These two books
compliment one another and it would be helpful and important to
read them with that in mind. The first book by the Lingenfelters
deals with teaching in a cross-cultural setting. Your first
reaction may be, I am not going to be a world missionary so this
book is not for me. On the contrary! I would like to recommend
this as required reading for seminary students, pastor teachers,
and any who teaches.
One of the
reasons this book is important is because the authors remind us,
and rightly so, that we are people of a culture. We carry that
culture with us in everything we do, in how we view life,
relationships, ideas, etc. We cannot leave our culture outside the
door when we enter church, preach a sermon or teach a lesson.
Therefore this books challenges us to understand the culture that
impacts how and what we preach and teach. If we do not know our
own culture and how it influences our worldview, then we will
never be able to effectively help those we want to serve.
As preachers and
teachers, we are not to preach and teach the Bible as our
objective but rather we are to teach people the Bible. The Bible
already knows what it says and means, the people do not and our
role is to help them incarnate the truths of the Word.
Understanding the principles of teaching cross-culturally will
remind us that people learn and process things differently, even
within a monolithic culture. We need to know how to recognize
where the students are because God would have us connect them with
his living Word.
Those of us in
education have realized that providing the best content in our
lessons or sermons does not guarantee the connection of that truth
with our people. We can cop out and say, “Well, that’s the
Holy Spirit’s job to help them understand.” While we will
never be effective without the working of the Spirit, he expects
us to teach the Word to our students in a life connecting way. One
of the best ways to do that is to provide situations where what we
teach can be turned into a structure experience. For example: a
group in Korea was studying leadership. As the content was set
forth, the teacher blindfolded the entire class except one woman.
She led them out into the streets and walked around, leading them
with their blindfolds in place. Later, they shared their
experience and it related to their topic of leadership. Many
things surfaced that would not have without that structured
experience. The same could be true of teaching about prayer,
evangelism or teaching the Bible.
This book
contains a wealth of research in the area of teaching and
learning. It is important to know ourselves and our cultural
conditioning. It is also important to know that as we teach a
particular curriculum or Bible study or sermon, there is also a
hidden curriculum being taught. We are often teaching our cultural
understanding of a curriculum and that could distort the entire
message. In one sense, the authors are correct in saying that
education is the transmission of culture.
The book also
emphasizes that real education results in the transformation of a
person’s life. They write, “Teaching for transformation of
character and ministry is the most difficult of all teaching
challenges.” Like the authors, I have maintained that our
colleges and seminaries excel in teaching information but do not
do as well in teaching how to communicate that information in a
life transforming way. Knowing something of a person’s learning
styles, which generally requires knowing the people, is a key to
effective transformation. Knowing how to communicate abstract
concepts in a concrete manner is a challenge. That is why most opt
for lecture and passing on a certain package of information. It is
far easier to lecture a class than to teach them.
The question is
are we teaching and preaching in a manner that leads to life
transformation? Do our people know how to connect with what we are
teaching? “If people have only cognitive information, they are
unprepared for situations that differ from the text or their
understanding of it,”(page 94).
This book and the
next would be good to use in a teacher training or homiletics
class. Several years ago a seminary search committee approached me
about teaching homiletics. I replied I would not want to teach
homiletics but I would instead teach communication. This book will
help us know how to communicate God’s truth in a life
transforming way.
The second book
by Pazmino is a good compliment to the Lingenfelters’ book. In
this book, this professor of Christian education underscores the
essential role of theology in our educational approach, content,
context, and persons. Pazmino has done and is doing what the above
book challenges us to do—to know people in their cultural
contexts, to know God and his truth, and see his role in bringing
those two together.
Pazmino clearly
reminds us that our educational theory and practice are not first
about us but about God. Yet how we educate is to reflect the
understanding and application of those theological principles. His
formula is simply this: We teach this content to these people
in this context— content, persons, context (the
educational trinity, as Pazmino refers to it).
Pazmino
challenges us to realize that Christian education starts with
God’s revelation, the content. We teach persons, and we teach
the truth in the context of the people. Pazmino examines some of
the Lord’s own examples of how to practice the educational
trinity. We are to be people-focused in our teaching and Pazmino
uses the relational aspect of the covenant to underscore that
emphasis. He writes, “Teaching, like other practices of the
Christian church, requires celebrating the already of God’s
fulfilled purposes while awaiting the not yet.” And his
challenge is to follow the Lord’s example in our teaching in
keeping together orthodoxy (right beliefs) and orthopraxy (right
practices). “Christian education strives to bring persons
‘face to face with God’ revealed as Trinity in the person of
Jesus Christ through the ministry of the Holy Spirit.”
-Charles Dunahoo
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