The Classroom As Holy Ground

Along my personal spiritual journey, I have been blessed to visit a fair number of holy places across Europe and Russia.  I’ve seen many of the Gothic cathedrals and abbeys of England, ate lunch on the grounds of Stonehenge, and participated in a service in York minster, where mass has been “said” every day for over nine hundred years!  I’ve stood in the Pope’s residence at the Vatican, sat where Luther preached in Worms, and knelt in a small Polish chapel that memorialized the lives lost at Auschwitz.  My friend, Alan Brown and I walked underground to look at the glass tomb and body of Lenin in Red Square, and then, even farther underground (with just a candle in hand) to view deceased monks and beautiful icons in an Orthodox monastery in Kiev.

Now this is said, not to boast or to sound like I’m mimicking Rick Steves.  In all these places, I found myself awestruck, silenced, and inspired to prayer and meditation toward God.  If the truth be told, I found myself worshiping unlike I experience much of the time in church these days.  Why?  What’s the difference?  Was it the atmosphere, being in a foreign country, or the fact that I was humbled by the majesty displayed?  Being a student and teacher of history, I guess it could have been that I was caught up in the sheer “ancientness” of it all, something we just do not have in our adolescent America.  But the more I pondered this the more I realized three things that made these experiences of worship:  liturgy, mystery and revelation.  In all these settings I found that there coexisted ritual, wonder and reverence . . . and I could not help but worship.

The other day I had a deja vu moment while walking through our Christian school.  I was strolling around, greeting the students and teachers, absorbing what was going on in the classrooms.  Suddenly, I was overtaken by the same sensation . . . that I was in a sacred place.  That’s right, it felt like I was standing on holy ground.  I was.  You see, we need to view what we are doing in the hearts and minds of young people as an act of worship.  Oh sure, we have our daily devotions, Bible lessons, weekly chapel . . . we might even sing a bit, but a Christian education IS more than that.  It’s a daily worship service, just like in York minster.  And here’s why,

• There is ritual.  Without ritual, education would be a free-for-all.  The classroom teacher establishes a routine, helping students to organize their thoughts and responses.  And in so doing, orders their steps in their faith/learning journey.  School is filled with ritual and liturgy.  We learn math facts, grammatical rules, natural laws, verb conjugation, chronological events, and warm-up exercises.  The distinctive of a Christian education, like in church, is that the teacher points all these to a Creator God and His Beloved Son who holds all things together.  Frederick Buechner says that ritual is rehearsal for the real thing.  We speak of what we do as “educating for eternity” and so it is.  A truly Christian education is ordering life to worship God on a daily basis, preparing students, not only for life here and now, but for the not yet.  The Christian teacher leads worship through the liturgy of life in the classroom.
• There is mystery.  Much of what we study in school is filled with wonder and kept in secret.  Our role as Christian teachers is to assist our students in unlocking some of that mystery, pondering on some, and accepting some as only belonging to God.  The writer of Ecclesiastes says it so well ~ “He has set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end”. We wonder about the cosmos, about a leaf, about a novelist’s intention, about a war, a plague, and a formula (see Job 38-41 for a more detailed list of questions).  We also learn about Christ, God’s grandest mystery, and the One who has hidden within himself “all the treasures of knowledge and wisdom” (Colossians 2:2-3).  The Christian teacher leads the search to unlock the mysteries of life in the world of knowledge, wisdom, and understanding.
• There is revelation.  God is in the revelation business.  He has spoken to us through His word, and by the Word made flesh.  He has also made Himself known through His creation and also by His Spirit (1 Corinthians 2:6-13).  The amazing and sobering realization for us is found in these words of Jesus himself ~ “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children . . . for this was your good pleasure”. We as Christian educators become vessels of God’s good pleasure as we point to, explain, open and help them discover the revelation of God.  In the Christian classroom the word of God is spoken, displayed, modeled, discussed, explained, applied, and integrated into all that we can learn and know.  The Christian teacher leads the journey of revealing what God has said to us about life, the life that is truly worth living.

A recent personal experience confirmed these three as distinctive qualities of Christian schooling.   A mom came to see me and asked if she could share about her 5th grade son beginning with us.  They are new to our school and she wanted me to know that after one week, he came and told her, “Mom, I can’t believe how great this school is.  I can’t believe that we can know so much about God in so many ways than just church!” We cried together, prayed together . . . and, I realized afterward, worshiped together.

This is why we must gain a fresh (new?) appreciation of our Christian schools and the individual classrooms as places of worship.  No, the Christian school should never replace the church, but rather is an extension of all our churches.  It should be the educational arm of EVERY church that seeks to worship Christ in spirit and in truth.  Thomas a’ Kempis, a medieval monk, wrote in his classic The Imitation of Christ,  “Without the Way there is no going, without the truth there is no knowing, and without the life there is no living”. It is disconcerting enough that we have lost so much of true worship in church, emphasizing form over function and experience over liturgy, mystery and revelation.  When it comes to education, we have strayed miles away from this in allowing our children to be taught of a foreign culture in the state schools, where none of what I have written here finds any basis.

It’s time for the body of Christ to get a grip . . . to reconnect worship in church with worship at home and worship in the education of the next generation.  The Christian community MUST come to terms with where we are as a people of God in this respect, and where God would have us proceed.  The Christian school stands at a crossroad with the Church in determining the voice we will have in our society in the future.  One significant aspect of that is seeing the classroom of the Christian school as truly sacred ground.

Maybe we should have the students take off their shoes . . . ?

~Bill