In Search of Kingdom Living

I’m finishing off some book reviews that were left over from my 10-book challenge. One of the books that have profoundly affected me is the Nurture that is Christian by James Wilhoit and John Dettoni.

A fundamental question that I wrestle with is how has God created people to grow? It is through wrestling with this question that I have begun to deconstruct our typical ways of teaching, preaching, and doing ministry in general. Our parents implicitly ask this question as they nurture and raise up their children. As sunday school teachers, we also have a manner to nurture the student – whether it’s by a candy reward system or a nodding of our head in agreement.

 In the last few decades, many Christian educators have looked into the area of developmental psychology and found strong correlations between general findings in this area of study and biblical/theological reflection for effective discipleship.

Through this dual lense of deveopmental psychology and biblical/theological reflection, this book offers a holistic approach in understanding spiritual growth for the whole person – physical, intellectual, emotional, social, moral, faith.

The book looks at major contemporary developmentalists and their theories. This has grave implications for our ministries. Looking at the powers of Piaget, Kohlberg, Fowler, Erikson, Perry, and Vygotsky. One gets a sense of the methods and reasoning for current teaching practices. The book also offers some practical applications for Christian ministry that complements the developmental theories.

One example to highlight what I’m struggling with in this book.

Imagine you observe the sunday school class of your young 5 year old. The sunday school teacher is a church colleague with no formal teaching experience. The teacher thus follows the curriculum given at the beginning of the year and would use ‘any means’ to get the attention of the 5 year olds. The basic method subscribed by the curriculum and the teacher is for memorization of scripture. The teacher would use candy to reward children who memorize well. Of course the kids like to memorize more and more scripture because they are soon rewarded with candy.

In thinking through this situation, one has to wonder what is going on with this method of teaching? Is this the only way to get 5 year olds to engage in scripture? More importantly, is sheer memorization due to candy stimuli a Christ-honoring method of teaching?

According to the educational theories that I have been studying, this type of teaching most closely resembles behaviorism – which is basically a form of conditioning the children to induce set responses. Have you heard of Pavlov’s Dogs? Same idea – to induce a response by conditioning.

So a underlying assumption of this methodology of giving candy as stimuli is to treat children like animals – to see them only as creatures who will perform a certain function (memorizing scripture) when given certain stimuli (giving candy).

My personal reflection question is how to discipline the student/learner, and how to have appropriate means of inducing responses while upholding their value as beings with the image of God imprinted on them.

Like I said at the beginning… profound implications for my ministry.