What's Your Major?

Thanks to my husband, who is an avid reader of the XKCD webcomic, I have discovered the real reason so many students in this generation list their major as "undecided." Enjoy!  http://xkcd.com/1052/

Handel's Messiah: A (very amateur) Listening Guide

A week before Thanksgiving, my husband and I had a rare free evening. He was working on a computer project in the office and decided to listen to Handel's Messiah as he worked. I had planned to do the dishes and then play a game or do some reading, but when I heard the familiar opening chords, I sat down and listened, too.

I've always liked the Messiah, but it's usually playing in the background while I clean, write, or drive. The last time I actually sat down to listen to the entire piece was about 5 or 6 years ago, when the ladies from my Sunday School class all went to a live performance at the National Cathedral. The company was enjoyable that night, but the venue was so drafty that the instruments had to stop several times to retune, including right before the Hallelujah Chorus and. I'm not sure which would have been worse: allowing the instruments to play the pieces out of tune (and potentially confusing the chorus), or interrupting the flow of the piece. In any case, the choppy performance was highly distracting.

So this time, as I listened with my full attention, I noticed several interesting things about the piece that I hadn't before. I'm not sure how many of them were intentional on Handel's part, how many of them were the result of the conductor's interpretation (for reference, the version we have is the Neville Mariner/Academy of St. Martin in the Fields performance of the original 1748 score), and how many are simply the result of the soloists' diction. But I heard a number of "musical jokes" or references, and I therefore offer this amateur listening guide. I won't claim any profound level of insight into the piece, but I am curious if others hear the same things I do, or if there are other references I have missed along the way.

"Comfort Ye My People:" the first time the soloist sings the word "iniquity," the chord structure of the music changes as if to convey the dissonance of sin itself.

"The People That Walked in Darkness:" this piece starts off with heavy, almost plodding, chords, and "lightens" as the light "dawns" on the people ("have seen a great light").

"Glory to God:" the string technique used here (I'm not a string player and so don't know the technical name) gives the impression of the fluttering of the wings of the angel chorus. Steve pointed out that the contrasting quiet of "and peace on earth" in the men's sections could be the echo off the hills.

"His Yoke Is Easy:" compare the lightness of this piece to the heaviness of "The People That Walked in Darkness."

"All We Like Sheep:" there's a lot of "turning" in the music itself in this piece.

"He Trusted in God:" one of my favorites. I can just imagine this refrain spreading through the crowd watching the crucifixion. It has the feel of gossip spreading through a large group of people.

"Thou Shalt Break Them:" the soloist in this version sings "thou shalt dash them into pieces" in such a way that you can picture something being thrown violently toward the ground.

And finally, note the difference in harmonics between "Behold the Lamb of God" and the final piece, "Worthy Is the Lamb." The former quotes the announcement of John the Baptist in John 1:29 ("Behold, the lamb of God who takes away the sin of world!") and is in a mournful minor key, as if to foreshadow the crucifixion for which the Messiah came into the world. The latter quotes Revelation 4:11 and is in a joyous major key, as if to celebrate the work accomplished by the Messiah who now sits at the Father's side in heaven and reigns as Lord of all.

Happy listening, and Happy Christmas!

On Board Games and Tenure

When we lived in Columbus, we were introduced to the wide world of what I'll refer to as non-traditional board games. These games--often but not always European in origin--aren't your typical "roll the dice and move around the board" games like Monopoly and Life. These games frequently involve more strategy than luck and usually have an original twist to the game mechanic that makes them interesting for more than their social value. "Games night" has never been the same for us since.

One of the more unusual games we played was a tongue-in-cheek commentary on the academic tenure process called "Survival of the Witless." It took hours to play, and we never successfully completed an entire game. This was partly due to complexity of the game--there were many components to keep of track of--but mainly it was because the objective was so difficult to attain.

