind of interesting to me that we’re equating learning styles with worship. Does anyone else think that’s kind of … I dunno … odd?
I think you have a valid point, Julie (and everyone) that we all come to a community of faith with different gifts and different hurts; all of which need to be both exercised and bandaged. I think of it almost like a jigsaw puzzle, but that’s sort of too 2-dimensional to make much sense. We all fit together in a community of faith.
The unfortunate thing is that it’s become easy for churches to do one thing that uses one sort of gift on one day a week. Schools, in order to pass tests, make things easy, etc. now focus on one learning style … it’s easier for the teachers and the administration, but doesn’t focus on what schools are there for: education. Perhaps churches are no longer focusing on what they are there for either, but are making things easy for their administrators.
sonja, one of my half-formed thoughts was that over all the many and varied spiritual paths I’ve walked over the course of my life (Christian and otherwise), I never perceived any connection to one learning style or another. In every place I’ve been I’ve encountered people of all sorts of different learning styles, personality types, and all the rest. Sometimes weighted more toward one end or the other, but a mix nonetheless.
Another half-formed thought was that I’m not sure how much ‘learning’ per se really has to do with it. Maybe it’s because I jumped rails from one spiritual path/faith to another so many times from childhood till my early thirties that as often as not I had as much to ‘unlearn’ as to learn. Christianity, in particular and in a distinct way, demands with its inescapably personal God that we grow in knowledge of God in a way not dissimilar to the way we grow in knowledge of another human being whom we love. And I’m not sure my learning style has much impact, for example, in the way I am always growing in knowledge of my wife.
I’m still hesitant to toss those half-thoughts out there, but since you asked if anyone else had any reservations about connecting worship with learning styles, I thought I would go ahead.
I’m a little sleepy, so this may make no sense whatsoever. I am a kinesthetic learner. The liturgy feeds me deeply. I love a good conversation. Truly. And I don’t believe that liturgy is a closed system at all. But that I can walk through, move through, kneel, stand, sing, pray, (rinse and repeat) in church means the world to me. The more “traditional” a baptist church is (sit, listen, think/absorb the wisdom of the trained preacher) the less likely I am to connect at all. I finally “got” Easter, for example, after I participated in my first Easter Vigil.
This is a great post. I’m going to chew on this for a while.
Peace.
Interesting connections, Julie. I remember being so bored with standardized tests that I starting filling in the wrong bubbles on purpose! That stunt brought my mother in for a consult with the teacher I think. You’ve been blessed to find your IB program, and your church. What I really long for is an experience of church where it’s seen as OK to “push back” against the ideas being bandied about. It’s a rare gift in American culture, in schools or churches, to find a place where that kind of engagement is allowed and embraced. We have become so polarized in our conversations that for the most part we forget how to have a conversation outside of the echo chamber of people who think exactly like us (or at least are afraid to let on that they don’t).
Julie,
I am the preacher in a sermon-centric worship service that tends to adhere to my denomination’s book of common worship, but I am open to creating more space for dialogue and the collaboration and co-creation your husband spoked about in his comments. What does your church service look like and how do you form this creative space in your church? Have you dropped traditional liturgy completely (not an option in the church I serve) or have you added more space for creativity (might be an option in the church I serve).
Thanks
Don’t you know women are supposed to be silent in church!
Seriously, I can relate, as one who nearly always aced standardized tests but yet grew to detest that approach to learning.
On listening to sermons, after so many years, it’s all been said before, and I find it hard to give full attention for the message duration.
And the trend to flashy video presentations even makes for a more shallow learning session IMHO, though I suspect that I am in a minority on this position, as everybody now expects moving images to capture their mind share, and actually reading text (or books) bores folks out of the skulls.
BTW, read and liked your book. Would have liked more details on the gory, unjust nature of economics that remains out of sight for most Americans. Even discussing with fellow churchgoers sympathetic to argument, they are puzzled over this “alleged” existence (other than sensationalist sex trafficking that seems to have permeated the mainstream news-vine) and really want to hear real stories of exploitation to prove it’s not just liberal fear mongering.
One criticism — you seem to spend a lot of words massaging the reader, almost in apologetic “not to offend anyone” tone. IMO, should just lay it out, tell the truth, illustrate with real stories and let the reader make of it what they will.
