The Learning Congregation

Martha Hodges - 2006-07-16

Here is a story from my life as a seven-year old. Our art teacher, Mrs. Thomas, visited our class every Tuesday. One week, she told us that the project for the morning was to draw portraits of our mothers. Now, we immediately have a problem. The crayon whose color, in my day, was called “flesh” was an odd orangey-pink that made anyone you drew with it look like they were suffering an allergic reaction to something. And of course, if the person you were drawing was brown-skinned, you were equally out of luck. But that was the least of it. Mrs. Thomas directed us to begin by drawing an egg-shape on the paper. Next we were to locate the eyes one third of the way from the top of this egg. Etc. I knew I was in trouble right away. I wanted to raise my hand and say, “But my mother doesn’t have a face that looks like an egg.” But I was no fool. I’d already learned better. The picture that resulted looked about as much like my mother as it did an egg. My mother, who, asked to sing me to sleep one night, had come up with a little ditty about this same Mrs. Thomas that went like this: “Dorothy Welty Thomas, pick up your paint pots three. Put them in the oven and they’ll spit out at thee.” I had an unusual mother. Her head was definitely not egg-shaped.

You probably have similar memories of learning that what was real did not necessarily have anything to do with school and vice versa.

Do you remember the excitement of the days leading up to the first day of school every fall? Do you remember this excitement gradually giving way to resignation as you got older? This is one of the tragedies of our society: The child who comes into this world so curious, so excited by her own ability to experiment, to figure things out, so hungry for knowledge, full of questions, so trusting of the information that we, her elders, hand to her so casually… This child will learn to give the correct answer, to play and to think by the rules, to study for the test, to suppress her boredom and to memorize the facts.

The facts, along with the skills of adding and subtracting, of reading and writing legibly, of drawing egg-shaped heads – these are the curriculum. The rest – the learning to produce the desired answer, the learning to sit still and keep her objections to herself – this is what is called the “hidden curriculum.” This hidden curriculum also includes such things as staying away from the bullies, when it’s okay to tattle and when it’s not, learning not to show off and not to hurt people’s feelings – in short, how to relate to other people if you want to be accepted and stay out of trouble, how to pass for a normal kid when you suspect you may not be entirely normal. Some of us learn these lessons better than others.

Maybe you’ve been lucky enough at some point in your life to have had a teacher who saw who you really were and who let you know that the way you were was just fine. If you did, I’d bet that this teacher also encouraged you to look beyond, behind and around the facts, to search for their meaning. I’d bet that he or she understood that educating literally means “to draw forth” – to draw out of you what you know to be true and real. And that a good teacher helps you to place the “stuff” you learn – the lunchroom survival skills as well as the facts about American history and the circumference of a circle – into a context. The context of what you know about how the world works and about how you fit into it.

If this kind of meaning-making is what education is about, at its best, it is also what religion is about. All educating is religious educating, in this sense, and all religion is educating religiously. Now, I’m not talking about prayer in the schools. I wouldn’t dream of challenging the line between church and state. I’m simply saying that the hidden curriculum of the classroom is all about values and meaning and relationship and reconciling what we learn there with our own understanding of truth. And so is religion. Religion is an educational endeavor – a drawing forth of what you know to be true and revising that in light of the experience you acquire every day, seeking to reconcile experience, belief and action – just as we did in last Sunday’s exercise in theological thinking. So yes, all educating is religious educating, and all religion is educating religiously.

If you accept this, then you must take another look at what goes on in church – in our church.

One reason I decided to become a minister was my determination that one thing I needed in order to live a fulfilling life was learning. Learning that was reflective and intentional and never-ending. I wanted to dedicate my life to learning, to learning in a religious context. But you don’t have to become a minister to make learning a central value in your life. I now understand that, by coming to church – especially this church, our Unitarian Universalist church in which questions and doubt are honored as sacred – by coming here and being part of this community of seekers, you affirm that you are religious learners.

What may be less obvious is that you are also religious educators. Clearly, this is so if you choose to teach our children in our Youth Religious Education program. As I hope you will at some point, by the way. But I mean something even bigger than that kind of educator. In everything that you do and say in this congregation, by your demeanor and your choices, you are teaching our children, yes – but also me and everyone else who observes you – what your religion – our religion is all about. What it means to live as a Unitarian Universalist. What you value. What you love. What you believe about your fellow beings. In every word and gesture, in your posture, your smile, your silence and your tears, you are teaching all of us about religion – your religion and ours.

What happens in a Sunday service – this is religious education. It’s easy to see how this is true of the sermon. I or someone else stands up here and offers their thoughts for your reflection. The format of the service – whether or how much you are asked to participate and in what way – tells you something about what the designer of the service believes the purpose of this gathering to be and offers that information to you for your consideration. The music is chosen to stimulate your minds and spirits in a certain direction. The physical surroundings tell you as much or more than the spoken words or liturgy about our shared religious values. Our chairs – how spartan or luxurious are they? How are they arranged? Why do we have chairs instead of pews? Why do we have pictures on the walls? Why a large window along the side of the room? Why does the preacher stand at a pulpit, and what kind of pulpit? Is the piano in tune? Why is there no pipe organ? Where are people sitting, how close together – and why are these rows in front always empty?

