30 May 2023

When does the Christian education of adults take place in your parish?

Does it take place at all?

One of the things I’ve been enjoying in the past year at St John’s is the offering of regular educational series aimed at the adult congregation. So far this year we’ve looked at the Passion in Matthew’s Gospel, the English Reformation, and currently we are engaged in a series on the Trinity. The response has been great, with up to 40% of the congregation attending.

So often we consider education to be something for children, but adult Christians need ongoing formation as well. An engaged and informed congregation is much more likely to be vibrant, and thus a community that encourages new people to join in exploring what it means to follow Christ.

In many parishes, regular adult teaching is almost entirely confined to the sermon. At one level that makes sense. The priest or minister has a captive audience, and people rightly expect that sermons will have content as well as a message. It’s a good opportunity to communicate. Clergy also only have so many hours in the week to prepare. The problem is that a sermon is meant to be more than teaching. Sermons can be didactic, but they can (and should) also encourage and challenge, and engage people pastorally, spiritually, emotionally, or even socially.

Because it’s not possible to do everything in the sermon, parishes that take the teaching of adults seriously have traditionally held regular study groups or study-based home groups on days other than Sunday. These are often as much about building community as about learning. In many places such groups are based around published study guides. This model is great – when people turn up. However, in many churches, trying to get busy people to commit to a regular weekday study group is increasingly difficult.

A subset of this form of education is the “occasional” study group – Lenten studies are the classic example. Many parishes attract a solid group to such “one off” series, however I have noticed over the years that it tends to be “the usual suspects” who come out for such things, rather than new members of the parish or those sniffing around the edges. Especially if it involves turning up at a time other than when someone regularly comes to church, there is a barrier to participation.

In several parishes in which I’ve ministered, we have worked around this problem by offering adult Christian education on a regular basis not on weekdays but on Sundays after the main service, when people are already there. Having a sermon, and then having a Bible study on a different text or a seminar or lecture on a religious subject after morning tea, provides a double opportunity. A remarkably large number of people take advantage. The Lenten Study series simply becomes one of a series of regular events.

Such a teaching programme does, of course, require a big commitment not just from parishioners, but from those doing the teaching, most often the clergy. But it is, after all, part of the clergy’s job to teach. It’s even in the ordinal. Many in our parishes are hungry for knowledge and conversation about their faith. Helping people to gain that knowledge and share it with one another is an incredibly rewarding aspect of ministry.

When introducing this style of educational programme to a parish my strategy has been to start “month on / month off”. This allows people not to feel that they have to commit every week in an ongoing way, but to step in and step out of subjects they find particularly interesting. It also gives the person driving the programme a chance to plan and prepare. The second thing I have tried to do, over time, is to encourage others in the parish with gifts in teaching and/or theology to contribute. In one former parish I had a quite formidable group of assistant clergy and lay people who between them could cover almost any subject. Eventually “month on / month off” became “every week”.  In most parishes that will not be achievable, but with planning and discernment education programmes can still be something the vicar facilitates rather than does entirely themselves. And there are myriad resources out there to enable study – the study leader does not always have to start from scratch or be an expert.

Teaching is, of course not everyone’s gift. For some clergy running a study group, even with the assistance of guide books, is so far outside their comfort zone or skill set that it seems an impossible mountain to climb. In such cases, my counsel would be: don’t give up – ask someone else to do it. There are so many highly educated clergy and lay people across our churches who are rarely if ever asked to contribute their gifts in education and communication. Inviting someone in to do a series of four short seminars might not be as impossible an ask as you think!

When people are looking for a church to join, one of the things they are most often seeking, alongside community, is a chance to ask questions about God. By offering regular opportunities for people to engage with the Scriptures and Big Questions we make our churches into places much more likely to attract and keep those who are looking for a pathway to Jesus.