"The Education Stream in the Ecumenical Movement"

Education and Leadership Ministries Commission Visioning Consultation

April 27, 2011

As some of you know, I was a seminary professor for 25 years before becoming General Secretary of the National Council of Churches.  Seminary professor is an honorable vocation, but it doesn’t translate well to all people – especially grade school kids, which is what my daughter, Leah, was when she asked me, “What should I tell my friends you do?”  “Well,” I said, “tell them in a teacher.”  To which Leah responded, “No, I want them to like you!” 

Despite this less-than-ringing endorsement, I think teacher/educator is a wonderful thing to be, and I give thanks to God for the calling to teach, the commitment to education, that each of you exemplifies.  May God bless our time together that the educational agenda of the Council and our churches will be enhanced. 

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The story of the ecumenical movement is often depicted as a river formed by the confluence of three streams:  Faith and Order, Life and Work, and Mission and Evangelism.  The first two joined to form the World Council of Churches in 1948, and the third became part of the WCC in 1961.

Even non-western ecumenists have tended to read the history of the movement in these terms.  For example, the great Indian leader, MM Thomas, moderator of the WCC’s Central Committee from 1968-75, contended in one of his Moderator’s reports that the WCC represents the coming together of the churches’ concerns for “Christian unity, world mission, and the struggle for social justice.” 

But, as we all know, there is a fourth stream.  Modern ecumenism has its roots in the nineteenth century when Christians began to work together across previously-impermeable confessional boundaries; and no telling of this history would be complete without significant reference to the Sunday School movement.  Sunday Schools were started in order to teach “wayward children”, morphed into an evangelistic tool, central to the strategy for world mission, and eventually became a complement to the religious training children got in the home. Beginning in 1889, leaders in the Sunday School movement met in periodic world conventions (major ecumenical events in their day), leading to the formation of the World Council on Christian Education (WCCE) in 1947 – a recognition that the educational agenda of the church was now far wider than just Sunday Schools. 

We see a similar history in the United States.  In this country, the American Sunday School Association was formed in 1824.  Nearly a century later, this was one of the organizations whose merger created the International Council of Religious Education (international because it included Canada); and the ICRE, in turn, was one of the eight agencies that together became the National Council of Churches in 1950. 

So, education has always been an important dimension of ecumenism; but as long as the WCCE remained outside the WCC, education was a neglected theme in ecumenical studies.  For example, Volume I of the History of the Ecumenical Movement, published in the early 1950s, devotes all of one page (out of 731!) to the Sunday School movement and the WCCE; and Volume II, which covers the years 1948-68, has no chapter dealing with education. 

I don’t want to overstate the case.  The Bossey Ecumenical Institute, as you’ve already heard, predates the WCC, and for 65 years has been a significant setting for ecumenical learning.  And, because of its history, the NCC has always given prominent place to education on its agenda.  Nonetheless, it was a big deal when the WCCE became part of the WCC in 1971, the World Council having established an Office of Education in order to prepare for the merger.  This was a visible sign that education is, indeed, the fourth, and equal, stream of modern ecumenism.  It is very appropriate that we remember this anniversary with a special consultation. 

Let me come at this another way.  As I have argued in several books and essays, ecumenism is fundamentally about the renewal of the church and its contribution to the renewal of the wider human community (indeed, the whole creation).  The ecumenical movement began with the awareness that the church, divided and seduced by the powers and ideologies of the world, cannot bear witness as it should to the liberating, reconciling news of the gospel.  In the words of the report of the WCC’s First Assembly, “Our first and deepest need is not new organization, but the renewal, or rather the rebirth, of the actual churches.” 

That’s why the movement has multiple streams: each lifts up a different dimension(s) of the church in order to help effect its renewal.  Faith and Order deals with worship and sacraments, with ministry and authority, with the faith we confess – all areas of obvious division and all part of what theologians call the esse, the essential being, of the church.  Life and Work focuses on the church’s social ministry, its peacemaking vocation and work for justice – which not all Christians regard as essential, but I suspect we do.  The mission stream deals with the church’s witness through service and proclamation – also essential to the church’s identity, and also in need of renewal. 

In the same way, the integration of the WCCE and the WCC signified that without education, without an emphasis on faith formation, the church would not be the church.  Education isn’t only something the church does; it is part of what the church is.  The body of Christ is a worshiping, confessing, justice-promoting, witnessing, learning community.   

One major reason I love serving in the NCC is that conciliar ecumenism insists that all of these streams belong together.  Paulo Friere, to whom I will return shortly, showed us the connection between education and justice.  Education is clearly crucial to authentic evangelism; to be followers of Christ, you need to know him and know about him.  In Faith and Order, members of different churches learn about one another and seek, through shared learning, to overcome divisions of our creating.  The various streams go together.  Such integration is, of course, expressed through the structure of the NCC which has commissions related to each of the four streams.