But, otherwise (and being too short), excellent book and I hope to read more titles from you in the future
I should add that part of where I’m coming from in my comments is the frustrating realization that as Mike says, we all do end up being our own “final judge” in these matters and especially so if we are protestants. I am self-critiquing, or just complaining about a frustrating reality, as much as anything.
Since I’m not Catholic or Orthodox and I feel free to disagree with and question things in the Anglican context I worship in now, I am similar to Julie and in many ways choosing from a smorgasboard myself. And I wonder how to avoid the dangers I asked Julie about initially – or whether I should even be troubled by such things. One thing that seems important at least for me, is finding an anchor somewhere – if not in a denomination or hierarchy, then in “the great tradition” or “mere Christianity” or in some other base level understanding of something that is bigger than me that I’m going to choose to make the leap and submit myself to in humility and be instructed by – not just constantly seek to deconstruct it and stand above it. Relatedly, the very discomfort (initially) of liturgy can be a spiritual discipline as it puts me in a posture where it’s not all about me, and I am joining in something way bigger than me, participating in “the work of the people” as we co-create and enact a worship service.
My need for stimulating discussion and the freedom to question is still there in a big way – I look for that in friendships with people near and far, and in one on one interaction and smaller group settings. But I don’t expect Sunday mornings to always cater to that need – although I do want the worship experience whatever the style to be authentic and not plastic. But I’m glad that there is at least one time a week where I’m reminded that as I stand before God it’s not all about me and that I need some humility, need to learn and not always stand above in a posture of judgment and critique, maybe even need to sublimate my tastes and preferences.
mark – it is odd that the more intellectual denominations also use liturgy.
tripp – the idea of liturgy working best for a kinesthetic learner makes total sense to me. I wonder if the high-energy hour-long clappy arm-waving praise services connect to people similarily.
Karl – this just addresses a small bit of what you are getting at – but your comments made me think about the origins of the traditions. The liturgy and the ritual and the beauty of churches were all develop to meet the learning style needs of the laity at one point in history. There was a time when doing church to reach a non-literate oral culture was what had to happen. Is meeting the needs of various learning styles today really about individualism and authority then? I don’t expect Sunday morning to cater to me needs. I would be more than fine to never have to sit through another praise song or hymn for the rest of my life – but I also get that those songs are a deeply meaningful form of worship for the majority of the church. It isn’t ever all about me – but I’ve learned that my relationship with God doesn’t have to fit into the box of what other people think it should look like as well.
Sonja – I think you hit on a good point with the “whatever is easiest” idea. Having an open learning time where people learn in dialogue (or rabbinic mode) is hard – its messy – and it could go in strange directions. That’s why you get so many critisizing it for the potential to allow heresy in. it could, but it also doesn’t force people to hide their real questions and put up a facade of belief. It’s easier to not allow diversity to exist in the church or in this sacrosanct thing called the Sunday service. But I’m beginning to feel like we’ve turned that service into an idol that cannot be changed or questioned and that scares me.
Naum – thanks for the comments and for reading the book. You’re right – I had a hard time balancing how in your face I should be and not scaring the reader away. I’ve done the “brood of vipers” approach – but to get the conversation started I’ve learned you often need the baby steps approach.
I could have written your post. Now if I could only find a church without sermons…
And, as a teacher in the public school system in California, I agree about testing and NCLB too. That’s why my children will not go to public school. It’s sad that so many parents/kids don’t have any choice but to subject their kids to this drill-and-kill, creativity-murdering type of education.
So by “anchoring” yourself somewhere, don’t you therefore have to also close yourself off to all the other expressions of truth and beauty and goodness that are to be found in other places? The flip side of what you are recommending is that we thereby close ourselves off to all the cool things God is capable of doing through other forms of worship or other theological ideas than what our own particular tradition has landed on. That’s why a lot of us actually prefer a “smorgasboard” approach – not out of a desire to be our own authority, but out of a desire not to limit the ways God can speak to us or to others in our community.