I now believe that the impossibility of the game's goal was intentional on the part of the game designers. That goal was tenure, and I think the designers wanted to convey the impression that tenure was impossible to achieve through normal channels. More on that idea later; in the game, players tried to reach tenure status by publishing a book and earning the approval of each of the half-dozen diverse members of the tenure committee. Book publishing was the easier of the two tasks, and was accomplished by drawing a book contract card and a set number of chapter cards from the deck. There were a limited number of contract cards in the deck, though, so in larger games one or more players were unlikely to complete the publishing requirement. Influencing the tenure committee was also determined by card draws, and was tracked on a score board. Six committee members were randomly selected from the committee deck, and each committee member was biased in a different way. Other (non book-related) cards in the draw pile influenced the committee members favorably or unfavorably toward a player. For example, a player might draw the "hereditary academic" card, which meant that from that point in the game, the player represented a tenure candidate who came from a family tradition of university professors. Some committee members were favorably disposed toward hereditary academics and others were not. Other cards caused players to lose favor with all committee members through activities that made already-tenured professors look bad (for example, the "teacher of the year award" card, because no one on the committee wants to be upstaged by a mere associate professor) or to gain favor with one or more committee members (the popular "butt-kissing" card). Favor was tracked on the big score sheet on a scale of 1 to 10 and was constantly in flux, and only when a candidate had an approval rating of 10 with 4 or 5 (I can't remember) members of the committee AND had completed his or her book contract could s/he win the game.

We only played "Witless" twice. The first time I think we quit after about six hours of play. The second time was at a New Year's Eve party, and when it became clear that this game would also drag on interminably, my husband decided to try and win the game the other way. The rules stated that at any time, a player could choose to "go postal" and roll a die in an attempt to kill off, one at a time, the entire committee. If s/he succeeded, new members would be drawn from the deck, and the players would pick up where they were, hopeful that the new committee members would be more favorable. It almost worked. Steve rolled the die and successfully killed off four or five of the committee members. But the new committee wasn't any better, and we decided that we were more interested in popping the cork on the Ukranian red champagne as the new year approached.

In the real world of academia, if there is such a place, tenure is the ultimate goal for most graduate students and junior faculty. Tenure means a guaranteed job, a respected identity in the community, and--the holy grail for most of us--the freedom to teach what you wish, however you wish. It represents an arrival of sorts, because what the committee is saying is that you can now be trusted to teach your subject without having to submit your syllabus for approval and without having to submit to periodic evaluation. And although tenure isn't as impossible to attain as it is in "Witless," the process is lengthy and can sometimes be political.

But tenure is not the normal track for new hires anymore, for two reasons. First, the economic downturn has taken a toll on university budgets. To be sure, many tenured professors' salaries are funded by endowments, thus reducing the cost to the school, but it's more expensive to pay a new hire at associate or assistant professor rates for 10 or 20 years than it is to pay them as adjuncts, contractors who receive a flat fee for each course they teach. Adjuncts have to teach more classes than associate professors in order to earn the same money, and a heavier teaching load cuts into the research time needed to meet the publication requirement for tenure. The second reason for the decline of tenure is a shift in the general population's attitude toward it. In recent years, the concept of tenure--the idea that an institution can't fire a professor if s/he makes politically incorrect or unpopular statements--has come under fire, as a result of several widely-publicized cases of tenured faculty saying outrageous and objectionable things (e.g., the University of Colorado professor who compared the financiers in the World Trade Center to Adolf Eichmann). The notion of teachers who aren't accountable to anyone doesn't sit well with modern students or the parents who pay their tuition bills, either. A recent edition of "Inside Higher Ed" reported the case of Steven Maranville, who was denied tenure by Utah Valley University for using teaching methods that his students disliked. The case is troubling: the "objectionable" techniques--group projects and Socratic dialogue--had been observed and approved by Dr. Maranville's superiors, who described him as a "master teacher." Only the students, who apparently just wanted to be lectured and left alone, complained. Additionally, the university had all but promised Dr. Maranville, who had already earned tenure at another institution, tenure within a year of his hiring. After being fired by Utah Valley, Dr. Maranville took a considerable pay cut to start at the bottom at a third school.