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I hope I have said enough to establish that education is at the heart of the ecumenical movement’s vision and practice, precisely because education is part of the essential being of the church, which ecumenism seeks to renew.  But what, more specifically, have Christians involved in this movement said about faith formation – about education in general – over the past forty years?  That is the question I want now to address. 

Let me begin this section of my remarks by making explicit what those of us here probably take for granted:  that education as a theme of ecumenism refers both to education in the church and to education in the wider society, since Christians are properly concerned with the renewal of both.  Of course, there are Christians involved in reform of public education who have given up on the church as a vehicle for positive change; and there are lots of Christians involved in Christian education who think only in terms of individual believers.  But I hope we agree that education in society and education in the church go together; authentic faith formation prepares believers to address divisions and inequities in human community, including those associated with education.  For purposes of telling the story, however, I will separate them, starting with what the ecumenical movement has said about education in society. 

At the same time that the WCCE was becoming part of the World Council, the new WCC department on Education and Renewal hired a special advisor by the name of Paulo Friere.  The great Brazilian educator was invited to set up an adult education desk, drawing on the insights set forth in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed – insights that have decisively shaped ecumenical thinking over these four decades. 

In my own career as seminary professor, I tried hard to distinguish between teaching, which respects a student’s own appropriation of a subject, and indoctrination, which presents information and skills in such a way as to assume their adoption by the student with little regard for whether he or she has truly understood what was presented.  What I learned from Friere, however, is that education is never “neutral,” that it inevitably involves some form of indoctrination, however implicit.  It can be used to socialize people into oppressive systems or be a crucial tool for human liberation.  Education, he argued, should enable people to participate in decision making about their own lives – becoming subjects, not just objects, of public events. You see here the integral connection between education and social justice. 

These themes were not entirely new.  Education was, for example, a key motif of the Social Gospel movement, and consequently figured in the early years of modern ecumenism.  A now-forgotten (and awkwardly-named) ecumenical organization, the World Alliance for Promoting International Friendship through the Churches, founded in 1914, had the explicit purpose of fostering education for peace.  And, of course, the U.S. Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, a truly ecumenical endeavor, sought to ensure expanded opportunity for all children through public education. 

But Friere and his colleagues were more radical.  The essential premise of modernity is that knowledge (objective knowledge) is the source of action.  In his writings at the WCC, Friere reversed this:  action, he contended, is the basis of genuine knowledge.  Methodologically, this gives priority not to the transmission of knowledge but to sharing and engagement with others. 

This approach has permeated the global ecumenical movement, shaping everything from the WCC’s social witness to its assembly Bible studies – to the consternation of many participants, and in ways that Friere himself may not have liked.  At the last assembly I attended (Harare, 1998), the Bible study leaders were apparently instructed not to worry about critical study of scripture, but simply to encourage people to share experiences prompted by the text, leading to near revolt, at least where I was seated.  As one friend said to me, “How are we supposed to hear the Bible’s challenge when all we do is trade stories?  Expertise has its place!”  You know the arguments. 

At the NCC, we have always been concerned with education beyond the church.  In the early years of the Council, the focus was on such things as federal aid to education and released time for religious instruction.   More recently, we have emphasized the importance of quality public education – education, as we said in last year’s Pastoral Letter, that is publicly funded, universally available, and accountable to the public. 

There are several principles set forth in NCC initiatives over the past decade that, in my judgment, reflect a growing ecumenical consensus, at least for this cultural context. 

1.                  Each child is unique, with special and sacred gifts to be nurtured.  While we favor rigorous educational standards, we oppose standardization which treats children more as products to be tested and managed than as unique expressions of God with different capacities to learn and different strengths to be discovered and encouraged. 

2.                  While each child is unique, all children are precious, which means that an educational system in which some children have access to excellent instruction while others, often in inner cities or remote rural areas, do not is simply unacceptable. 

(These first two principles underscore the moral necessity of quality education for children with disabilities.  Each child has particular gifts, and all children are precious.) 

3.                  The goal of education is not simply proficiency in such things as reading and math, important as these are, but nurture of the whole child.  Churches, of course, have a vital role in forming children morally and spiritually, but it is not an abdication of that role for us to insist that public education should nurture qualities that enable mature contribution to society, including artistic sensitivity, personal integrity and compassion, civic awareness, an ability to appreciate diversity, and a thirst for life-long learning. 

4.                  Education should not be viewed in isolation but as part of the wider social context.  Standards-based reform can be effective only if the government also addresses those conditions that correlate with low student achievement, including poverty; lack of adequate health care, nutrition and housing; and lack of access to early-childhood programs and extra-curricular activities. 

