but be transformed

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but be transformed

• Thursday morning plenary
• Association of Presbyterian Church Educators
  Annual Event

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Do not be conformed to this world, but be
transformed by the renewing of your minds, so
that you may discern what is the will of Godwhat
is good and acceptable and perfect. Romans 122
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• On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside
  the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of the
  conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea
  what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as
  I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The
  churches are children playing on the floor with
  their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to
  kill a Sunday morning.

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• It is madness to wear ladies straw hats and
  velvet hats to church we should all be wearing
  crash helmets. Ushers should issue life
  preservers and signal flares they should lash us
  to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake some
  day and take offense, or the waking god may draw
  us out to where we can never return.
• Annie Dillard. Teaching a Stone to Talk. New
  York Harper Row, 1982

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• We believe that the goal of teaching is
  transformation, not just information. We do not
  deny that information is a critical starting
  point. Yet we do not believe that churches have
  really taught the Bible by simply conveying
  information about texts or church history or by
  simply conveying information about the churchs
  past.

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• We assume that teaching has as its goal not just
  the conveying of information, but an invitation
  to transformation, an encounter with that
  mystery we call God. We assume that there is a
  need to teach in ways that all involved are
  invited to journey to a new placea new place of
  knowing and understanding, a new place of living
  before God, a new place in becoming Jesus
  disciple, a new place for the church to be part
  of Gods mission.
• John M. Bracke and Karen Tye. Teaching the
  Bible. St. Louis Chalice, 2003.

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• Otherness, taken seriously, always invites
  transformation, calling us not only to new facts
  and theories and values but also to new ways of
  living our livesand that is the most daunting
  threat of all.
• Parker Palmer. To Know as We Are Known. New
  York Harper One, 1993

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• We collaborate with the structures of separation
  because they promise to protect us against one of
  the deepest fears at the heart of being humanthe
  fear of having a live encounter with otherness,
  whether the other is a student, a colleague, a
  subject, or the God who created us.

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How do we move beyond fear? How do we engage the
other?

• To move beyond fear, to teach for
  transformation, we must see teaching as an act of
  hospitality. And hospitality is always an act
  that benefits the host even more than the guest.
  Hospitality is about opening space. We resist
  opening space because we teachers have been
  taught that our job is to fill the space and
  control it instead of opening it.

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Hospitable space

• Bounded and open.
• Welcoming and charged.
• Invites the voice of the individual and the voice
  of the group.
• Honors the individual narrative and the grand
  narrative of the Gospel and the tradition.
• Supports solitude and surrounds it with the
  resources of the community.
• Welcomes both silence and speech.

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• I believe that knowing, teaching, and learning
  are grounded in sacred soil and that renewing my
  vocation as a teacher requires cultivating a
  sense of the sacred. Why sacred? Because it is
  a place where all of us, teachers and students
  alike, encounter the mysterium tremendum et
  fascinans.
• Parker Palmer. To Know as We Are Known. New
  York Harper One, 1993.

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• A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse,
  and a branch shall grow out of his roots. The
  spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him. The
  spirit of wisdom and understanding. The spirit
  of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and
  the fear of the Lord. His delight shall be in
  the fear of the Lord. Isaiah 111-3

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But God Says

• be transformed. Do not be afraid. Be
  transformed by encountering the holy and wholly
  Other.