The Maranville case illustrates perhaps the biggest difference between the way the designers of "Witless" portrayed the tenure process in the late 1990's and the new reality that today's tenure-track faculty face (excepting, of course, the existence of the "go postal" option in the game). In the board game, the receipt of an award for teaching excellence counted against you; in the real world, student evaluations are taken seriously--sometimes too seriously. On one level, the desires of teachers and students are perfectly compatible; students want to take interesting and relevant courses as much as teachers want to teach them. And no teacher enjoys failing a student, no matter how poor the student's work. Good teachers want their students to be engaged in the material and successful in the course. But we also don't to give easy A's. We want to challenge students to wrestle with difficult material, to think and solve problems, and to do their best. Sadly, many of today's college students are used to earning top grades with minimal effort, and they expect their university experience to be no different. They resist instructional methods that are new to them, and they think they know how to teach better than the teacher does. Saddest of all, some university officials and tenure committee members seem to agree with the students, forgetting that a teacher is, by definition, an expert. Dr. Maranville's case is, alas, not the only one of its kind.

I'm not saying that a Ph. D. in a non-education field bestows a professor with the ability to teach well. In my 20-plus years as a student, I've been taught by some obviously brilliant men and women whose lectures were boring, unorganized, and delivered too quickly to take notes from-professors who would probably never win a "teacher of the year" award. So although I note the current trend toward weighting student evaluations heavily in a tenure decision with alarm, I am also not advocating the do-as-poor-a-job-as-possible-in-the-classroom approach found in "Witless." But at the end of the day, teachers, not students, generally know best how to structure a course and guide students through its content and toward its goals, and that reality needs to be upheld by faculty supervisors, whether or not the institution of tenure survives into the next generation of academics.

An A-Z of DC Traffic

This one's for my friends who have moved away and who may be feeling a bit nostalgic for DC life (you know who you are), and for those of you who have never lived in this area. Full disclosure: I had a lot of help from my husband on this one. The germ of the idea was mine, about one third of the alphabet was mine, and the annotations are mine, but the rest is his. This week, we present to you an A-Z of DC traffic.

A is for Accidents, which seem to be especially problematic on the north stretch of the Beltway, around Georgia, Connecticut and New Hampshire Aves. I can count on one hand the number of times I've driven that stretch and not encountered an accident along the way.

B is for Beltway Chaos. Ordinarily sane drivers can become quite aggressive once they merge onto the Beltway. I'm not sure why, unless they're trying to minimize the amount of time they have to spend on it. Or maybe its design was the work of demonic forces (read Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman if you don't get this one).

C is for Construction. Lots and lots of construction. Whole sections of roads and interchanges are unrecognizable now because of a massive "high occupancy toll lane" project that won't be finished until next December. It's a mess.

D is for Diplomats. They have immunity, and many of them drive like it. Fear the State Department license plate!

E is for Emergency Lights. Don't misunderstand me--I'm grateful for our first responders. But pulling over for an emergency vehicle is more difficult when the road is four lanes wide or more and being in the wrong lane after having to merge over means taking a detour or risking your life trying to get back to where you were.

F is for Frightened by Precipitation. I am terrified of winter driving now, not because I don't know what to do, but because most of the other drivers don't know what to do. I've seen cars spin out on half an inch of snow here.

G is for "Greenbeepers," my husband's term for those drivers who are second in line at a green light and honk at the car in front of them the instant it turns green.

H is for HOV, or High Occupancy Vehicle. During rush hour on certain major arteries, you must have at least 2 or 3 (depending on the road) people in your vehicle in order to drive on the road. Violators are fined, and the enforcement can seem predatory at times (like the easy-to-forget-about .10 mile shortcut that connects one of the roads to the beltway).

I is for Increased Blood Pressure. I know I've become much more irritable since we moved here, due in large part to the traffic.

J is for Jerks Everywhere. Seriously, people honk at student drivers here.

K is for Killer Bus Drivers. Think I'm making this one up? Check out this link.

L is for Long Lights. A recent traffic survey revealed that DC area drivers spend in excess of 70 hours each year idling their vehicles in gridlock and at traffic lights, some of which take 4 minutes or longer to cycle. The national "idling" average is 34 hours per year.