First, when it comes to the basic, sermon-centered evangelical worship, I don’t really disagree with any of your comments. I’ve spent fifteen years in that setting and I still couldn’t say I understand the purpose or goal of that particular approach to “worship”, much less any sense of its effectiveness in reaching whatever its goal might be.
I did have some reaction, though, to the way you spoke about liturgical worship and I’ve had a chance to work through at least one of my thoughts in that regard. I think it’s in part a reaction to this:
“Nor do I like feeling like I have to engage in the right rituals of the system in order to do church right.”
And this:
“The liturgy and the ritual and the beauty of churches were all develop to meet the learning style needs of the laity at one point in history.”
The first statement, I think, profoundly misunderstands the practice of liturgy. Growing up I experienced Episcopal (Anglican) and Roman Catholic liturgy as someone who was neither of those. I’ve experienced both off and on throughout my life. I was married in a Lutheran church as a non-Lutheran and my younger son was baptized in that same church as an infant. And throughout that time, my connection as anything markedly “Christian” was tangential at best.
However, though the liturgical “police” can be found in any tradition (even the so-called “non-liturgical” ones) by and large in a liturgical church nobody cares whether you as an individual are doing exactly the same thing they are or whether or not you “get it right”. You aren’t the focus of the liturgy and nothing in particular hinges on you doing it properly or not. I’ve often observed faithful in those communities doing something different. It might be moving off to light a candle or engage in other devotion. It might be sitting or kneeling in prayer while others do other things. But there is no sense that the onus is on you to do something right or not. At whatever age, as someone who was not a part of the tradition, I have generally tried to find the center of the practice of the liturgy so that I felt I was more properly experiencing it. But I never felt as though I somehow had to do so. In fact, I’ve often heard those outside the tradition (in mixed gatherings) explicitly given the permission to participate or not participate as they were inclined.
Yes, there are elements in the liturgy designed to teach the catechumens and even the faithful in an oral culture (and note that oral culture does not necessarily mean illiterate as any reading of St. John Chrysostom’s homilies makes clear). But that is not the central purpose of the Christian liturgy. It was not even the central purpose of synagogue worship from which the Liturgy of the Catechumens or the Liturgy of the Word was clearly derived.
“Liturgy” has been described as “the work of the people”. As I recently heard someone (Bishop Kallistos Ware?) say, that may be a good theological point, but it’s a dubious etymology. The original meaning of leitourgia was an action by which a group of people become something corporately which they had not been as a mere collection of individuals — a whole greater than the sum of its parts. (I’m drawing on Alexander Schmemman with that definition, but I’ve heard and read similar ones elsewhere.) And in its Christian (and scriptural) usage, it certainly referred to more than simply a single local group, but rather to the collective worship of all Christians.
That’s probably one reason why I hesitate to connect worship to learning style. I don’t believe the central purpose is to facilitate my learning. I’ve never approached any religion or spirituality as though the purpose of its practice was to teach me something. I’ve never thought of faith or spirituality as an educational system. So it never really occurred to me to approach Christianity that way.
It dawns on me as I type that that may be why I could never grasp the purpose of the sermon-centric model of Christian worship. Hmmm. Something to think about.
I don’t think an anchor necessarily implies being closed, Mike. Or at least not in a bad sense. You yourself are probably closed to some things. I assume you aren’t open to God showing you that it’s ok to start a cult and rape the kids of the adults who join your cult, for example.
We all choose from the smorgasboard (to the extent that we do) based on what we think is good, true, and beautiful. But if our idea of the good, the true and the beautiful doesn’t come from outside ourselves – isn’t anchored somewhere – then ALL things really are possible, including someone deciding that his own race is the master race and that the true, good and beautiful is furthered by purifying humanity and eliminating undesirables – or someone finding truth, goodness and beauty by worshipping at the altar of materialism, or any other host of things that individual communities might decide is the newest, coolest thing God has shown them to be good, true and beautiful.
Your question is a good one – how big and all-encompassing do we want our anchor to be? Do I want my anchor to encompass everything that a particular tradition teaches on every single topic? That’s what you seem to be critiquing, and it’s where some people land, but it’s not where I land. That issue is why my anchor is smaller – the “great tradition” or “mere Christianity” or what have you. Your anchor may be smaller still, but I think you still have one – unless you really are still open to intentional exploitation and oppression of the poor being good, true and beautiful in God’s economy.
