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Bob Frisken with students from Bethel School

The Passion for Christian Education

Rev Bob Frisken AM

Source of our Passion
One day a young man who lived in Capernaum, set out to find Jesus. He had heard reports that he was healing people and teaching them and so he came to Jesus with a question, "Teacher, what good thing must I do to get eternal life?"
Jesus answered him by telling him that it was only God who was good and that his responsibilities were to obey God. When he told Jesus he had kept all the commandments since his youth Jesus told him that the one thing that was lacking was to love God more than his money and his status and get rid of it all and to come and follow Him.
He was telling this young man that good deeds are not any replacement for love for God. We need to pay attention to this same message- our good deeds do not impress God he wants our love and for us to have a passion for him that leads us to a passion for service
My soul finds rest in God alone;
My salvation comes from him.
He alone is my rock and my salvation;
He is my fortress, I will never be shaken.
Find rest, O my soul, in God alone;
My hope comes from him.
He alone is my rock and my salvation;
He is my fortress, I will not be shaken
Psalm 62 1-6
Yes, LORD, walking in the way of your laws, we wait for you; your name and renown are the desire of our hearts. My soul yearns for you in the night; in the morning my spirit longs for you. Isaiah 26 8-9
The source of our passion to teach comes firstly from our passion for God. If we d not teach out of a passion for Him then we teach with a misplaced passion. There are indeed many good teachers with a passion for their subject and for their students who do not have a passion for God. This passion is misplaced and it becomes a substitute for the love for God for which we are made. Our spirits long for God. But we attempt to fill our longing for God with other passions that then become supplanting passions. While these passions can lead us back to the deepest longing of our hearts they can just as easily become our substitute for the true longing of the human heart which the Psalmist so beautifully expresses
As the deer pants for streams of water,
So my soul pants for you, O God.
My soul thirsts for God,
For the living God.
Psalm 42:1-2
Undivided hearts
When our hearts are not pure and our motives are divided we find ourselves living with divided hearts. Palmer (2004) speaks of a hidden wholeness we need to recover.
Thomas Merton claimed that "there is in all things . . . a hidden wholeness." But … in our human world, Merton's words can, at times, sound like wishful thinking. Afraid that our inner light will be extinguished or our inner darkness exposed, we hide our true identities from each other. In the process, we become separated from our own souls. We end up living divided lives, so far removed from the truth we hold within that we cannot know the "integrity that comes from being what you are."
What is this hidden wholeness that Palmer says we need? I think it is being true to who we really are, accepting ourselves as God accepts us with our faults, and our sins, our failings and our weaknesses as well as our goodness, our strengths and knowing that by God's grace our sins are forgiven and we can work towards being more whole people. Crabb talks of this as leaving the comfort of the lower room of our lives where we do what pleases our lower nature and living in the upper room of our life.
We live divided lives when
• We don't admit to ourselves our sin and our failings and don't accept God's grace.
• We say the words that we think others want us to say but are not really what we believe
• We are silent when we know we should speak up but it is easier to be silent and not be criticized.
• We break faith with our own convictions
• We remain in settings or relationships that steadily kill off our spirits
• We pass on gossip or secrets confided to us to achieve personal gain at the expense of other people
• We hide our beliefs from those who disagree with us to avoid conflict, challenge, and change
• We conceal our true identities for fear of being criticized, shunned, or attacked
How can we find this hidden wholeness that Palmer writes of? It is only found in true community or what Crabb (1999) calls "spiritual community", when we stop building protective barriers around ourselves and recognise our own brokenness and our need of each other if we are to find that hidden wholeness that ought to be at the centre of our being.
If we teach out of a sense of duty or simply because of our economic need for a good secure job if we teach for any other reason than that we know we are called by God to teach and we do so out of our passion for Him and our passion for others our teaching will fail to touch them at the deepest level and we will live and teach from divided lives that will encourage our students to live the same way.

