Fall Classes 2011

Typically, in American church life, small group ministry and adult education classes compete for attention, for the same piece of the pie. So, overseeing both areas at Vineyard Boise can occasionally leave me feeling a bit schizophrenic!

The reality is, our heart is to see people primarily learning in the more relational atmosphere of the small group setting, usually in someone’s living room. Classrooms, generally speaking, are most conducive towards acquiring information, while the small group is where conversations, friendship and relationship can happen. And that’s ripe soil for growing disciples.

All of that to say, we only have a handful of what we would normally bill as “adult classes” happening this fall for the simple reason that most people are seeking out groups. A number of small groups are doing Beth Moore studies together along with other assorted book studies (you can locate these on our small group website vineyardboisegroups.com) and a huge number of groups are engaging in our all-church fall curriculum in the book of Titus (see our webpage for details and downloads).

But we do have a few classes upcoming:

Financial Peace University
We are going to be premiering a shorter version (three weeks) of FPU in the October/November time frame that will deal with the most immediately relevant aspects of the course for families and individuals in financial crisis (e.g. debt reduction) at low or no cost. Then in January of 2012 we will offer the full 13 week course. Contact Rocky and Theresa Hinten for more information tmhinten@yahoo.com.

 

Lioness Arising
This class will begin October 15th in the chapel Wednesdays 9:30-11:30

In Lioness Arising, author and speaker Lisa Bevere offers the life and image of the lioness as a fierce and tender model for women. Revealing the surprising characteristics of this amazing creature, Lisa challenges women to discover fresh passion, prowess, and purpose.

Learn what it means to:

• be a stunning representation of strength
• fiercely protect the young
• lend your voice to the silenced
• live in the light and hunt in the dark
• raise a collective roar that changes everything

Packed with remarkable insights from nature and a rich depth of biblical references to lionesses, Lioness Arising is a call for women to rise up in strength and numbers to change their world. Jesus is, after all, the lion of the Tribe of Judah.

For more information or to register, contact Kate Frank kate.frank@vineyardboise.org.

 

 

Understanding our Muslim Neighbors – BRIDGES Summer class

Bridges is a Summer class scheduled to start at Vineyard Boise this week (Wednesday, June 22).

We hosted this class last fall and it filled to capacity quickly. I watched the first two of six sessions of the DVD and found it enlightening on several levels. This isn’t an expose on what’s wrong with Muslims but rather an introduction to the Muslim history and faith by Fouad Masri. His intention in the curriculum is not just to inform Christians about Islam, but to build bridges (hence the name) between Christians and Muslims.

It goes without saying that the subject is increasingly timely. The class met with excellent reviews from class participants last fall. Class details are below. The curriculum is published by the Crescent Project.

“Crescent Project’s training is practical, biblical, and much needed in today’s climate of misunderstanding.” Ravi Zacharias

“Christians have reacted to Muslims in many ways, but all too often, without the compassion that characterized Jesus. BRIDGES is helping Christians connect with Muslims…clear[ing] up the confusion surrounding Islam and help[ing] you see Muslims as Jesus sees them.” from the BRIDGES class workbook

Class is limited to 20 people and will start Wednesday, June 22, at 6:30 PM in Auditorium 2 @ Vineyard Boise (4950 N. Bradley Street, near the fairgrounds, near Chinden and 50th). Tuition for the class is $12.00 for materials (due the first day of class). Sorry, no childcare for this class. To register for the class or for more information, please contact Laura Hendricks @ ryanhendricks1@hotmail.com

Bonhoeffer as teacher

The elderly minister and Bonhoeffer slowly walked up the stairs of the school building, which was several stories high. The children looked down on them from over the banisters, making an indescribable din and dropping refuse on the two men ascending the stairs. When they reached the top, the minister tried to force the throng back into the classroom by shouting and using physical force. He tried to announce that he had brought them a new minister who was going to teach them in the future and that his name was Bonhoeffer, and when they heard the name they started shouting, “Bon! Bon! Bon!” louder and louder. The old man left the scene in despair, leaving Bonhoeffer standing silently against the wall with his hands in his pockets. Minutes passed. His failure to react made the noise gradually less enjoyable, and he began speaking quietly, so that only the boys in the front row could catch a few words of what he said. Suddenly all were silent. Bonhoeffer merely remarked that they had put up a remarkable initial performance, and went on to tell them a story about Harlem. If they listened, he told them, he would tell them more next time. Then he told them they could go. After that, he never had a reason to complain about their lack of attentiveness.  Quote from Bonhoeffer by Eric Metaxas, p. 131

The scene just described was a confirmation class of roughly fifty fourteen and fifteen year old boys that Dietrich Bonhoeffer, after being ordained at about age 25, was entrusted with in 1931 in North Berlin. It was quite a contrast with Sunday School classes he had taught while in America just previously in Harlem. As Metaxas notes, “Quite unlike the cherubs Bonhoeffer had taught in Harlem, he now faced a veritable gang of sawed-off hoodlums” that had “so expertly harassed the minister Bonhoeffer was replacing – that no sooner had Bonhoeffer taken over the class than the exasperated old fellow died.”