Different tangent, but I also think Scott Morizot makes an excellent point when he questions whether worship is centrally supposed to be about facilitating my learning. It surely shouldn’t be in opposition to learning and asking questions, but is worship really *primarily* about learning new stuff?
Even if it isn’t, how does that get us to “therefore we should all do liturgy”?
Julie,
No, not suggesting a “brood of vipers” approach. Just tell the stories, expose the reader to the gory reality with your gift of posting the written words. Facts, too, but real faces and stories will touch the heart, especially to people receptive, but unaware and/or ignorant. No need to browbeat, just bring the truth…
>>Naum – thanks for the comments and for reading the book. You’re right – I had a hard time balancing how in your face I should be and not scaring the reader away. I’ve done the “brood of vipers” approach – but to get the conversation started I’ve learned you often need the baby steps approach.
You keep bringing up arguments along these lines Karl, but frankly they just always strike me as red herrings, and an attempt to not really deal with the issue at hand. We’re not talking about fairly obvious ethical issues that no non-sociopath would affirm, we’re talking about what we do in worship services. And yes, in that context, anchoring yourself in one particular tradition does require you exclude a lot of other really good things. And while you can pay lip service to “mere Christianity” or the “great tradition”, the reality is that most of the people who have advanced that sort of approach have actually been very exclusionary towards worship traditions other than their own. C.S. Lewis, for instance, was pretty well sold on the Anglican liturgy as the best model for worship, and often spoke dismissively of “enthusiasts” (e.g. Baptists). Likewise, Jim Belcher’s Deep Church purports to offer a “Great Tradition” approach to worship, but his description ends up looking an awful lot like Presbyterianism. And a lot of other “great tradition” folks (e.g. Dan Williams, Thomas Oden, etc.) tend to give the general impression that we’d all be better off just returning to the Orthodox style of worship.
So yeah, thanks but no thanks. “The Great Tradition” and “Mere Christianity” still appear to me to be a pretty narrow box when it comes to ways that we worship God. Liturgy might be fine for some, but I’m not going to “anchor” myself to it to the exclusion of everything else.
“Even if it isn’t, how does that get us to “therefore we should all do liturgy”?”
I haven’t seen anyone in this thread arguing that we should all do liturgy. I never meant to suggest that to be the case. I just thought Scott had a good point in questioning what seemed to be a premise: that worship = learning. But whether worship = learning or not, and even though I question whether my personal style preferences should always be the primary motivator for how I choose the church I worship in, I am glad there are a variety of styles available and I enjoy learning even from styles that aren’t particularly my favorite.
“We’re not talking about fairly obvious ethical issues that no non-sociopath would affirm, we’re talking about what we do in worship services.”
Maybe that’s where the breakdown in communication happened. Worship style is NOT what I was talking about at that point. In the context of a post about worship styles, Julie talked about her felt need to question everything, to push back, to not have someone tell her what to think, in essence (I think) for basically nothing to be dogma. That goes beyond the idea of liturgical vs. non-liturgical, and that’s what I was responding to with my questions of where is the place (on at least SOME issues) for humility, for choosing to anchor myself somewhere and treat some things as settled and place myself under the authority of someone/something else – whatever that “anchor” or authority may be. Is there a time for a worshipping community to say, “ok, these things are no longer up for debate?” Julie (and you and many others) certainly seem as though you would like to see that happen with questions regarding women’s roles in the church.
That’s where questions of HOW we determine what the true, the good, and the beautiful look like come in – to what standard or set of criteria do we submit them? If we say that the only non-negotiable anchors are the things that all of nonsociopathic humanity believes in, then where is the place for revelation? And what then is the ground for desiring a closed discussion on women in the church (I’m on your side on that one, btw)? I’m as much of a western liberal individualist as you guys and don’t exactly want to be Catholic either, but I’ll side with Dorothy Sayers in taking at least some form of Creed over chaos. I think we all do, whether we admit it or not. The only questions are things like which creed, how comprehensive or minimalist is your creed, what source(s) do you draw on to form your creed and why do you decide to treat them (or the creed you have used them to cobble together) as authoritative, etc.