M is for Motorcades. When the President, Vice President, or visiting dignitary needs to travel between downtown locations, police cars block key intersections so that the motorcades can pass through. This can take a while, and can happen for any reason, including taking the Vice Presidential dog to the vet for a check-up (Sorry about the source; it was the only one I could find that referenced the original, and apparently unarchived, news article).

N is for Night Milling and Paving. Lots of road work gets done during the overnight hours here.

O is for One-way Streets. Every big city has them, but what makes DC's grid even more frustrating is how many two-way streets turn into one-way streets during rush hour.

P is for Parking Tickets. Steve got one for parking in space that was clearly marked as an acceptable location. The other side of the street was clearly marked as unacceptable. Now we're trying to navigate the contesting process. Fun!

Q is for Quirky, Inconsistent Signage. The signage where Steve parked was clear, but that's not the case everywhere. Check the picture in this article out as an example.

R is for Rush hours...and hours. Morning rush hour here starts around 6:00 and tapers off between 9 and 9:30, although you may still encounter heavy traffic as late as 11. Afternoon rush hour starts around 3 and tapers off around 7. Did I mention we spend 70+ hours a year idling?

S is for Sudden Slowdown. For any reason or sometimes no reason. It makes me appreciate having the sound system controls on the steering wheel, where I don't have to look at them.

T is for Towing. Towing is such a fact of life here that one of our friends actually factors several tows a year into his budget as part of the "cost of living." Towing companies can be predatory, too, hauling your car away within minutes.

U is for Unpredictable Traffic. One local radio station broadcasts traffic reports every 10 minutes. I thought that was ridiculous until we got stuck on I-66 at 11 PM behind an overturned semi. You just never know.

V is for Vans of Illegals. I'm not trying to be racist here, but we have a fair number of hit and run accidents on our roads. Sometimes the person is drunk or oblivious or just can't be bothered to stop, but frequently the offending vehicle is a an older model van with few windows, and the driver doesn't stop because most of those in the van are illegal immigrants who fear deportation if stopped.

W is for Weaving Across Multiple Lanes. Enough said.

X is for Xenomanic Drving Tendencies (we didn't want to resort to the standard X-tra cop-out). Very few people in the DC metro area are actually from this region. Most of us are transplants from other parts of the country, or from other countries, here for a few months or few years. Everyone--New Yorkers, New Englanders, Californians, etc.--drives according to their local road culture. And everyone thinks their way is best.

Y is for Yield! Yield! Look, I'm going to have merge onto this road. We can do this the easy way, with you slowing down just a bit to let me over, or we can do this the hard way, by forcing me to come to a complete stop and really messing up the traffic flow. Oh, I see that you prefer the hard way.

Z is for Zero Room for Error. I've always had quick reflexes, but now my flinch reflex is on permanent hyperdrive. Just ask Steve--I know it drives him crazy.

What are some of your own local traffic quirks? I'd enjoy reading about them. Stay safe out there!

Is Your Church "Missional?" Part II: An Evaluation of the Model as I Experienced It

In my last post, I outlined my understanding of a fairly recent movement in Christian theology called "the missional church." In this post, I'll give my evaluation of that movement. Once again, please note that I do not intend to criticize any specific people--I'm interested in the ideas behind the movement. Any apparent disrespect should be regarded as unintentional.

It took me a while to think through the many facets of the missional community church model, and then to puzzle out which belonged to missional theology as a whole and which belonged only to this particular expression. I may still be misunderstanding some of the finer points. But here's what I've concluded so far:

1. The basic missional principle of approaching local outreach in the same way as global missions (taking the gospel to the people rather than assuming that they will come to us) is sound. The Great Commission (Matthew 28:18-20, and Mark 16:15) says "go," and it doesn't matter if the going is across the street or across the globe. Unlike the nation of Israel, the Church does not inhabit a fixed geopolitical location to which all nations can come to learn about God (the Promised Land was in the middle of the main trade route between Egypt and the other Mesopotamian states). The Church, the one people of God, is now by God's grand design scattered throughout the nations. We are to go to the people.

