Education and the Mission of the Church
The primary mission of the Church is and will always be to make disciples of all nations. The approach Christians have taken to this has varied throughout time, but the central message—the gospel—does not.
When publisher Robert Raikes started the Sunday School movement, he focused on meeting the educational needs of the child laborers whose 12-hour workdays prevented them from learning to read. He started Sabbath Schools to improve literacy and provide spiritual instruction. British evangelicals like William Wilberforce and Hannah More, as members of the Clapham Sect, viewed Sunday School as an important means of serving the poor and evangelizing.
Over the past two centuries, compulsory public education has largely eliminated the need for churches to provide basic education. Many churches have continued to implement Sunday School for adults and children as a means of discipleship, primarily focused on biblical literacy.
We should never forget, however, the roots of the Sunday School. Basic literacy was a necessary precursor to biblical literacy in the early industrial era. Teaching people that technology is ideology is vital to pre-evangelism in our day.
Epistemology as Pre-Evangelism
In his classic work, The God Who Is There, Francis Schaeffer argued that pre-evangelism is a necessary part of apologetics in our world. He writes, “Before a man is ready to become a Christian, he must have a proper understanding of truth.” Schaeffer believed that our failure to engage the epistemological challenges of modernity and postmodernity contributed to the younger generation walking away from the faith.
Our contemporary epistemological challenges have shifted. Technology is ideology, and it is shaping our understanding of the world. The epistemological mood of the internet age is metamodern. The fragmentary nature of the internet, especially our social media feeds, forces us to oscillate between thoughts of horrific violence and humorous memes.
Postman complained about TV news anchors shifting topics by saying “Now this. . .” Yet we don’t even get that miniscule warning as we scroll down a livestream of the world’s stream of consciousness on our phones. The resultant discontinuity subconsciously shapes the way we see the world. It pushes us toward metamodernism.
As we consider our efforts to make disciples, we can use our Sunday School curricula to, as Schaeffer noted, “take the roof off” the prevailing epistemology. We can show how modernism, postmodernism, and metamodernism are all out of touch with the reality we see depicted so clearly in God’s word.
Biblical literacy is vitally important and cannot be removed from discipleship. However, we also need to train people to swim against the tides of the prevailing internet epistemology. Metamodernism makes total discontinuity between Sunday worship and Monday worldliness seem natural. Our discipleship efforts have to point people toward the need for a worldview to be internally coherent and to correspond with reality.
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