2017.8.27 Sunday Schoolin'

2017.8.27        Sunday Schoolin’      

Rev. Laura Bogle        Foothills UU Fellowship

Time for All Ages and Blessing of Students

I told a version of this story heard on StoryCorps about one of the first people to desegregate West High School in Knoxville:  http://www.npr.org/2017/08/25/545848025/-people-helped-you-whether-you-knew-it-or-not )

Think about a teacher in your life that had or is having an impact on you.  Was the impact about what --the subject-- they taught you or how they taught you?

Have you ever had a teacher like Mr. Hill?  Just the other night I ran into one of my high school teachers who was like that – who cared so much, and looked out for those of us who were a little bit different.  Hadn’t seen her in over 20 years, and there was that same warm acceptance.  I had no idea back then what a difference it made.

So, since all the local schools are back in session and Maryville College starts back up this week, I asked some teachers in our congregation about how their Unitarian Universalism impacted their teaching. 

From Samantha Astor:  "The teacher is of course an artist, but being an artist does not mean that he or she can make the profile, or can shape students.  What the educator does in teaching is to make it possible for the students to become themselves." -- Paulo Friere

From Crystal Colter: Education is a powerful tool for social change… I feel good knowing that I'm supporting students as our paths cross at this point in their lives and many of them are looking to use their education to make the world a better place....

From Carl Gombert: I am merely a more experienced student.

David Butcher teaches history and geography at Heritage High School and has a Sharing the Journey reflection to share with us.

I want to ask any educators here – please stand to receive our gratitude and blessing. 

And I want to ask anyone who is a student, of any age! To please stand as we give you our blessing for the year ahead.

While we affirm the separation of church and state, we also want to recognize that you educators and you students are whole people when you step into your classrooms.  That you bring your Unitarian Universalist selves to school with you.  We recognize the importance of your work and study—in Unitarian Universalism teaching and learning is holy work, it is about becoming the fully alive, curious, connected, and compassionate people we are meant to be.  We know that it is both challenging and rewarding, and that you sometimes don’t have the kind of support you want. 

And so we are here to bless you and remind you of your community of support. 

Congregation, will you repeat after me this blessing, written by UU Religious Educator Laila Ibrahim:

It’s a blessing you were born.

What you know about God and the Universe is a piece of the truth.

What you do with your life matters.

You don’t have to do it alone.

Reading

From “The Sunday School: A Discourse Pronounced Before the Sunday School Society” (American Unitarian Association, 1838)  (a version is #652 in our hymnal)

By William Ellery Channing

The great end in religious instruction, whether in the Sunday-school or family, is not to stamp our minds irresistibly on the young, but to stir up their own;
Not to make them see with our eyes, but to look inquiringly and steadily with their own;
Not to give them a definite amount of knowledge, but to inspire a fervent love of truth;
Not to form an outward regularity, but to touch inward springs;
Not to burden the memory, but to quicken and strengthen the power of thought;
Not to bind them by ineradicable prejudices to our particular sect of peculiar notions;
But to prepare them for impartial, conscientious judging of whatever subjects may, in the course of Providence, be offered to their decision;
Not to burden the memory, but to quicken and strengthen the power of thought;
Not to impose religion upon them in the form of arbitrary rules, which rest on no foundation but our own word and will, but to awaken the conscience, the moral discernment, so that they may discern what is everlastingly right and good;
Not to tell them that God is good, but to help them see and feel his love in all he does within and around them;
Not to tell them of the dignity of Christ, but to open their inward eye to the beauty and greatness of his character, and to enkindle aspirations after a kindred virtue.
In a word, the great object of all schools is, to awaken intellectual and moral life in the child. Life is the great thing to be sought in a human being. Hitherto, most religions and governments have been contrivances for extinguishing life in the human soul. Thanks be to God, we live to see the dawning of a better day.

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This reading from our spiritual ancestor William Ellery Channing gives us a good idea of the kind of approach to religious learning we Unitarian Universalists have inherited—one that is about education in the root sense of the word.  Educare= to lead and to draw out what lies within.

This is in sharp contrast to a method of religious indoctrination.

The one is about learning a way of life, a way of thinking, a way of approaching the world, a way to find your own answers, a way of recognizing some questions won’t ever be answered fully.

The other is about being filled up with someone else’s answers.

One is about approaching life and the world from who you are, and what wisdom your life experiences have brought to you, and asking – how do these line up against the wisdom of my faith tradition and community?

The other negates the lived experience in favor of unchanging rules.

What I want to talk with you a little bit about today is how that spirit of education, not indoctrination, has taken different shapes and forms over time in our congregations, and where I think we are going as a congregation.

While William Ellery Channing was writing in the early 19^th Century, it wasn’t until the mid 20^th that Unitarian churches came to have the model of religious education that we call now typically call “Sunday School.”  In the 40s and 50s Unitarian Sunday School curricula were developed for church programs that mimicked the structures of public schools.  In Religious Education programs kids were segregated by age to go to “classrooms” during church to have their lessons.  Many of the curricula used were about learning particular content, still not indoctrination, but highly intellectual.  By the 60s and 70s on a Sunday morning at many UU congregations children and youth were having a totally different experience from the adults.  Adults went to worship, children and youth went to class.  (And by the way, most of these classroom programs were run by unpaid women, parents in the church, sometimes the minister’s wife.) 