It’s a side-tangent from the original post about disliking liturgical worship. But some of the post seemed to verge beyond a mere dislike of liturgy and include a rejection of having any beliefs be treated as settled – that’s what I was questioning. On one hand, I see a lot of myself in the post – only having come to choose different items from the smorgasboard. But on the other hand I think I have concerns about being postured as an autonomous individual/community standing in judgment of all traditions and in submission to none, that you don’t seem to share.
Are you sure your real name isn’t Jim Belcher? You use the same kind of double-speak that he does in Deep Church. Out of one side of your mouth you admit that you do pick and choose, and then out of the other side you condemn that as being an “autonomous individual/community standing in judgment of all traditions and in submission to none”. But of course if you are in fact doing the former, then you are also the doing the latter as well. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. Either you pick and choose the good things out of your tradition and leave the rest, or you don’t. If you do, then you are “standing in judgment” over it, whether you are comfortable with admitting it or not.
And yeah, you’re right, I’m not as concerned about that as you seem to be. What you call “standing in judgment”, I call “discernment”, “wisdom”, and “being intellectually responsible”. I respect the traditions of the church, but let’s not forget that they were created by flawed human beings too. I will gladly learn from the wisdom of others, past and present, but I’m not about to just accept everything they say without question. “Thinking for oneself” (aka “discernment”) is a spiritual discipline and a sacred responsibility in my book, not at all a threat to real faith.
A few points of clarification. No, worship is not just about learning. And the term “learning style” isn’t just about learning things either. It refers to the ways in which a person best grows and develops as a human being. I that has significant impact on spiritual formation of all kinds. Yes, it influences how we learn things about God, but also how we experience God and interact with others. Understanding these ways people interact with everything around them and form themselves as spiritual beings should be something the church pays close attention to. Allowing people to be who God created them to be and helping them develop in that process isn’t some celebration of individualism, but a way for a community to love and respect each of its members. I’d rather help people connect to God in ways that resonate with their soul than tell them they must practice a faith that feels like a foreign language to them.
Scott – I think you took my statement about the confines of liturgy too literally. You say that lighting a candle or kneeling differently is proof that there is freedom in liturgy and simply prove my point. The liturgy itself is a structure. No one is grading you, but it is expected that you color within the lines so to speak. To even mention the candle or kneeling as different shows me how strict those lines actually are. It is a structure and police or not, it is the way church is always done in certain settings. To be a part of such churches means adhering (mostly) to that structure. That’s what I meant by “right way of doing church.” Liturgy does nothing for me. I know others here love it and it rocks there world, but I just don’t see its appeal.
Karl – Why do you always operate in the extremes? Just because I desire to have the persmission and space to question within church, DOES NOT not mean that I abandon all beliefs and creeds and sense of right and wrong or authority. It is easy to dismiss me if you make the extreme assumptions. But they simply aren’t true.
BTW my original post wasn’t just about my dislike of liturgy – it was about where I’ve found places where I can be spiritually formed. And no, I don’t have the same hang-ups as you about the need to be in submission to someone just for the sake of being in submission to someone. I am part of the body of christ – a community of believers. Yes, we are going to disagree. Yes, central beliefs may be questioned again and again. Yes, we are going to have to live and worship and function as a community anyway. I’m fine with that. And you’re right – I could care less about being an individual judging all traditions while submitting to none – I’m not interested in those labels. You obviously are and so continue to tell me why I’m wrong for worshiping the way I do. That’s just not what I’m about or what I see the purpose of the church is either.
I was admitting to doing both Mike, not admitting to one and condemning you for the other. It’s the tension of being in that place that bothers me when I look at it honestly. Not necessarily that it’s wrong, but I feel the tension and I think it’s a good thing that I do – better than cavalierly shrugging my shoulders and refusing to acknowledge the potential dangers of that approach.