2. The basic missional principle of recalling all members of the Church to the Great Commission and to a renewed sense of urgency for reaching the people they already know is also sound. Complacency is always a temptation, and many of us in the evangelical churches are content to write a monthly check to a missions organization and call it "participation in the gospel." The megachurch movement has, to some degree, fostered the culture of Christian consumerism mentioned in the previous post. When your church can afford to staff all its ministries with paid professionals who will put on a well-polished show every week, parishioners get the idea that they don't need to do anything--so they don't. We would benefit from thinking of ourselves as missionaries as the people with whom we have contact, whether or not they eventually come to faith.

3. Focusing on building authentic community within the local church is a necessity. It's far too easy for Christians who are struggling with serious sins to fall through the cracks when all they do is show up for a Sunday service (and maybe even a mid-week Bible study) that is attended by other Christians who think that they, too, have to appear as though they have all their ducks in a row. The world calls this hypocrisy, and it's one of the primary factors that contributes to a disinterest in church among non-believers. On a similar note, in this same environment, it's far too easy for those of us who may not struggle with any of the "big" sins to sit back and ignore the progress that we could and should be making ourselves. Wouldn't it be better for everyone--believers and non-believers--if we dropped the masks and got down to the business of helping each other overcome our struggles and live as we ought to live? What happened to "Just As I Am?"

4. Having said the above, I find that the missional community model is too narrowly local in its focus. As stated in the previous post, most missional theologians and church leaders use the term "the church scattered" to refer to the sending out of their members into their local spheres of influence during the week. I, however, take a broader view of "the church scattered--" I believe it best refers to the fact that the people of God now live in many nations across the globe as opposed to one, poised to take the message to the people who need to hear it. Sure, that starts at the local level, but God's plan is bigger than my local community. The missional community view risks losing the bigger picture of God's plan to glorify Himself in all the world for the snapshot view of what God is doing in my neighborhood, as if these were the only people who mattered. It also has a tendency to create local congregations who think they are alone on the mission--that "the Church gathered" is just them and no one else, and that's a far cry from Pentecost, in my opinion. Furthermore, the Great Commission tells us to "go and make disciples of all nations," and Acts 1:8 reveals that God intends the gospel to spread outside of Jerusalem (our local neighborhoods and people who are like us) to "Judea and Samaria (those nearby with whom we have either no affinity or open hositility)" and "to the ends of the earth." Yet there's little to no talk about world missions among missional community churches. One leader in the movement explained that Acts 1:8 tells us that we are to take the gospel first to our local community, then to Judea and Samaria, and then (and only then) to the ends of the earth, and that the missional movement was designed to correct the "unnecessary and unhelpful divorce of Jesus' mission from our local context" by refocusing our efforts on this prioritized list. Furthermore, he said that we had no business doing international missions until the American Church starts reaching its own people again. He went on to say that if we were engaged in the local mission, it would spur us to get involved in missions beyond our own doorsteps, but he implied that the time for that was much further down the road. I have several issues with this explanation. First, I just can't see Acts 1:8 as a "list of priorities." Yes, the revelation was given to the Jews first, but God never intended for it to stop there, and the early church certainly didn't wait until they had reached everyone in Jerusalem before they took the message outside of the city. In fact, they had to be pushed to take the next step by the application of persecution (cf. Acts 8:1-4). And Jesus himself traveled between Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the surrounding Gentile territories simultaneously. Acts 1:8 could be taken in one of two ways: it could, I think, be interpreted as a promise (the "predictive future") to the still bewildered disciples hiding in Jerusalem after Jesus' ascension: something along the lines of, "You may not believe this now, but the Holy Spirit is coming, and when He does, you're going to be transformed into bold witnesses who won't just stay in this city--you're going to take the message to the ends of the known world! How about that?" Or it could be a command ("the imperatival future"), but nowhere does the text imply that the local mission takes priority over the global mission. Second, when I look at the global situation today, I see doors opening in countries that have been closed (the so-called "creative access countries") for centuries. Do we really want to tell God, "Sorry, we don't have our local act together just yet. Can you keep those doors open until we do?" Third, isn't an exclusive focus on local missions simply swapping one "unnecessary and unhelpful divorce" for another? Overcorrection is rarely the answer--we must find a way to call the Church to fulfilling all parts of the Great Commission simultaneously. As Bill Hamel, the president of the EFCA put it in Columbus in 2010, it's both/and, not either/or.

