The Point of Education


I’ve spent the last couple of days enjoying time with my beautiful daughter and thinking. In particular I have been thinking about some of the conversations I was involved in this past weekend. Katie and I had some people up for dinner this week, old friends from high school some of whom have a college education and some who don’t. I was thinking this week that I need to hold to what I have always felt for minister, and that is to have friends who are not wrapped up in the church.

In conversation this weekend I was speaking with one individual and he was expressing his frustration over his mother who has fundamentalist overtones in her religious expression. That’s not the way he said it but after some minutes in conversation this is what I understood the issue to be. He has known me for quite sometime and knew that I was at one point going Liberal religious. He was surprised the other week to find that I have gone back to evangelical with definite religious conservative leanings now. So of course when we started speaking I found that I had to define what the different groups are, what they are doing, and why they are doing it.

We were having this conversation in my office and I quickly looked around for an easy example to use to explain the differences. I hit upon my book shelf. If you were an Evangelical looking at this bookshelf you would see some order, but leave the bookshelf as it is and enjoy the complexity of the whole. You would understand that you don’t need to know the reasoning behind the order; you could just leave it as it is. If you were a fundamentalist you would look at the bookshelf and see that it’s out of order. Because of that you would move immediately to arrange the whole thing alphabetically by title, even if the things didn’t go together. Then if you were Liberal you would just disregard the entire bookshelf and only pull off the books you like and make your own little bookshelf to hold them.

All of my education to date, on Fundamentalism, Evangelicalism, and Liberalism had gotten boiled down into a simple explanation. Now I know that there are some problems with this example, there are problems with every example but it did a decent job at giving a visual picture to Christianity today in America. I personally feel that if a person studying for the ministry can’t boil their education down so that it’s accessible to the average person in their lives than maybe the education isn’t worth it, but that’s a topic for a different day.

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