Dumbing It Down

The public education system in this country has been frequently accused of "dumbing down" the quality of education provided for the children of our society. Typically, what is meant by "dumbing down" is the process of lowering educational standards and content to the lowest common denominator - basically to a level at which the vast majority of students can easily meet expectations and testing standards - for the purpose of creating the appearance of success when, in fact, educational ground is being lost.

As someone who has served a brief tour of duty on the front lines of the public education struggle as a classroom teacher, I have to admit that this is something that is happening. It has been going on for a long time, and, unless there are dramatic changes made in both public education and society as a whole, it will continue for many years to come.

While I could probably write a lengthy book on everything I think is wrong with public education and what I think needs to be done to fix it, I'm not going to go into great detail on all that now. However, I would like to point out that as someone who has also done a tour of duty in leadership within the institutional church, both public education and modern institutional church suffer from many of the same ailments, particularly in the trend toward dumbing down (or watering down) the content and quality of what is taught and what is done.

In defense of both public educators and church leaders, I have to say that they both function under some serious limitations - limitations imposed on them by the systems and institutions of which they are a part and by those placed under their teaching and leadership.

In the case of public educators, they face the task of successfully teaching state-mandated content with very limited resources within a set time frame to a very mixed group of students. The primary difficulty comes in trying to initiate genuine learning while, at the same time, exercising functional control over the social dynamics within the classroom. The average public school classroom consists of basically three kinds of students: those who are willing and eager to learn, those who are in active opposition toward having to do or learn anything, and those who are somewhere in the middle of these two extremes and can be influenced in either direction on any given school day. A teacher may start out shooting high, trying to get students to engage in higher order thinking discussions or activities but soon finds that those opposed to their own education will do just about anything to keep you from taking the class there. These students have figured out that if they can keep the teacher occupied with disruptions and disciplinary problems, then they can avoid the terrible pain of having to use or expand their minds. As I've witnessed firsthand, these students will often take turns being the central source of disruption, so that the school administration is not justified in extreme disciplinary measures against any individual student while the group goal of monkey-wrenching the system is still achieved.

But state requirements and expectations on teachers remain the same, no matter how much opposition they might face from their own students. They have to teach all of the required content within the semester or school year to all of their students, they have to keep all of their students occupied from bell to bell with relevant educational activities, they have to keep classroom behavior within school rules and administrative expectations, and (most importantly these days) they have to somehow get most of their students to meet state and federal benchmarks on achievement tests.

With the exception of a few exemplary teachers, most end up taking the low road of teaching to these tests by rote and keeping students occupied with unchallenging though time-consuming busy work. And it's not because these teachers are lazy or fans of mediocrity. For many, it really is the only way they can keep both their jobs and their sanity.

Leaders and teachers in the church deal with very similar problems and frustrations. They also have certain performance expectations, set time frames, limited resources, and they have to deal with the same three kinds of people when it comes to the church body: those who genuinely desire spiritual growth and a closer relationship with Christ, those who have no intention of growing and will do just about anything to keep things shallow and superficial, and those (usually the majority) who fluxuate between these two poles.

Unlike problem children in public schools, people in this country aren't required by law to attend church services or to be a part of a church body. So why would anyone opposed to their own spiritual growth and education even bother with church at all? To answer that question is to pick at a tick that has been sucking the life out of the Body of Christ for centuries.

Believe it or not, there are quite a few people within the ranks of Christianity that love the church as an institution - it's liturgies, rituals and beautiful buildings - but they have absolutely no interest in really opening their hearts and lives to either the Living God or their fellow Christians. They love religion and the sense of security and self-satisfaction that it brings, but they use religion as a substitute for genuine relationship with their Creator and Savior. They fear hell, yet they also fear what actually following Christ might cost them - so they work to foster a church environment in which salvation is just a matter of jumping through the right religious hoops and believing the correct doctrines, and the door is firmly shut on anything beyond that.

And when anyone tries to take things deeper or raise the spiritual temperature, these people act a whole lot like problem students. Arguments and in-fighting and rumours and petty squabbles over the silliest things seem to rise up from nowhere, and those who were promoting deeper commitment and fellowship find themselves swamped just trying to keep the whole thing from falling apart.

Repeat that nerve-racking process several times, and the spiritually hungry find themselves either searching for food elsewhere or learning to like two-percent milk while calling it meat. And it's though the efforts of these guardians of mediocrity that countless church leaders have been conditioned to keep things inside the comfort zone and entire Christian institutions and denominations have been molded into big, warm beds of spiritual slumber.

Both public education and Christian institutions are trying to function on the same mistaken premise - that those dead set against learning and growing can be prompted to do so through better orgainized programs or inovative teaching methods. The government may be mandating that no child be left behind, but the brutal truth is that some have to be left behind if anyone is going to get anywhere.

The same goes for the church. The Body of Christ will never become what God wants it to be as long as so many of its parts refuse to submit to His transforming hand. The willing and unwilling will never arrive at the same destination in the same boat. Either the unwilling will have to be thrown overboard or the willing will have to abandon ship and take to the life boats.

The latter is what seems to be happening with many of us who have been or are being called out of the realm of institutional church. There are just too many barriers to change and too many people willing to fight to the death against change for substancial change to ever take place inside most institutional environments.

When God calls you to go on a journey of change into new frontiers, you have a very simple choice: to go or to stay. And if you choose to go, you can only trust in God to provide you with traveling companions. So far, He certainly seems to be doing that - miraculously connecting people with like visions but from very different religious backgrounds.

