Learning, change and church

I'm glad Caroline Ramsey has restarted blogging. And it's good stuff, at least to me. She works teaching in a university and I find her lament here only too understandable, and I share it.

the sad thing to me is that this sort of life changing learning seems to happen to me quite often in my secular work as a university teacher of management and learning. It doesn't seem to happen so often in church. I just don't seem to see the radical changes so often in church.

You need to check out the kinds of students she's working with, but doing so only deepens the pathos. So what was working for her students?

what worked was the nature and quality of the relations that the students were involved in. ... I offered new ways of relating with colleagues, new ways of understanding what was going on around them and new ways of talking about what actions were possible. And I did that within a context of talking about their work. ... The new ideas I had to offer were discussed in the light of their relevance to difficult work situations - did they offer new options? Did they offer new ways of seeing things? Did they provoke new actions? I, the so called expert, was not in authority over the students telling them what was right or wrong. Rather, I was there in service to the students' agenda there to be disagreed with, there to be questioned, there with a point of view, some understanding of new ideas and some experience of working in organisations.

Hits a lot of buttons in the 'authentic instruction' approach, not least the social support and relevance to life dimensions.
And Caroline is right; this kind of thing should characterise church more. Disciple means learner and we should be about this kind of thing. We're missing something and quite often it is further reproduced by ministerial formation where by practice we seem to give the impression that people should learn by being lectured to or reading a book. I think we should notice that a lot of the spiritual learning going on for many in our society is in 'new age' circles and relates to relationships, workplace and personal growth. Isn't it about time we took note of that and of the best educational research and practice. Of course, it may mean restructuring the way we do church ...
A "difference that makes a difference": On learning, maybes and church: Filed in: learning, church, HE, personal_growth, teaching