The more I talk to people in these churches, the more I realize how incomplete my education has been. Now, perhaps my situation is unique (with all my field ed placements and whatnot), but I feel like, prior to this summer, it had been a while since I really just attended church and took it all in. After over a month of doing this, I definitely have a finer attention to detail, and I'm learning quite a bit about worship and liturgy and communion and a plethora of issues that I hadn't even initially set out to study. Even in my field ed placements, I missed a lot because I was seeing things from the position of an associate minister, which (unfortunately) is not always conducive to worship. I definitely can't remember the last time I experienced such a variety of worship settings and outreach models, and I've learned so much about where the real power in a church lies-- it's in the pews, not the pulpit. With this in mind, a thought has been kicking around in my brain lately:
Every future pastor should do something like this journey. Everyone should spend a brief amount of time attending a bunch of churches with radically different styles and histories and ministry models so that we can see the shape that the church has taken in a variety of neighborhoods around the country (and maybe even around the world). The church has adapted to the needs of its community in remarkable ways, and future pastors could learn quite a bit from exploring a series of case studies and delving deeper into what makes a church "successful" or not. My Popular Revivals course gave a hint of this through the use of case studies concerning international churches, but I would love to see a more experiential approach worked directly into the MDiv core classes.
There's just so much about the church that you can't learn from the classroom or even from internships, but to a lot of you reading this, that probably seems pretty obvious. Still, what if we were able to develop some sort of immersive worship curriculum to help divinity students stay in touch with the concerns of the pew, not just the concerns of the pulpit? I don't want to imply that Duke doesn't address the concerns of the pew (because it certainly does), but I feel like we can always do more, and maybe this could be a start.
Just a thought.
I like that thought. There's so much to learn in the little time we have at Duke, but that's something that would be of real help in the "real world" outside of the Div. And to be honest, for those of us who have spent many years in one particular setting, it's good to be reminded of the fact that there's a whole lot of variety in God's people and how they worship. (I've been a part of a single church since '96, but used to be involved in worship in military chapel settings....now THERE'S some variety for you!)
ReplyDeleteHope all is well with you, Tom.
(waving hello from Jamestown, NC!)
Darcy