5. Finally, I have a problem with the missional community model's approach to discipleship. I will grant that most churches probably have more member-centered programming than is absolutely necessary for carrying out the mission of the Church, and that many modern Christians are more interested in what they can get out of church participation than in what they can contribute, but again, I see an overcorrection in the "bare bones" approach taken by missional community churches. The Great Commission tells us not just to preach the gospel to all nations, but to "make disciples" and to "teach them to obey everything that I have commanded you." The behavioral component of discipleship is important, and accountability really is best fostered in small groups of people who are completely honest with one another, as the movement points out, but there's a teaching component to discipleship, too--you can't "obey everything that [Jesus has] commanded" if you don't know what that entails. And you shouldn't rely on your leaders to unpack all the details for you--that's how cults get started. We need to be teaching church members, particularly new Christians, how to read, study, and apply the Bible for themselves (and I would note here that traditional churches fail on this point as often as missional churches do). As a teacher, I worry that new Christians and unbelievers who are exposed to the missional community model will see that the pastor does all the teaching (the community groups focus on application and what they got out of the sermon) and will think that you have to have a seminary degree in order to read and understand Scripture--and that is a tragedy. How do we expect to break the consumer mentality among churchgoers fully if we keep them dependent on the leadership for substantive teaching?

Is your church "missional?" I hope it is. All congregations need to keep the Great Commission fixed clearly in sight. I hope your members have a sense of their own role in God's mission, and that they don't just sit back and wait to be ministered to (although we all have times when we need that). But I also hope that they have a sense for just how big God's plan is, and how their local congregation fits into the one people of God. I hope that they "go" to their neighbors and look for ways to make the gospel known throughout the rest of the world. I hope that they desire to study the Bible for themselves and that the pastor is a faithful teacher. I hope your church is both/and, rather than either/or.

Is Your Church "Missional?" Part I: An Introduction to Missional Theology

A little over a year ago, I was introduced to one of the trendiest words in contemporary theology. That word is "missional," and it is most often used to describe a "new" way of thinking about church life that emphasizes a conscious return to the mission of the Church to reach people with the gospel, instead of focusing too much attention on programs for those who are already part of the faith community.

At least, that's the broad definition of the term. I first encountered this concept while representing our local church at the 2010 EFCA annual meeting in Columbus, Ohio. Some of the presenters at the meeting--especially the younger guys who were working in youth and campus ministry--used the term while describing the success they had had when they shifted their ministry focus from trying to attract students to their programs to taking the gospel to young people wherever they were at. Many in the millennial generation, they said, would never set foot inside a church, but were interested in getting to know people who were clearly interested in them. The model made sense to me, but as the conference progressed, I noticed that other leaders in the denomination were suspicious of or openly hostile toward "missional" ministry. I didn't have room in my schedule to attend the information session on missional theology, so I left the conference more than a little confused as to the nature of the controversy.

A few months later, our congregation began the process of planting a church in downtown D.C. We teamed up with a young pastor who felt called to church planting, and who had a clear vision for the new community in the District. This vision was informed heavily by a particular outworking of missional theology called the "missional community" model. Over the past few months, I've had a chance to evaluate this model, to understand (finally) why the term "missional" sets some church leaders' teeth on edge, and to reach my own conclusions about the movement. Please note that I do not intend, in any way, to criticize the pastor of the church plant--planting a church requires a clear vision of who your target demographic is and how to reach them, and he has studied the neighborhood far more closely than I. My intent is to use this space to explore and analyze the ideas driving the movement. Also, note that the movement is still fairly young and has a fair amount of diversity--others may have had different experiences with missional community churches which would lead them to define the movement differently. In part I, I'll explain the model as I understand it, and in part II, I'll give my analysis.