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Manifestation of our Passion
Our passion for God manifests itself properly when we live and grow in a Christ centred community or a spiritual community? When I speak about a Christ-centred learning community I am thinking of a group of people who want to be God’s people to learn together and to share each others lives in significant ways and for significant purposes. I am not thinking about an organised community but rather in more simple terms of people who understand the importance of connectedness. In this thought even a group of people who meet together for an hour once or twice a week can become such a community. Whether they become such a community does not depend on their skills or their organisation or their ideas so much as their passion for connecting, for their Lord and Master Jesus Christ and for each other. Crabb talks about such communities as relationships where members are “turning one’s souls toward each other”. He says that people have a deep longing for such community.(1999 pages 121-125) asserts that “community, or connectedness, is the principle behind good teaching”, that it takes on many different forms and is as varied as the different identities of teachers (Palmer, 1998, pp. 115, 116). Each teacher communicates a passion for different subjects and offers students their own unique teaching style. Thus, through their teachers, students learn to appreciate different subjects and different ways of approaching life. The teacher’s capacity for connectedness, Palmer asserts, is at the heart of authentic education (Palmer, 1998, pp. 56, 89). Thus I believe that Christian school ought to be learning communities where students can finds these connections. Van Brummelen encourages teachers to “forge their classrooms into learning communities” where students can enjoy the richness of living in a caring community (Van Brummelen, 1988, p. 65). Crabb stresses that we need to maintain a spiritual community and guard against a counterfeit unspiritual community (Crabb, 1999, pp. 45–56). Such a community is interactive and is “a safe place to hit bottom” (Palmer, 1998, p. 115; Nouwen cited in Crabb, 1999, p. 161).
Crabb believes (1999 P 125) that there are three foundational convictions that must be solidly in place before we can make progress towards becoming such a community. These are firstly that spiritual community is the work of the Spirit, secondly that pursuing our own holiness is what will help others most and thirdly that people with pure hearts can help to form communities in which they can satisfy their hunger for God
Spiritual community is the Work of the Spirit
The behaviour sciences have tried to work out how we can relate to ourselves and others in such a way as to create congenial society. Christians can too easily adopt these ideas and in so doing overlook the work of the Spirit and relegate him to the periphery of life while we get on with solving all our problems. As Crabb (1999 p 126) puts it “Holiness has been bumped out of the centre and replaced by healthy adjustment, self acceptance and relief from struggle” Perhaps the most important lesson to learn about forming Spiritual community is to stop working so hard and to trust God more . No amount of work, no amount of training or skill will make the necessary difference only God can make a difference and all we can do is what we often do least is to pray. While training has its place prayer is more important.
Pursuing our own holiness is what will help others most
Look at the time we give to grow in holiness and in our knowledge of God compared to the time we give to Christian work! Fundamentally we fail because we do not consider growth in holiness important. Yet when I grow in holiness even without speaking to another I may be a blessing to them, even to people I do not know. Because I am making myself available to God who will do his good work through me. We need to have a passion for God, a love that devours al other things, too few Christian know that passion- too often I find myself cold and without that godly passion. Paul told Timothy
I have been reminded of your sincere faith, which first lived in your grandmother Lois and in your mother Eunice and, I am persuaded, now lives in you also. For this reason I remind you to fan into flame the gift of God, which is in you through the laying on of my hands. For God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power, of love and of self-discipline. (2 Timothy 6 5-7)
We need to have a holy desire or passion to bless others but this will come about more through our own search for holiness than through our wisdom our practical help. Not that those are unimportant of course.
People with pure hearts can to create communities in which they can satisfy their hunger for God
Our heart is the very centre of our personality it is the seat of our desire it is where we meet God. We have lost touch with our heart. We are continually distracted by the media, by the busyness of the world and the business of the world and we fail to guard our hearts. We become enslaved to the immediate satisfaction and we are afraid to own what we most deeply want. We are terrified to admit that we want to be appreciated , respected, liked and so we are often jealous of others who seem to have it more together and who see to be liked, appreciated or respected more than we are We need to understand that behind every longing no matter how wrong it may seem to be there is an unsatisfied longing for God If we begin to search for God and to guard our hearts we will find a deeper satisfaction than any of the poor substitutes we give for God whether that is gossip and criticism, pornography, or drug dependence, busyness or high achievement.