As far as those we've left back in the institutional ships, we can only continue to pray for them, love them, and trust God to do things in His own time.

The Grace To Be Wrong

The quest for and the defense of correct doctrine has been the primary rallying flag of argument, division, and in-fighting within the ranks of Christendom for almost two thousand years. Even in the first decades of the church, New Testament writers were attacking and seeking to protect the church from what they described as false and divisive teachings.
And, to state it bluntly, there is just too much doctrinal disagreement and contradiction from institution to institution, denomination to denomination for everyone to be right at the same time. Simple logic dictates that a lot of the popular, widely held doctrinal beliefs floating around out there are just plain wrong.
So how do we determine who is right and who is wrong? Exactly what doctrines are we supposed to have in place? Does Scripture make these necessary doctrines perfectly clear without any room for differing interpretations, or do we have some room to manuever when it comes to the beliefs we embrace and promote? When establishing doctrine, are we completely free to interpret, add to, or subract from Scripture in any way we find convenient? Should doctrinal constructs originating from outside Scripture - personal visions or revelations, for example - be considered legitimate? How important is it to have all your doctrinal ducks in a perfect row? Is it even possible for fallible humans (even fallible humans of the divinely inspired variety) to attain absolute doctrinal perfection?
Now, I know I have a bad habit of throwing out more questions than answers, but, to be perfectly honest, I don't even pretend to have the definitive answers to all these questions.
I do believe that Scripture is very clear on many central, foundational points, but I have to admit that there are quite a few mysteries in Scripture that I'm just not sure about. And, even after extensive study, I find Scriptural evidence that appears to support opposing sides of many long-standing doctrinal disputes. I'm talking about age-old interChristian conflicts such as free will versus predestination, the exact nature of the Trinity, the precise prerequisites for salvation, and the question of whether or not salvation can be lost once attained.
Of course, I have my opinions on these and many other doctrinal issues, but in all honesty, there are passages of Scripture that make it hard for me to be fully confident in my own opinions. I don't think this is a matter of real contradiction within Scripture, but, rather, I suspect the problem lies primarily with the limitations of human logic and reason. I think the Bible contains many truths which appear to be self-contradicting or incomprehensible to human beings - a conundrum caused by the fact that created beings just aren't capable of fully wrapping their minds around an infinite, uncreated God. In addition, I think that the vast gulf of time and cultural change between us and the Bible's contributing writers makes it hard for us to catch their intended meaning in some places.
With so much room for error and misunderstanding, I find it interesting that we Christians tend to grant ourselves and each other so little room for imperfection when it comes to doctrinal matters. The general rule in modern Churchianity is to choose your doctrinal answers and stick by those answers as infallible no matter what. And if you disagree with any of the official doctrines of your church or institution, you'd better either keep your mouth shut or start looking for a church or institution that lines up more with the way you see things.
I don't know if it's just theological vanity or the simple weight of tradition and expectation, but it's a rare occassion when Christians leaders and institutional bodies allow themselves the simple, liberating grace of not being 100 percent right 100 percent of the time.
What this carved-in-stone approach to doctrinal matters has created is a static, starkly divided state of affairs in which birds of like doctrinal feathers have all flocked together in seperate camps. Inside these religious camps, diversity of belief is scarcely tolerated, and free and open discussion of doctrinal issues is practically nonexistent.
While I don't think this is a healthy state of affairs for the Body of Christ, I do understand some of the reasons and dynamics behind it. For one, people generally don't enjoy having their beliefs and habits of thought challenged. Expanding your mind can be painful and difficult, and it's just easier to create an environment where those who agree on doctrine can do so without any interference from those who don't. In addition, institutions, by their essential nature, are self-preserving and self-perpetuating, and something as unstable as doctrinal uncertainty threatens the stability and future survival of the institution.
So what is the correct approach to matters of doctrine? Heck, I don't know, and only the Good Lord does, I suspect. But if you want my admittedly fallible opinions, here they are.
I think we're called to be disciples, which literally means students or learners. And I don't think we ever reach a place where we can say that we've learned it all - or even that we're completely correct about everything we think we've already learned - and then sit back comfortably on our laurels.
On top of that, I don't think that we're only called to be students of Scripture but to be students of life, as well. What I mean by that is that Christ has called us into a real relationship with Him - a relationship with literal interaction and communication going both ways - and it's through this day-to-day relationship that we learn a lot of the things we need to know as disciples. Don't get me wrong, I'm not downplaying Bible study. In fact, I think that if we focus on a real, Spirit-led relationship with Christ, we'll find Scripture and life experience confirming each other in amazing ways.
I also believe we can learn a lot from each other as believers. That's one of the main reasons we've been instructed to come together as body - for mutual support, growth, and education. With that said, I think we severely hinder the collective quest for sound doctrine by limiting free and open discussion about doctrinal matters and insisting that we've already figured it all out. By doing this we're pretty much telling the average pew-warmer that their questions and possible contributions regarding doctrine are beneath consideration.
As far as establishing an A-to-Z list of doctrines on everything under the sun, we're just not there yet, and I doubt we're ever going to get there. And by insisting on inflexible doctrinal stances, I fear that contemporary Christianity is stunting its own growth and education.
Maybe someday God will get it through our thick skulls that knowing Him personally is much more profitable than just believing all the right things about Him.