There’s nothing in your 2nd paragraph that I disagree with. But to your litany of positive takes on our picking and choosing from over 2,000 years of Christianity I still come back to “by what standard do you decide what is wise, discerning and responsible?” That’s why I’m more comfortable looking for a place to be anchored on at least some essentials. Maybe anchored with a long anchor rope that allows me some freedom of movement but still anchored. I don’t think the Great Tradition is as restrictive as you do. I like how Lewis put it in his introduction to a translation of Athanasius’ On the Incarnation:
“If any man is tempted to think-as one might be tempted who read only contemporaries-that “Christianity” is a word of so many meanings that it means nothing at all, he can learn beyond all doubt, by stepping out of his own century, that this is not so. Measured against the ages “mere Christianity” turns out to be no insipid interdenominational transparency, but something positive, self-consistent, and inexhaustible. I know it, indeed, to my cost. In the days when I still hated Christianity, I learned to recognise, like some all too familiar smell, that almost unvarying something which met me, now in Puritan Bunyan, now in Anglican Hooker, now in Thomist Dante. It was there (honeyed and floral) in Francois de Sales; it was there (grave and homely) in Spenser and Walton; it was there (grim but manful) in Pascal and Johnson ; there again, with a mild, frightening, Paradisial flavour, in Vaughan and Boehme and Traherne. In the urban sobriety of the eighteenth century one was not safe-Law and Butler were two lions in the path. The supposed “Paganism” of the Elizabethans could not keep it out; it lay in wait where a man might have supposed himself safest, in the very centre of The Faerie Queene and the Arcadia. It was, of course, varied; and yet-after all-so unmistakably the same; recognisable, not to be evaded, the odour which is death to us until we allow it to become life”
Julie, I’m not trying to personally attack you; just to discuss the issues you’re bringing up. The extreme often seems to be your preferred way of getting your point across. A scroll through your blog yields any number of extreme statements made in order to express a point. Sometimes taking a position to its logical extreme can shed light on the underlying assumptions and the potential dangers. But yeah, other times it can unfairly caricature the position, or paint the reasonable people who hold the position as being just as bad as those on the fringe. I’ve often felt like you do that to ideas you disagree with (maybe you do it because you’ve seen them in their extreme forms); I’m sorry if I did it to you.
“And no, I don’t have the same hang-ups as you about the need to be in submission to someone just for the sake of being in submission to someone.”
I can understand that the word submission might be too loaded for it to even be useful. But I wouldn’t call the need to have a humble and teachable attitude or the (rightly understood) spiritual discipline of submission a hang-up.
I personally like the standard your own denomination upholds – a balance of Scripture, Reason (which includes Experience), and Tradition.
That’s why I find it ironic that you are advocating that at some point we should just submit everything else to “Tradition”, when your own church tradition actually tells you not to do that.
Karl – I am just uncomfortable that you always seem to take the things I say to the same extreme even after I say over and over again that you are misinterpreting me.
And we weren’t talking about humility or a teachable attitude, you were talking about being under an authority who gives me the final answer on what I should think. I love being taught. I love to learn. I don’t think agreeing with whatever a certain person says because I have to is healthy.
I’m not advocating – or meaning to advocate – a submission to tradition alone.
The Anglican three-legged stool has historically been understood with those three “legs” of the stool as being of unequal length. Or importance, or strength. A stool with 3 unequal legs kind of breaks down the quick’n'dirty analogy. But the question arose early on, and while acknowledging the need for all 3, historic anglicanism recognizes the primacy of (or at least deference paid to) scripture over tradition and reason, and recognizes a primacy of or deference to, centuries of tradition’s interpretation of scripture over one individual’s or group’s interpretation based on their own reason. A high bar must be cleared in order to make a case for change to an important teaching based on new reasoning, and some things like the creeds are treated as settled and definitional.
Not that reason and tradition don’t inform how one views and interprets scripture. All 3 always work in concert but scripture is primary and tradition and reason – in that order but also in concert – are used to understand and apply it.
So what I’m advocating is a submission to scripture, as interpreted by the great tradition, with application of reason and discernment. Which is not that far from how you articulate it. But I think I give more deference to scripture as interpreted by 2,000 years of tradition and brilliant minds than you do. Again for me, the more uniformity over that 2,000 period on a given belief, and the closer to the core of the faith the belief lies, the more deference I’ll give it.
