Tuesdays with Morrie

Last Friday we went with a few friends to see the play "Tuesdays with Morrie", based on the book by Mitch Albom.  The play consisted of a series of conversations between Mitch and his old college professor, Dr. Morrie Schwartz.  The visits always took place on Tuesdays, thus the name of the book.

When Mitch graduated from college, he promised to keep in touch with his favorite professor (Morrie Schwartz), whom he affectionately called "Coach".  But after he left school, life took over busy and it was 16 years later when he by chance found out that Morrie was slowly dying of Lou Gehrig's Disease (ALS).  He decided to go back to Boston to visit Morrie.  What was intended as a one time visit turned into a weekly mentoring session between teacher and pupil.   During those visits, they talked about life, love, work, happiness, forgiveness, music, dancing, egg salad, and just about everything else.  Sometimes the dialogue leaves you laughing, sometimes in tears, but always in thought.

Partly because of what I have gone through in the last year, I found myself deeply resonnating with the message of the play.  "Tuesdays with Morrie" is about teaching and learning.  At first glance it may appear that Morrie was the "teacher" and Mitch was the "student".  But in reality, they are both "students", and life itself was the teacher.

This past year has seen me take apart everything I thought to be "true" in my faith and, in a real way, start from the beginning again.  Through this process, I have come to see a fundamental flaw in ways we approach "faith development" or "Christian Education" in the church:

In the church, faith education, or Christian education is done "incrementally". In other words, you teach something today, and what you teach tomorrow is based on what you have taught yesterday.  You keep building on previous "layers".  This way of learning encourages confidence on what was learned before, as it forms the "foundation" for new learning.  For the most part, this is how we learn things like Science or Mathematics.  For instance, in math, you first learn addition, and then with that as a foundation, you learn multiplication.  

But there is a different way to learn.   Sometimes new things are learned from completely tearing down old learnings and starting fresh again.  For example, when engineers design a car, they build a prototype, they push it to failure, break it down, and then start fresh again to build a better prototype.   Rather than encouraging unquestioned confidence in what was learned before, this way of learning assumes flaws in previous thoughts and ideas.  It seeks to expose them, and then start again.

It seems to me that faith is taught/learned/developed this way.  Faith development needs to begin with an assumption that there are flaws in our understanding.   Rather than blindly holding on what was learned before, faith developes when our previously held ideas are shattered, and we are forced to start over again.   In other words, faith is developed not by discovering how right we were, but by being confronted with how wrong we have been.  For biblical examples, think of Paul, or Peter.

For me, Tuesdays with Morrie reminded me again that the key to unlock this way of learning is humility.  If one needs evidence to show that our ways of "Christian Education" is not working, one needs to look no further than the abundance of arrogance in the church today.