Today we talk about learning, and how the Church has done a bad job teaching. Because things.
Luke 24:44-53; Ephesians 1:15-23; Psalm 47; Acts 1:1-11
In our culture, we’ve decided that to do certain things, you need an education. Most jobs require at least a high school diploma or equivalent. A majority of jobs require an associate’s or bachelor’s degree. Others require even more schooling. There are even those jobs that don’t need a degree, but have a formal apprenticeship system, but this system is going away and now is only found in very few professions.
We have this sense that before you go and do something, you need training. You can’t just, for example, decide one day that you want to design rockets for the Space Shuttle, you have to have training. You need to know about aerodynamics, chemistry, structural engineering, materials science, and more. It’s not even enough to just know about these things; you need to have something that proves you know about these things.
So we have these systems in place. You go to school for 13 years (kindergarten through high school), then, depending on what career you think you want to go into, you go to college. Again depending on your career you now think you want to go into, you go to graduate school. Eventually you find yourself out of school and entering the workforce, only to usually change careers again and go back to school to learn about your new career. It’s a process that we’re used to.
The most fascinating thing about our system is it kind of doesn’t work. Sure, you get a lot of knowledge in school, but as everyone who has ever been to college then entered the workforce knows, the first year or so on the job means learning everything you really need to know for your job.
There are some careers who try to alleviate the initial clueless-ness by adding an internship or something similar – a way to get on-the-job training with a certain level of supervision. In a way it’s like an apprenticeship, but we usual give them different names depending on the profession involved. I know I really appreciated the internship I had while I was in seminary, because it helped me get to know what being a pastor is really like, not just what school said it was like.
In the Christian church, we’ve developed a system like the one we’re used to. We have Sunday school, Confirmation, maybe more Sunday school (but let’s be honest usually not) to educate. We teach Bible stories, Catechism, things like that. But what we don’t have is an apprenticeship system. We don’t teach what being a Christian is really like, we only teach knowledge.
It’s actually quite different from how Jesus taught his disciples. He taught them, yes. They had all kinds of education from Jesus, but he also showed them how to live. He showed them how to act by how he lived his life. And, when he was getting ready to leave, he told them about the Holy Spirit, who would be with them and teach them even though he wasn’t going to be there physically.
And then he said, “You are my witnesses. You will preach repentance for the forgiveness of sins to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem, but wait in the city until the Holy Spirit comes.” Jesus had, essentially, apprenticed these 12 men who ended up apprenticing others. They had been taught, but mostly they had learned from a master how to be a Christian. (Also, never mind that they weren’t called Christians at this time, it’s just easier to talk about that way.)
So it always strikes me how much we’ve gotten away from “apprenticing” in the church. We teach knowledge, but we’ve gotten away from teaching how to live. In a lot of ways, I was lucky in this regard. The church I grew up in had a system in the youth program where younger students were mentored by older students who in turn were mentored by college students who were mentored by adults. The system started to break down around college, but it was there.
There was also never this system in place for adults, just for the youth. The only teaching about Christianity adults got was usually a 15-40 minute sermon on Sunday. That’s enough to impart knowledge, but it’s not going to show how to live a Christian life. Note that I said show, not teach. The education model that Jesus shows us is very much an apprenticeship system, where you learn from a more mature believer how to live.
It’s for this reason that Jesus tells his disciples, “You’re going to preach, but don’t do it yet.” Earlier in the gospel 70 of Jesus’ followers were sent out to preach, but they had Jesus there. In a way that was their “internship” preparing them to go out when Jesus wasn’t around anymore, but now Jesus is preparing them for life without his physical presence.
So he says, “don’t do anything until the Holy Spirit comes.” We have an advantage over those early believers; we have the Holy Spirit already, but that doesn’t mean we don’t need to learn. As your pastor, I haven’t been doing as good of a job as I should creating opportunities for apprenticing as a Christian. I know of a few ways to do this, but I don’t know what the best way is for Holy Cross, so I would like your help. How can we apprentice each other in the Christian faith? If you have an idea, talk to me or a council member about it, because, as Jesus told his disciples, “don’t go until you’re ready”. We need to get ready to go out and share Jesus with those around us.