Worship, Service, Provision, and Nurture

This morning, while putting together cherry pies to contribute to the meal after Sam D.'s funeral tomorrow, I thought of the four categories in the title.  I believe they could serve as touchstones for what should be taught in a Christian school.  Learning how to worship, serve, provide, and nurture is important.  Specifically, I'm thinking of them as emphases for Pilgrim Christian School.  While they do not fall under typical academic courses of study (which are also needful for most students) they encapsulate some of the core values that seem to me to be essential for living well individually, in the family, the church, the community, and in the wider world.

In curriculum committee meetings, we sometimes talk about topics like this, but usually we end up dancing, or perhaps merely squirming,  to try to fit these ideals into predetermined parameters--state requirements for public schools, in our case.  I have caveats in mind in relation to this, but I feel that we are long overdue in rethinking our allegiance to the predetermined parameters.  State requirements simply are not predictably friendly to living well in ways that are vitally important to the values inherent in Christian living.  Doubling down on academic rigor seems far afield of the mark if we actually aspire to placing a primary emphasis in our schools on living well as Christians in a tumultuous and needy world.

Academic subjects provide tools, and almost any useful endeavor calls for tools, so there is value in learning academic subjects.  In a conventional classroom setting however the amount of time spent in school, the space and setting required , logistics and schedule complications, and group dynamics often actually preclude using those tools while they are being learned.   In short, they are limitations to effective learning, and we often label them instead as "efficiencies." 

When we regard the need for application as being permissably on hold until after school is over--for the day, or the semester, or the year, or the date of graduation, application is so far separated from when the tools were acquired that what was learned may have been forgotten entirely.  What is needed is an environment in which actually using tools in practical ways is seamlessly intertwined with acquiring those tools.  In cases where the tools cannot be applied practically at all in the process of learning them, perhaps we need to examine their necessity.

It's time to take the pies out of the oven.