Contemplating the scene I am struck first by the proverb that a “gentle tongue breaks a bone.” The quiet authority of Bonhoeffer’s presence – and his intentionally staying clam and keeping his voice low – speak volumes on the fact that it is not through raised volume that truth is found or instilled. Isaiah’s prophecy was once again in display in that classroom among those unruly fifty boys: “He will not cry out, nor will his voice be heard in the streets; a bruised reed he will not break nor a smoldering wick will he put out.” Bonhoeffer’s tone as teacher set the tone.

And that was just the beginning.

To read the rest of the story, during this time Bonhoeffer literally moved into this rough, poverty-stricken North Berlin neighborhood so as to be close to the boys and their families. He visited each one. He also adopted an open-door policy so that his new charges could visit him unannounced at any time.

Six months later as he looked back on the class he remarked in a letter that “the experience of teaching them has been such that I can hardly tear myself away from it.”

That’s a teacher.

Teaching is more than passing on information. It is passing on heart. Relationship, heart, passion, kindness and a discerning of value and identity where others only see miscreants.

It’s yet another part of Bonhoeffer’s legacy to us – a legacy we are challenged as teachers on whatever level to embrace and pursue with those entrusted to us.

old school

Leisure.

Not exactly the word most of us would associate with “school.” Of course, I suppose it depends on what school you attend, as well as your overall disposition towards learning and classrooms and books.

Still, as a general principle, we associate “school” with deadlines and pressure and speed and cramming and assignments in the three “r’s” of reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic rather than leisure in the three “r’s” of relaxation and repose and rumination.

A friend today who recently finished his latest online biblical course observed, “Isn’t it funny – it’s when class is done, papers are complete and tests taken that I really start enjoying thinking and reading and digging deeper into the material (in this case the book of Romans)?”

Which reminded me of the delightful personal discovery I had some time ago in my leisurely reading through the book of Acts. I came upon the word “schole” in Acts 19:9. “Schole” is the word from which our word “school” is derived and in all the New Testament it occurs only in Acts 19:9. Below is the lexical entry for “schole” (it’s from Thayer’s lexicon, courtesy of blueletterbible.org; the source is dated, but in this case accurate):

So there you have it. “School” (at least “old school”) was a place of leisure and relaxed conversation; of unhurried dialogue; of meaningful and sometimes meandering musings that is more like crock pot than microwave. So when thinking of the Tyrannus “lecture hall” in Ephesus, think less the feel of a college classroom with theater seating and more… well, more Starbucks. Much like Eugene Peterson describes his early days at seminary in his latest book The Pastor (yes, this book will continue to find its way into my posts):

Madison Avenue Presbyterian had a history of inviting several seminarians each year to work on the church staff and offered us a modest stipend for showing up. After Sunday-evening worship and another sermon, Dr. Buttrick invited the seminarians – there were seven or eight of us – to his penthouse manse on Fifth Avenue overlooking Central Park. He removed his coat and shoes, put on a pair of slippers, sat on the floor with his back against a wall, filled his pipe and lit it (he was the first pastor I had ever observed smoking a pipe), and then gathered us into a freewheeling conversation for the next hour. We asked him questions, and he asked us questions. There was no agenda. We talked about preaching and prayer and worship but not in the abstract. He kept our conversation local and immediate and personal in a way that I later learned to identify as pastoral.

The irony here is that this understanding of “school” more closely resembles what we call “vacation” than what we know as “school.”

Now the point here is not that we cancel all classes and close all our “schools” as we break out our pipes, slip on our slippers and sit on the floor engaging in freewheeling conversation. This isn’t an either/or proposition. Our familiar classroom setting serves a definite purpose in the education process: it cracks the nut (and sometimes the whip) getting our heads and hearts into a subject and thereby instilling not only the discipline to study it but the passion to pursue it. To teach the discipline while failing to model and impart the passion leaves us mired in serious educational neglect. Far too seminarians die in Hebrew and Greek courses and mark the end of class by a massive bonfire as they celebrate that they will never again have to look at another Greek or Hebrew letter. Any school, any class can accomplish the same dreary end with any subject. Subjects that should bring light to the eyes instead leave us cold. So we cope with our classes and our subjects and those who can cope well and know how to work the class (or the teacher) end up on honor rolls, while the majority at least pass, and others suck their way along the bottom.

But do any walk away with a passion for words, for learning, for dialogue and discussion and musing with all the attending joy and life? That I believe is the challenge of any teacher in any classroom at any level: to instill, to communicate that passion for the subject that sits in the center so that when schedules and assignments and papers and tests and deadlines and projects are done, the records filed and the chairs vacated, the passion for learning remains – to be leisurely, satisfyingly pursued and tasted and shared.