In the last couple of decades we have struggled with how to adapt this model to the changing times.

We realized that we weren’t preparing children and youth to become adult participants in a faith community.  And many were just not doing that– aging out of youth group meant aging out of Unitarian Universalism.

Also, with the changes in socio-economic factors in our country it became harder to have complex programs run by unpaid volunteers.

And with the busy-ness of modern family life, many families want to spend time together on Sunday morning rather than be separated from each other.

And so we have shifted from Sunday School for Religious Education to a model of lifespan Faith Development.  One marked difference in this shift is away from “learning about” religion from a somewhat distanced place to experiencing the power of a faith community.

Religious Educator James Fowler famously outlined 6 stages of faith.  He connected certain ages to each stage, as if we all grow linearly at the same pace.  I prefer to think of the stages as a spiral cycle that we all travel, often revisiting earlier stages that we thought we had left behind.

Here’s a quick thumbnail sketch of the stages for you, with handy shorthand words that rhyme: (taken from-- http://www.uua.org/re/tapestry/youth/wholeness/workshop2/167602.shtml and Joy Berry’s recent reflection for the Fahs Collaborative entitled “Wrought Faith: Minding What We’ve Missed in Faith Development.”)

Stage one: Faith is caught – that is, Faith is not a thought-out set of ideas, but instead a set of impressions that are largely gained from parents or other significant adults.

Stage two:  Faith is taught – that is, faith is the stories told and the rituals practiced.

Stage three: Faith is bought-- People at this stage claim their faith as their own instead of just being what their family does. However, the faith that is claimed is usually still the faith of their family.

Issues of religious authority are important to people at this stage. …religious authority resides mostly outside of them personally.

Stage four:  Faith is sought -- Along with questioning their own assumptions about their faith, people at this stage start to question the authority structures of their faith.

This is often the time that someone will leave their religious community if the answers to the questions they are asking are not to their liking.
Greater maturity is gained by rejecting some parts of their faith while affirming other parts. In the end, the person starts to take greater ownership of their own faith journey.

Now, a lot of us end up at stage four, which is an OK place to be – but there’s more: two other stages that are more rare—

Stage 5:  Some answers have been found and the person at this stage is comfortable knowing that all the answers might not be easily found.

In this stage, the strong need for individual self-reflection gives way to a sense of the importance of community in faith development.

People at this stage are also much more open to other people's faith perspectives. This is not because they are moving away from their faith but because they have a realization that other people's faiths might inform and deepen their own.

And then the even rarer Stage 6 – sometimes called the stage of Universalizing faith.  James Fowler describes people at this stage as having "a special grace that makes them seem more lucid, more simple, and yet somehow more fully human than the rest of us."

Religious educator Joy Berry writes, “Stage four is about the individual journey: asking questions and seeking answers. It's where we become capable of setting aside the opinions of others and making decisions about what's best for us, about what we believe and don't believe, as independent and unique individuals. It's an important stage; but it should be a waystation, not a destination.”

She asks us to consider—what if

 “our own, and even our congregations' potential faith development is determined by how much of it happens in shared work, learning and growing together across generations?
What if our human blueprint for faith development as individuals depends on the degree to which our communities of faith are engaged in shared faith work? What if our collective learning experiences are the practice and training that determines how whole and strong and complete our faith can eventually become?”

Then, maybe together, we can move towards Stages 5 and 6--

Joy says this is “wrought” faith – forged and tested and strengthened in the fire of community and real life.  Connectional across the generations and within families.

And so in our congregation here’s what I hope we are building:

--a sense that the whole congregation is the curriculum – that we all are learning and growing together no matter whether we are in a “class” or in worship or engaged in a service project or out at a protest or showing up for a memorial service.  That’s why we encourage families to be together in worship.  Why I believe that it’s OK for younger children to sit through a sermon—after all, all of us have moments when we don’t fully grasp the sermon, or it doesn’t speak to us!  I know this.  But we are absorbing a way of being, a way of being together, the words of the songs, the practice of the chalice lighting, the ability to quiet the mind for a while, the touch of others around us, the way we speak and act towards one another.

--And I hope that we are encouraging a sense that every single one of us, no matter what age, is a religious educator.  That’s why for the second year we are having a multi-generational class with youth and adults that will run through the whole year.  That’s why we encourage people of all ages to sit at the kids’ table during the potluck.  That’s why what you do here and how you are a part of this community is so important.  You never know when or how you are helping someone else grow and deepen in their own faith journey.

Myles Horton was not a Unitarian Universalist, but he founded a place in East Tennessee that has had historical connections to UU’s for decades:  The Highlander Center in New Market began in the 1930’s as a place where ordinary people without much formal education could come and learn together about their own power and agency to change things for the better in this world.  It was and still is a kind of “people’s school.”  During the Civil Rights movement Rosa Parks and many others were trained there.

Myles said something once about education that I consider as good a guide as any for Unitarian Universalist faith development.  He said,

“I think if I had to put a finger on what I consider a good education, a good radical education, it wouldn't be anything about methods or techniques. It would be loving people first.”  (from We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change)

May it be so – in our schools, our colleges, our universities, and most especially in our congregations.  Amen.