That’s one thing I like about Anglicanism – there’s a lot of freedom to disagree outside of the historic essentials. Hence my turning to “mere Christianity” or the great tradition as representing the best application of human wisdom and reason to scripture over the course of 2,000 years, embodied in a tradition of belief that is surprisingly uniform on the core essentials over the centuries, and which has within itself the tools for self-correction when part of scripture (like the need to work for justice and care for the poor) gets ignored by some particular modern wing of the church.
I hear you Julie, and I’m sorry. Thanks for making thought provoking posts and allowing room for discussion.
Julie, I think we’re talking past each other for some reason. There is always some sort of structure in any worship experience, even the ones you describe that appeal to you. My examples were simply drawn from my own observations over the course of time. Of course, you’re not going to find somebody doing something dramatically different unless it’s their intention to disrupt the activity of the others who are present. But that’s hardly a constraint. The purpose is not to do things right.
Nor do I know that I would say that I “get anything out” of liturgy. Perhaps if I ever did decide to attend a liturgical church on a regular basis and immersed myself in it for some years, I might have any opinion on how it has or has not shaped me. I haven’t done that and am not particularly planning to — though much of my spiritual life has been unplanned anyway. I don’t know that much of the time I feel that I necessarily “get something” from my sporadic efforts at the Hours. Save to the extent that I can look at myself and see the differences in the person I was a decade and a half ago and the one I am today, I wouldn’t say that I “get anything” out of Christianity.
I’m not a defender of any sort of Christian liturgy, don’t belong to a liturgical church (heck, hardly belong to any church at the present time), and don’t have any desire to dictate or change how you or anyone else chooses to worship. However, just as I have done with much that I’ve encountered in any religion, including Christianity, I’ve tried to understand liturgical worship from the best the traditions have to offer what they desire it to be whether they necessarily achieve it on any given day in any given place or not. And in none of the traditions, from both study and experience, does that boil down to engaging in the right rituals in order to “do church right”. Yes, there is a structure, just as there is a structure to anything we do together as human beings. But the structure is not the central point. It’s not the purpose.
I wouldn’t say that I’ve found anything in Christian worship practices of any sort that “rocks my world”. But then, I haven’t been looking for that. There’s a reason I came to think of myself as the reluctant Christian and the accidental Baptist.
I know that questions about the sort of “worship” that best suits me or that does something for me or that most enriches me are not the sort of questions I’ve been asking over the years. If they were, I probably would have given Christianity up as a bad deal a long time ago. Much of the face Christianity presents in America today is a pretty shallow one, especially if you’ve practiced some of the other world religions. (Christianity is not shallow. No faith that endures for 2,000 years and grows as Christianity has grown could be.) No, having been drawn into the people of this exceedingly strange God (and he just keeps getting stranger the more I get to know him), I’ve been struggling to understand how to be a part of that people, how to live, and how to corporately worship that God. Understanding the development and the meaning of Christian liturgy has shed some light on those questions. If I had not experienced it and simply tried to absorb the experience for what it was, though, I’m not sure I would have had the touchstones necessary to really grasp writings about it. At any rate, I’m sure it helped.
I started to write more, but it seemed even more muddled than the above. It’s not just that I don’t see the purpose of Christian worship as teaching me, rather I don’t see its purpose as focused on me at all save to the extent that I am joining with others of the people of God to worship that God and (hopefully) prepared to live as that people when we leave. While my learning style and personality type and so much more informs and shapes how I interact with reality, I don’t believe it has much to do with what Christian worship should or should not be. At least, it’s a very recent phenomena for Christians to have so many different “options” from which to choose.
Yeah Karl, as someone in the process of becoming a church historian, I’m realizing more and more just how slippery of a concept that whole idea of “mere Christianity” or the “Great Tradition” really is. The whole thing requires an enormous and repeated use of the “No True Scotsman” fallacy. In other words, to get to your supposed “core”, “uniform”, “essentials”, it becomes necessary to presuppose your boundaries ahead of time, and draw them in such a way as to exclude any counter-examples. The problem is that there are a whole lot of counter-examples – they just never get mentioned in the standard tellings of Christian history, or, if they are, they’re immediately framed in terms of “heresy”, “schismatics”, “enthusiasts”, etc. and thereby dismissed. It’s easy to assume that there has always been a core, uniform set of essential Christian beliefs if you just limit your range of vision to those who actually fall within that set and exclude or ignore any who don’t.