So that is one focus of ecumenical concern:  education in society.  The other – education in the church, what we are calling “faith formation” – has also been the subject of considerable rethinking in ecumenical circles over the past forty years.  As I read this history (e.g., a major report at the WCC’s Vancouver Assembly in 1983), the following four themes emerge: 

1.                  Faith formation is life long and can happen in any setting. The proper question isn’t “Does the church have an educational program?” but “Is the church as a whole programmed for education?" 

2.                  Faith formation is learning in community.  It involves the establishment of relationships with those whose perspectives may be unfamiliar.  It is always a two-way process, a sharing of gifts in which, to take one example, adults may learn from children, not just the other way around. 

3.                  Faith formation involves linking local experience with global concerns and perspectives.  One of the WCC’s great educators of a previous generation, Ernst Large, once wrote that faith formation in ecumenical perspective seeks to enable the Christian conscience “to adjust itself to the larger household of the whole inhabited earth.” 

4.                  Faith formation is not simply a matter of learning about the faith but of discovering its implications for the ethical decisions we make, personally and socially.  It is action oriented, not just in the sense of learning in order to act but of learning through acting.  The term “formation” suggests that we are not talking about education that is confined to programs of instruction, but about a whole process of equipping for actions, raising awareness, changing attitudes and values. 

Reading between the lines, I think that we at the NCC have maintained that faith formation, in this era and setting, demands a) biblical literacy (through which we learn to challenge our culturally-shaped prejudices), b) interfaith literacy (through which we come to know neighbors who adhere to other religions), c) cross-cultural literacy (through which we come to relativize our own perspectives by encountering those of others), and d) social literacy (through which we move beyond the individualism of our culture, including the tendency to see education solely in terms of personal betterment).  I hope we will add to this list during our days together. 

These themes (e.g., learning in community, linking local and global) certainly contribute to what we might call “ecumenical formation” – educating Christians to appreciate and promote the unity and diversity that is our gift and calling as followers of Christ. In my judgment, however, there has been too little attention paid to this topic.  One reason is that Christians involved in the ecumenical movement aren’t always agreed on the meaning of “ecumenical”!  Another is that we tend to treat formation for ecumenical participation as a by-product rather than an intentional activity – as is indicated by the fact that ELMC has sixteen working groups but none explicitly devoted to ecumenical formation.  Don’t Christians need to learn about dialogue and how to undertake it?  About other churches and how to appreciate their distinctive gifts?  Shouldn’t we learn about our church’s ecumenical agreements lest we reinvent the wheel in each generation? And shouldn’t the NCC be giving leadership to such efforts? 

There is one significant study on ecumenical formation, produced by the Joint Working Group between the Roman Catholic Church and the WCC, and published in 1993.  This study focuses primarily on persons in ministry or training for ministry, whereas Bossey (to take that example) has historically emphasized the formation of an ecumenical sensibility among laity.  But the JWG study still deserves attention.  It argues, among other things, that “the spirit of ecumenism needs nurturing,” that such formation requires specific courses or workshops as well as integration” into the curriculum at every level of the education in which the church is involved,” and that ecumenical formation is ultimately an expression of spirituality since the goal is a “renewed lifestyle” characterized by openness to difference. 

The document points out something to which I can personally attest:  that seminaries confuse being interconfessional with ecumenical and, thus, are rarely intentional about ecumenical formation.  As a result, a) a new generation of church leaders lacks ecumenical sensibility, b) ecumenism is increasingly seen as the domain of specialists (not the responsibility of the whole church), and c) work done in ecumenical dialogues or councils has little impact on congregational life. 

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I will end by returning to the forty-year anniversary.  Konrad Raiser, former general secretary of the WCC, has suggested that education surfaces as a major theme at times of social/cultural crisis, historical moments that also entail radical challenge and change in the ecumenical movement.  The years around 1970 were certainly that: the entry of the Roman Catholic Church into ecumenical dialogue and collaboration; the emergence of previously-neglected voices from the global South, as well as women and racial minorities in the North; the beginning of a new era of more radical social witness, signaled by the famous Program to Combat Racism; the emergence of interfaith dialogue as a central ecumenical concern; and the advent of ecology on the ecumenical agenda – to mention only a few. 

Surely ours is also an era of radical challenge and change.  When compared with 1971, ours is a period of chastened expectations.  Once-promising dialogues (e.g., the Consultation on Church Union) have not borne expected fruit.  The Catholic Church, while still ecumenically engaged, has pulled back from earlier commitments.  Those churches that once led the way ecumenically are faced with diminished resources, which affects their investment in bodies such as the NCC. 

And at such a time, education again presents itself as the essential framework for thinking together about this movement, its history and future.  I am grateful for your commitment to this work and for your participation in this most important consultation.

Michael Kinnamon
General Secretary
National Council of Churches