These choices – even the choices that are made unintentionally – reveal our religious beliefs and values. The chairs here, to follow up on just one example, tell us that comfort is valued, but not luxury. They tell us that our idea of worship is flexible – that we want to be able to move the chairs around so that we can relate to each other in different ways on different occasions. This was a deliberate choice on the part of whoever designed this sanctuary. On the other hand, the fact that the sound system is designed so that the speaker can only be perfectly heard from one point in the room – this corner – tells us something very different. It tells us that we are not so far from our roots in the Protestant tradition, with a preacher standing apart from the congregation, the listeners seated in rows, eyes front. This latter was not a deliberate choice, but a function of what could be afforded at the time – but it is no less a reflection of shared values for being unintentional. All of this makes up our “hidden curriculum.”

But let’s look beyond the sanctuary for a moment, beyond our physical surroundings to our relationships and behaviors and what they reveal about our religious beliefs, about what we are teaching and learning from each other.

How we greet one another or ignore one another, seek each other out, embrace or turn away, these behaviors express our separate personalities and the nature of our friendships, but they also teach. They teach us what kind of social behavior is accepted here and, as such, it behooves us to be very careful of how we treat each other. Are there people standing on the outside of a group, waiting to be approached? If someone has been away for awhile, is his absence acknowledged and his return noticed and celebrated? Do the same conversational groups form every week? Do the adults speak to the children and vice versa? Do older members speak to younger members or do we unconsciously segregate by age group? What are we teaching each other, our children, and our visitors by the way we engage in conversation after the service is over? What do we want to be teaching? The answers to these questions are religious answers, and our behavior is another kind of religious education.

How we find out about a member who is ill or in need, and what we do or don’t do about it; our choice of what church programs to support with our presence or volunteer efforts, what we do with the collection plate, whether or not we charge for the coffee, what connections we form with other congregations and other faiths, these are all choices that teach religious values. And we are all learning from them – about each other, about ourselves, and about our UU tradition and faith.

What we choose – intentionally choose – to teach about our religious values becomes our mission. Now, I know that most people shudder and roll their eyes when the subject of “mission” comes up. Too many of us have experienced sitting with a committee hashing out a fine-sounding mission statement, only to see it filed away in a drawer, never to be heard of again. It’s hard to get people too excited about creating mission and vision statements. And yet, when we are asked to name “the glowing coal” at the center of our congregational life, we’re hard pressed to come up an answer. And we do need an answer. Not just to put something on the congregational record that candidates for your new minister will be looking at. But for all the right reasons, this congregation needs to define its vision of what it wants to be and its mission – its reason for existence.

Talking about what we want to be learning and teaching each other is one way to approach this question. As a body of religious educators and religious learners, what is your dominant curriculum? What is the hidden curriculum? At least as importantly, what do you want it to be?

We can’t talk about the way we are together today without looking at the history of this congregation. This congregation began as a kind of protest movement. The people who did not care for the religious offerings at First Church in Dayton broke away and formed a lay fellowship. Over the years, you have demonstrated just how important religious autonomy is to you. You are a community of free thinking, strong-minded individuals who prize their intellectual and spiritual independence. So what holds this collection of determined individualists together? It’s clear that something does. Over the years, the commitment of congregational leaders has been phenomenal. In choosing to move to this new building, you affirmed your intention to grow and, by extension, your belief that what you had to offer the world was worth the risk of assuming a huge mortgage and alienating those who preferred to keep the status quo.

Yours is a history of risk-taking, fierce independence and sacrifice. It’s a history of people who accepted the challenge to change in response to new conditions, a history of people who learned new ways to adapt to change. It’s a history to be proud of. Something has kept you together all these years, through all these changes. Something keeps you together now, as you face yet another transition and new challenges – a new governance system, financial limitations, the grieving and healing process that occur when a minister leaves, and your preparation to choose and welcome a new minister.

In the year that we have left together between now and the time that your new minister begins his or her life with you, it will be our task – our exciting and celebratory task – to determine just what your mission – your curriculum – is and will be in the coming years. I can’t figure this out for you, although it’s my honor and privilege to help facilitate this process of self-discovery. I have some ideas about what I’d like it to be, but this is not my decision to make. What will you teach your children by the way you covenant to be together? What will your religious values – values you have taught and learned from one another – lead you to covenant to offer the world and each other?

In the coming year I will be offering opportunities to talk about this curriculum of yours, beginning with a combination pot-luck dinner and workshop on August 30 at which we’ll talk about this community as spiritual home and sanctuary and how you want it to convey your values – what you want it to say about you and what you want to it to teach about what you love.

Our learning together continues. Together, we will continue to tease out the meaning behind the facts of our shared existence. We’ll continue to explore the path around that theological circle that we ventured on last Sunday: looking at experience as our ultimate teacher, reason as the instrument by which we derive values from that experience, and conscience as the call to act on those values.

This is the gift of transitional times in the life of a person or a congregation. To observe, assess and re-assess, and ultimately, to be changed by the meanings we find as we adapt to new circumstances. This is the great gift of our capacity to learn from our shared experiences. Along the way, we’ll have great fun – the fun of learning and creating together. Who knows, we may even, from time to time, color outside the lines.