The "missional community" model of organizing the church is based on two assumptions. The first is a belief that the modern evangelical church has become too inwardly focused (missional theologians often refer to this as a "culture of discipleship") and has neglected the basic command of the Great Commission, which is to reach unbelievers with the good news of Jesus Christ. We have developed a consumer mentality toward church membership and have focused so much on our own spiritual growth that we have forgotten that we are to be missionaries to those around us (our "spheres of influence"). The second is a belief that post-postmoderns (no one is quite sure how to refer to them yet) are more interested in forging authentic relationships than they are in subscribing to a set of religious beliefs. Many of them have either had negative experiences with organized religion and so are suspicious of creeds, or are relativists who don't see the need to profess allegiance to one religion over another. But in our media-saturated, frantic society, everyone wants to belong. If we can invite these people to our homes to see how Christians genuinely care for, invest in, and help each other out, some of them will be intrigued enough to consider the church's message. The catch phrase for this assumption is "belonging before belief."

Building off these assumptions, "missional community" churches pare their programming offerings down to the bare bones--childcare during the worship service, perhaps an impromptu women's gathering or men's prayer group--and focus instead on small community groups that meet throughout the week to share a meal, keep tabs on members' needs and encourage each other to "stay on mission" by looking for opportunities to reach out to unbelievers in their workplaces and by living lives of obedience. Community groups--often referred to as "the church scattered"--are also intended to serve as a gateway to church life for the unbelievers the members are witnessing to--they are supposed to be places where non-Christians can see (and be attracted to) the genuine community enjoyed amongst Christians, and where they can safely ask any questions they have. Community groups usually set aside some time for Bible discussion--frequently relating to the sermon heard earlier in the week at the corporate worship gathering--but the emphasis is on application rather than on in-depth exploration of the text. Members are encouraged to invite their non-Christian friends and contacts to community group meetings rather than to the Sunday services, because so many people have negative perceptions of church services, and because it's too easy to blend into the crowd and leave without really connecting to anyone.

Churches that employ the missional community model do have corporate worship gatherings (referred to as "the church gathered"), and these are where the in-depth teaching occurs. Worship styles vary from congregation to congregation, but sermon styles are (I think) fairly consistent: missional pastors prefer to preach expositionally ("verse-by-verse"), to take small chunks of text at a time (it was a rare week when the pastor of the church plant covered more than 6 verses at once), and to preach for longer lengths of time than most traditional church pastors (or at least, this was the case in the church plant). Teaching and worship take place in the corporate gathering; discipleship (application of the teaching) and evangelism take place in the community groups.

That's my version of "Missional Theology 101." Next time, I'll post my evaluation of its main tenets.

College for All?

The time has come--in the life of this blog, at least--to address one of education's hottest current topics: "college for all." I've mentioned the concept in passing in a few previous posts, but my thoughts on the subject didn't really begin to gel until recently, when I read two new publications.

The first catalyst was Mike Schmoker's Focus: Elevating the Essentials to Radically Improve Student Learning (Alexandria: ASCD, 2011). Although the book is targeted toward K-12 educators and policy makers, the author included some helpful ideas which could easily be applied to teaching at the undergraduate level, and his support for "college for all" is as enthusiastic as is his disdain for standardized testing. His basic premise was the absolute centrality of "authentic literacy" as the key to success in all subject areas. Teach students to read (or "decode," in the new jargon) in kindergarten and first grade, and then throw away the reading groups and basal readers (the graded reading textbooks that most of us probably used in elementary school, which mostly contain excerpts from short stories and/or pieces written specifically for the textbook). From second grade on, students should read entire works of varying lengths (novels, short stories, poems, newspaper articles) and genres as an entire class, with the teacher modeling a critical reading method and having students pair up and share thoughts, reactions, and answers to self-generated questions before completing written assignments related to the piece. If all teachers would follow this disarmingly simple plan, he argues, students would actually exceed the standards that have bloated our current system, and they might just retain a love of reading in the process.

