BLOG 10.25.12. THE TIME MAGAZINE ARTICLE RE: ON-LINE LEARNING APPLIED TO THE CHURCH, PREACHING, AND WORSHIP.
The current issue Time Magazine (October 19,2012) could, potentially, render to the church a huge service, especially with its lead article: “College is Dead. Long Live College!” The focus of the article is on the emerging global phenomenon of on-line learning. Some of the significant figures in the article have tapped into the awesome recent discoveries and developments in brain-science, especially how the brain most effectively absorbs and processes knowledge.
What it has discovered is that not only does this make higher education available to huge numbers of people globally, but that it establishes networks among these people, and that it actually can be much more effective in education than traditional college lectures. It gives an example from Stanford where a professor offered his class the option of taking the traditional course with its exams, or taking it on-line with its exams. Result? Those who took it on line achieved a whole grade point higher than those who took the traditional course.
Granted, the article says that ideally education should be a combination of both on-line courses and the communal experience of a college class. I think the readers of my Blog would find the article suggestive.
What it provokes in me is the question as to whether the church, in its understanding of its inner life of worship, energizing, equipping for discipleship, and of mission … is somehow stuck in a previous century, or another era when the clergy-person was the educated person (the “parson”) in the community, so that a sermon was the primary means of such equipping. In turn that clergy person was frequently the product of a university course in divinity (whatever that is) taught by those who were academicians and not disciple makers.
But what we now know is that a lecture, or a sermon, is one of the least effective ways of transmitting information to the brain. Do we have the imagination to conceive of the task of the church in terms that are fresh and more effective? I am reminded of Walter Brueggemann’s classic comment: “The key pathology of our time, which seduces us all, is the reduction of imagination, so that we are so numbed, satiated, and co-opted to do any serious imaginative work.”
We faithful church folk “go to church” and participate in singing hymns that are rich in the church’s classic faith, but just loaded with images and vocabulary that most could not explain if they tried. We listen to brief sermons that come at us after our week of immersion in all kinds of other demands and distractions, so much so that it is difficult to relate them to our lives, and often are taken totally out of their Biblical context.
And here we sit with our iPads or laptops where we have available Biblical and theological resources unimaginable to a previous generation. What if … the church’s worship leaders and teaching pastors sent along a précis of the sermon, with references, and applications, and questions, and explanations in the week before—and do this with a place for responses and questions from us to them? The potential is mind-boggling (and also scary and demanding for the teachers … but they would profit too).
I’m just beginning with this bit of imagination, so stand by. Maybe we can get into the 21st century yet.
Meanwhile, happy St. Crispian’s Day: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers …”
