Problems of the professional class. . .

One of the terms I despise is the professional church worker.  It is a terrible way to describe a pastor or teacher or one of the other names invented to designate a church worker.  In fact, I lament the whole idea of a profession who is a professional when it comes to the Church.  Maybe the term once had a salutary meaning but it has become symptomatic of what has gone wrong among us and the way we unwittingly were complicit in what has happened to church, school, and the faith itself.

The rise of the professional class came with all the perks -- a wonderful MDiv degree from an accredited school with an office to go along with the office.  But the soft underbelly of it all was the role all of this played in undermining the parental responsibility of raising their children in the faith and the role of the home in forming children of faith.  The professionals always know better than the amateurs and at some point along the way, parents were amateur catechists and the church workers were the professionals and the result has not been great.

We borrowed the Sunday school from American Protestantism and forgot that it was created not for the children of Christian parents but for those who had no family and home to raise them up in the faith.  The Sunday school became the excuse for and the reason why parents did not have to teach their children the great stories of the Bible so that they might know the one story of that Scripture.  It was not meant to displace the home but it did.  The Sunday school became the education hour in the Church and it did not take parents long to figure out that they did not have to do it if the professionals in the parish had it under control.

We used the parochial school to further centralize the education of Christian children.  It was the successful model of the dynamic congregation.  Professional teachers taught our children everything and the presumption was that faith was formed in the classroom simply because these were church professionals doing the teaching.  Where there was a school, the congregation ended up with two separate and distinct classes of catechumens.  The lucky ones had the school to teach them the faith and so they did not need the remedial instruction given to those who did not attend the parish school.  The unlucky ones who did not attend the school were still taught by a professional class.  The parents trusted the Church to know what to do and how best to do it and their role in forming the faith of their children was farmed out to professionals -- either in the parochial school or in the catechism classes on Wednesday nights.

We learned in the Church to teach the children and placate the parents.  Their meaningful work in all of this was to chauffeur their kids to the school or catechism class or Sunday school and pick them up at the end and, well, of course to pay for it all.  We should have been at least as concerned about teaching the parents as their children but we were not.  In either case, education in the Church was more about imparting content than forming faith.  In the classrooms of the parish school and in the catechism classes in the evening or on Saturday morning, it was about learning the stuff -- memorizing or even perhaps understanding and applying the stuff but was it really about growing in the faith?  I wish I could say it was.  Now, I am not at all knocking knowing the content but growing the faith is not simply imparting knowledge.  Memorizing the catechism is vitally important but if you cannot pray those words what good is the rote knowledge of the text itself?  It is no wonder that people presumed (both parents and children) that you graduated from Church at some point, put on a gown and got a party to let the world know you passed.  But what did that have to do with the continual, lifelong growth in faith and life?  Not as much as we want to believe.

We imparted information and worked to make sure that the people of God understood it as much as they could but we did not quite grow their faith.  That surely was revealed in the vast numbers of parents who dropped out after their children were confirmed and the vast numbers of children whose last communion was their first communion.  We did not impart a Christian worldview and we did not help them see their place within that worldview with God as their center.  We left them with neat, convenient, but false divide of sacred and secular and with the idea that faith was more a feeling than a living trust.  We left them on their own to pray and when they stopped that also meant their children never learned.  We did not have the God conversations that should erupt in daily life as we live in but not of the world, children of God whose home is heaven but whose lives are lived out in the here and now.  

I think the newest catechism put out by our Synod is well meaning but too much.  How much knowledge do you need to receive the Sacrament?  Is this knowledge better obtained by instruction and tests and such or is it best imparted within the framework of family prayer, devotions, hymn singing, and Bible reading?  For my part, I would suggest that no kid instructed in the classroom about the Lord's Supper is as well prepared as the one who has the benefit of a faith lived out within their eyes and ears in the home.  It cannot simply be solved by earlier communion or more comprehensive catechesis by the professionals.  The home cannot and should never have been bypassed or made to be secondary in the process of forming the faith of the child.  That is the chief problem and poisoned fruit of our professional class of church workers who see their professional work mostly as content.  

Youth groups and entertainment became the means of keeping the kids in the Church but did they keep them in the faith?  We spent hours trying to convince them not to have sex before marriage but did not teach them the godly order and shape of this union.  We spent our energy on trying to keep them off drugs and in school so they could live the American dream but I do not think we spent enough energy building up the parents and encouraging them in their roles as teachers of the faith so that they might share eternal life with their children and their children with them.  They did not want to hear us telling them what to do because they had learned too well from us that what was right in their own eyes was surely right before God, if they were even concerned about God.  It is not that anyone was bad but we corrupted a system God had created and now that the liberals and government has learned so well from us, they are using the same system to steal the hearts and minds of our children from the faith and we have given neither parents nor children any reason not to believe them.

I am not a professional pastor.  I am still an amateur -- and one so old that I have little time left to do better.  If I could, I would have spent less time teaching the children and more time teaching the parents.  I would have worked harder to strengthen the devotional center of the home and less time trying to make up for the things I thought the parents had skipped or overlooked or forgotten.  I would spent more time on Luther's words in the catechism and less time on the expanded questions and answers and their proof texts.  I would teach the parents and their children how to pray the catechism as well as learn it.  I would encourage hymn singing in the home and Bible reading together and an ordered prayer life.  I would have required the hymnal as well as the Scriptures to be the essential books in the hands of parents and children alike.  I would have ditched the Sunday school, Vacation Bible school, and catechism classes and started up the catechetical services where both parents and children heard the Word of God together, listened together as they were instructed in the doctrines of the faith, and stopped worrying so much about what the knew and spent more time on what they believed.  My time may be short but yours is probably not.   Learn these lessons sooner than I did.  God bless you.