Mike Schmoker--who has actual classroom experience, unlike many policy makers--makes his case for reforming language arts and social science instruction using this model well, but he lost me when he applied it to natural science and mathematics instruction, and it was in the context of doing just that that the nuances of his interpretation of "college for all" came through. Schmoker believes that all students could succeed in college if his model were used, because they would have mastered critical thinking and writing skills (in a usable form). Moreover, he states that the skills needed for success in college are the same skills needed for success in the work force and for responsible citizenship. In an ideal academic world, his assumption might be correct. Unfortunately, colleges have their share of instructors whose primary methodology is to do nothing more than lecture for 90 minutes at a time and then test students on what they can remember later. Listening and memorization are useful skills in college and in the workplace, too, and some students actually need more helping learning how to learn in these environments than they do in the critical thinking department. On the other side of the aisle are those students--and let's face it, they do exist--who just never seem to make the jump to independent, critical thinking no matter how much they are prodded. I admit to being something of a visionary myself, but Schmoker's world is a bit too perfect even for me. Furthermore, Schmoker divulges, in his chapter on mathematics instructional reform, that even he can't envision "college for all" as a reality unless schools abandon the new algebra II high school graduation requirement. Most colleges and universities require incoming students to have completed algebra II or its equivalent (whatever that is), yet the traditional high school curriculum has allowed students to graduate with no mathematics mastery beyond geometry. For the policy makers who initially envisioned "college for all," the solution was to require all high school students to complete algebra II. For Schmoker, the solution is to cater to the average student's ability and eliminate algebra II as a college entrance requirement.

I disagree with both proposals; the United States would be best served neither by dumbing down college standards nor by imposing unrealistic (and, as Schmoker repeatedly points out, untested) standards on all high school students, but by bringing back tracking.

Those of you who didn't run away screaming at the word "tracking" probably realize that not all jobs truly require a college-level education. A degree from CalTech or even from the local State U won't make me more likely to choose one auto mechanic or plumber over another, but good reviews and certifications will. I'm also unlikely to query the first responder to a house fire to see if s/he has completed the new BS in "Fire Service Administration" (no joke--click on the link) from UMUC before I let him or her put out the fire. And you might also realize that most European countries--countries who consistently outperform US students on standardized tests--have maintained tracking programs even after American educators declared them "discriminatory."

If you're still reading, and you still believe that "college for all" is a realistic and desirable goal, let me introduce you to the second publication that is responsible for this post. A headline in today's EdWeek Update proclaimed, "ACT Deems More Students College Ready." Apparently, data from the ACT (a competitor of the more famous SAT) results of the class of 2011 indicates that "...25 percent of those students produced scores in English, reading, math, and science that correlate with higher chances of earning B’s or C’s in entry-level college courses." This, the article goes on to reveal, is an improvement from 21 percent in 2005. ACT's senior vice president for educational services stopped short of gushing, calling it a "great sign," but cautioning that the pace of improvement is still too slow to meet the desired goals on the desired timetable.

In spite of ACT's optimism, the results of the study look grim. First, only 49 percent of the class of 2011 took the exam. Second, even though nearly 75 percent of the testing cohort reported taking the new standard "core curriculum" (4 units of English and 3 each of math, science, and social studies), 75 percent of test takers failed to meet ACT's "college ready" benchmarks in all four of its subjects. And while math and science performance saw modest gains, English scores flatlined or fell. Does this look like a cause for optimism?

I've been a fairly outspoken critic of US public educational policy for some time. With Mike Schmoker, I feel strongly that K-12 public education has been taken over by political agendas, to its detriment. The policies that were intended to ensure a consistent, quality education for all children in this country have actually obscured the teaching of basic skills, and those who make the policies often have no real teaching experience. Committee-generated lists of standards aren't helping anyone. The effort to bring real reform to our schools is entering its second decade, and we don't have much to show for it. The policies and procedures are deeply flawed.

But the "college for all" mentality hasn't helped, either. From my perspective in higher education, all it's really done is brought more underprepared students to our campuses, a phenomenon which has too frequently been followed by the dumbing down of our programs. Many students spend their entire first year in courses that have been completely redesigned to address their academic deficiencies, and part of their last year in special "workplace readiness" courses. I hope that they are really learning in their middle two years, but I'm skeptical. Let's stop kidding ourselves and admit that just maybe both the reform policies and the basic assumption--college for all--that has driven them are flawed. Real reform will begin when we relearn the art of seeing students as individuals with different interests, aspirations, and abilities, rather than as clones produced from the same material.