That’s old school.

The Teacher

Read another chapter into The Pastor by Peterson this morning. Still reveling in it.  

Among other things, I loved Peterson’s telling of his classroom experience when he entered John Hopkins University to do graduate work in Semitic studies under the tutelage of the renowned Professor of biblical archaeology and Semitic studies, William F. Albright. Peterson’s summary of that study experience and a specific anecdote he shares, for me, sum up what real education is all about – biblical or otherwise. Institutions, whether secular or ecclesiastical offer structure and space; the real question is how educators fill that space and use whatever structure is there (and not being driven or confined by it). Peterson’s experience with his Professor shows a healthy way to go about it.

Following a personal postcard from Albright welcoming him to the university, Peterson remarks:

That postcard set the tone for a way of schooling I had never experienced: informal and personal. I didn’t know that there was a place of learning that was able to function with so little institutional structure. No pretension. No hierarchy. No required courses. No grades. And no exams except for the final doctoral exams. And, of course, the formidable dissertation. Students who were serious about learning. There was a kind of relaxed camaraderie that suffused the place. Semitic studies was a small department, maybe sixteen students and two professors.

The centerpiece of the department, the world-famous William Foxwell Albright, had dominated the field of biblical archaeology and Semitic studies for thirty years. It was the first time I had been in the working presence of a world-class intellect. It was not so much that his knowledge was so wide-ranging and integrative, but that being with and around him I experienced his mind in action – he was constantly thinking, reformulating, pushing the boundaries of ancient history, noticing the ways the several Semitic languages worked comparatively.

He entered the classroom one morning telling us that he had awakened having solved the meaning of Moriah while he slept. Both the meaning and location of Mount Moriah, where Abraham had bound Isaac for sacrifice, had always eluded scholars. Professor Albright went to the chalkboard and soon had it filled with words from Ugaritic, Arabic, Assyrian, Aramaic, and, of course, Hebrew. He continued, excited and intense for twenty minutes, at which point Prescott Williams, an older student who had already spent four years with him, interrupted, “But Dr. Albright, what about this and this and this [he was making reference to items of grammar and etymology that I knew nothing about]. Do you think that holds up?” The Professor stopped, stepped back, and stared at the chalkboard for twenty seconds. And then he said, “Mr. Williams is right – forget everything I have said.”

It was an act of humility that I would soon learn was characteristic of Dr. Albright. Everyone in that room knew he was capable of dismissing Williams and bluffing his way and none of us would have known he was bluffing. We all knew he knew everything. But he knew he didn’t know everything and let us know he didn’t.

On so many levels, what a portrait of “the teacher.” Peterson’s understated conclusion about Albright and his students catches what must be the goal of every teacher in every classroom: “an interesting culture of learning had developed around him.”

Lord, make us such teachers.

 

Honey at our fingertips

Thinking of an inaugural post for this adult education page, I came across this brief article I wrote back in December, 2006 which well expresses what we would love to see happen in our adult education classes at Vineyard Boise:

Victory had been won. The enemy was in full flight, with Israel in hot pursuit. As the day wore on, the Israeli army began to wear out. King Saul had saddled them with a heavy vow not to eat a thing until Saul had full revenge on the dreaded Philistines. They all obeyed, bypassing plunder and many tempting, beckoning honeycombs with honey oozing out lying on the forest floor. All, that is, except for Saul’s son, Jonathan. Jonathan hadn’t heard about the oath. (He was too busy causing the very panic in the enemy camp that resulted in Israel’s victory.) When Jonathan stumbled upon the honeycombs, he dipped into one with the staff in his hand, lifted it to his mouth and eagerly sucked it down. He was refreshed – his eyes “lighting up with renewed vigor.” (You can read the full story in 1 Samuel 14.)

This is what we want all of our education classes at Vineyard Boise to be: timely “honeycombs” with honey oozing out right at your fingertips. We want each class here to be a “honeycomb” through which the Lord can refresh our souls and bring light to our eyes through renewed vigor for the “race that is set before us.” Too often education ends up being not much more than dry information dissemination. We come, we listen to someone talk, we take notes, we go home…but are we changed? Education is so much more! Yes, information can be pretty effectively “downloaded” into our brains – through books, through lectures, through MP3 players, internet sites, etc. But that is only part of the education equation. Real education is both informational and relational – highly relational. Jesus taught his disciples as he sat with them in a circle (see Mark 3:24), and it’s in such an interactive circle, where we are free to listen, to talk, to question, to laugh, and to cry, that education happens. That’s where the “honey” is found that will “light up our eyes with renewed vigor.” All we have to do is pause long enough in our race and pursuit to take a much needed taste.

Okay, maybe I’m using this old article because I’m too lazy to write something new – but I still like the picture of Jonathan dipping the tip of his staff in the honey.

So what are you waiting for?

Take a dip and challenge your mind, your heart, your soul.