Of course, even then you have the problem that even most of the groups who do fall within a narrowly defined “Great Tradition” would still want you to include among the essentials things that not all of the group can agree too. You can claim, for instance, that both Catholics and Baptists are within the “Great Tradition”, and yet at the same time, you’re not going to get a Catholic to accept that sacramentalism is a “non-essential” and you’re not going to get a Baptist to accept sacramentalism at all (in fact, you’re probably going to have a hard time getting a lot of Baptists to admit that Catholics are Christians, period.)
Bottom line is that the history of Christian beliefs has been a lot messier and more complex than standard versions of that history ever let on, and it’s just not the case that one, easily definable set of “mere Christianity” can be reduced out of it. Historic Christian theology are less defined by some “centered set” of beliefs, and a lot more like Wittgenstein’s idea of “family resemblances”.
Mike I think Christian history has been both messier and more complex than standard versions let on, but also *less* hopelessly fractured and without a center, than current historo-critical studies like to paint.
What do you make of Catholics, Orthodox, and protestants of many different types all reading a book such as Lewis’ “Mere Christianity” and saying “yes, this IS a great summary of the core of my belief?” So much so that many of them argue that Lewis was really “one of them” – I’ve seen Orthodox argue Lewis was nearly Orthodox, Catholics (and some super fundies) say he was Catholic or nearly Catholic, and we know he’s the virtual patron saint of evangelicalism. Pastors/priests in all of those traditions pass out his books to their people and say “read this for instruction in the basics of the faith.” How can this be so, if they are really so hopelessly disparate in all that matters?
BTW, I’m not trying to canonize Lewis or his book – I’ve read N.T. Wright’s critique and agree with some of it – but it’s a handy and known reference for, and example of, what we’re talking about.
I didn’t say they were all “hopelessly disparate”. I just said there is no easily reducible core. That doesn’t mean you won’t find lots that Christians agree on. So sure, lots of people can read and appreciate Lewis. But let’s not kid ourselves. “Mere Christianity” is not actually what its title claims. It’s not a thorough exposition of the core of our faith that can unite every single tradition and denomination. It’s a series of radio talks put down on paper, that utilize some amateur theology and some amateur philosophy in a rather scatter-shot manner. He touches on some things that are probably core (though even there he goes in some controversial and unusual directions… I mean “perfect penitent” theory of the atonement? You and I both know plenty of evangelicals who will call that heresy because it’s not an exclusive focus on penal substitution.) and a bunch of other stuff that is just random musings on various apologetical type arguments.
At any rate, just because lots of different Christians like Lewis doesn’t mean his writings represent the “common denominator” or “core essentials”. It just means that there is plenty that Christians can agree on, just as there is plenty we disagree on too.
(BTW, I heard a lecture once by a Mormon trying to claim Lewis for Mormonism. According to your argument, wouldn’t that make them part of the Great Tradition too?)
No, I don’t think someone’s claiming Lewis, any more than someone’s claiming Christ, makes them part of the Great Tradition. One can claim Allah and/or Muhammad, but if one then says in the next breath “but I don’t believe Muhammad was really Allah’s last prophet nor that Allah is the only God – then Muslims have every right to say “sorry, but you aren’t one of us, then.”
Also, Lewis makes clear that he isn’t putting forward any one particular theory of the atonement – of which I’m glad. Yeah, that would frustrate many evangelicals who want penal substitution only, or at least primary. But IMO that’s because a particular theory of the atonement – exactly how to describe the many faceted thing that was accomplished through Jesus’ death, resurrection and ascension – isn’t as core as belief in and reliance and action upon the ACTUALITY of Jesus’ death, resurrection and ascension:
“You can say that Christ died for our sins. You may say that the Father has forgiven us because Christ has done for us what we ought to have done. You may say that we are washed in the blood of the Lamb. You may say that Christ has defeated death. They are all true. If any of them do not appeal to you, leave it alone and get on with the formula that does. And, whatever you do, do not start quarrelling with other people because they use a different formula from yours.”
- Mere Christianity
Here’s an article from Touchstone about Lewis’s eclectic view of the atonement:
http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=22-03-027-f#