The Outworking of our Passion
Our passion for God finds its outworking as we discover the unity for which we were made and for which Jesus prayed (John 17:20.0
This unity must first come from the willingness to abandon our own self interest and to have the mind of Christ See Philippians 2:1-5).
As we allow ourselves to have a servant heart so we can begin to build true unity which is the basis of any learning community. The teacher himself or herself must model both true humility and servanthood and show a willingness to live a wholistic life connected to God and to others.
The teacher’s capacity for connectedness, Palmer asserts, is at the heart of authentic education (Palmer, 1998, pp. 56, 89). Research confirms that all human beings are “hard-wired to connect to other people” (Institute of American Values, 2003). I believe it is only by creating an authentic Christian learning community that we can meet the needs of our students. Palmer states that “to teach is to create a space in which the community of truth is practiced” (Palmer, 1998, p. 90).
Palmer reminds us that if we are to teach the younger generation then we must be connected with them (Palmer, 1998, p. 50). As we form strong relationships of trust with our students we are able to share our faith with them.
Palmer believes that good teaching comes from a secure selfhood, from a teacher’s identity, which is rooted in the teacher’s nature (Palmer, 1998, pp. 66, 70, 71). We thus need to recognize that who we are is a result of God’s sovereignty in our lives, our gifts are given and we should accept who we are in God and rejoice in the gifts he has given whether great or small and use them in His service.
See the Parable of the talents (Matthew 25:15-30)
If we are to grow to be effective we must break the paradigm of learning inherited from the secular world which glorifies objective knowledge, is centred on the development of the individual and sees teaching as a professional task where each teacher maintains a degree of separation both from the students he or she teaches but also from fellow teachers in the school
In Romans 12:1-6 Paul shows the key to this
Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God--this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is--his good, pleasing and perfect will. For by the grace given me I say to every one of you: Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the measure of faith God has given you. Just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others. We have different gifts, according to the grace given us. If a man's gift is prophesying, let him use it in proportion to his faith.
Because we love Him we will gladly sacrifice ourselves to serve Him, to offer our bodies as living sacrifices holy and pleasing to God.
We will consciously avoid conforming to the world’s pattern, despite the continuous pressure, but rather we will renew our minds as we interact with each other humbly and yet with sober judgment being willing each to do our assigned part in his Body
Thus the renewing of our mind is the key to serving God in our vocation. Our minds needs to be kept fit and this requires exercise just as the muscles in our bodies need exercise To do this we must commit to renewing our mind through Bible reading, prayer and meditation and fellowship and discussion with others We must continue to learn the craft of teaching through reading, further study, professional development sessions and by reflecting on the teaching task with other colleagues which provide opportunities for self-reflection and exchange of ideas with colleagues. We need to be aware of the relationship between care of our own minds as teachers and the level of care we can offer to our students (Palmer, 1998, p. 141).
It can be difficult for teachers to overcome a culture which maintains an air of privacy amongst colleagues. Such a culture is based on competition and is spiritually unhealthy (Palmer, 1998, p.142). The best learning about teacher practice occurs when we observe other teachers working with students and when we allow our work to be evaluated by others (Palmer, 1998, p. 143). Palmer rightly suggests that voluntary involvement in such events should be understood as a professional obligation (Palmer, 1998, p. 144). Growth in any skill is dependent on shared practice and honest evaluation amongst practitioners (Palmer, 1998, p. 144). It is important that the leadership expect such dialogue and provide opportunities for it to happen (Palmer, 1998, p. 156). The teaching and learning relationships between teachers and students constitute the primary test of a school’s effectiveness (Fowler, Van Brummelen & Van Dyk, 1990, pp. 110). Through this process, teachers can practise and model their own community of truth, just as it should exist in their classes (Palmer, 1998, pp. 160, 161).
Interconnectedness in curriculum
The interconnectedness of our lives should be demonstrated by integrating the various areas of the curriculum (Fowler, Van Brummelen & Van Dyk, 1990, pp. 19-26.) Students can broaden their own vision by observing the contributions of others and of other areas of study and by realising that the subject can be seen from various vantage points (Palmer, 1998, p. 128). Students learn life skills of respect and teamwork and develop research skills by probing the unknown together and learning to work as a team. (Palmer, 1998, p.133). Open-ended questioning is critical to this eventuality, creating an atmosphere of communal dialogue, interacting with all members of the group, not just the teacher. The questioning technique employed by the teacher is a significant factor in encouraging further investigation by the student (Palmer, 1998, pp. 133, 134; Palmer, 2004, pp. 130 – 134; Godhino & Wilson, 2004).
In any such working together there will be problems. These in include personal conflict and problems where some of the team work harder than others. Teachers and students need to embrace healthy conflict as a way of understanding each other though there must be ground rules for communal dialogue (Palmer, 1998, p. 104;). Students gain confidence in these processes with practice. By clarifying students’ thoughts and asking questions we let them know their observations are important to us (Palmer, 1998, p. 80; Godhino & Wilson, 2004, pp. 4, 5). While it is easy to jump to conclusions about some students being lazy the perceptive teacher will realise that issues are often more complex with lack of confidence of some and the natural bossiness of others being significant contributing factors Teachers need to exercise the pastoral ministry of encouragement whereby they accept all students equally and encourage all to carry out their part.
But over and above all of this we need to love God with all our hearts and to love each other deeply and be willing to serve each other as our service to God.