Community of Faith

The final educational paradigm to be evaluated is the notion of the “Faith Community”. This approach is characterised by the goal of helping people understand and embody the meaning of being a people of God and a community of faith in the world[1].

The faith community captures the power of the congregation to teach, and is both the content and the process of Christian education. Learning the faith occurs through participation in a faith community that seeks to enhance the relationship of persons to others, communities and the larger world, connecting people, communities and creation.[2]

What is the nature of the community of faith, and how does the church provide and transform the activities of education? Craig Dykstra attempts to answer this question and what it means to live the Christian life faithfully and well. He explores the contribution of that which helps people grow in faith: the traditions, education, worship practices, and disciplines of the Reformed church community.

Dykstra begins with identifying a widespread spiritual hunger that is prevalent in our age – and rightly admonishes those who would conflate the Christian faith with a way of making sense out of life. “Meaning” and “faith” are not the same - meaning is a by-product of faith, not its substance. The true satisfaction for this hunger is identified as Christ, and those who lose their strivings for meaning have them returned as a gift (c.f. Matt 16:25). The very shape of the church as the redeemed community is the primary setting and resource for education. Only with this corporate view of education, a process the apostle Paul called “building up” the body of Christ (1 Cor 14:12), where communities seeking to incarnate Christ’s presence, can our personal quests for Christian faith and vocation be nurtured.[3]

This transformational aim of Christian education is actualised most naturally within the context of community. Particular emphasis is placed in both the Old and New Testaments on the interactive, interpersonal and learning situations that transform our beliefs, attitudes, values, and behavioural practices[4] (Deut 6:1-9, 11:18-21; Acts 2:42-47; Eph 4:15-16; Heb 10:24-25). Christianity is essentially an embodied way of community life that sources its power intergenerationally in specific, overtly Christian practices – the ordinary practices that the church has been doing for centuries.

Writing from a Reformed perspective, Dykstra draws on an educational approach informed by classical Protestant understandings of Christine doctrine and practice. The life of the Spirit is recognized and lived as it is consistently and deeply participated in within communities that know God’s love, acknowledge it, express it, and live their lives in its light. Hence, the faith community enables the realisation of the “new life in Christ”, and carries on its life through certain “practices” that are constitutive of the shape of its life together in the world. Such practices are explained as “outward and ordinary means” or “ordinances”, functioning as means of grace[5].

Further, people come to faith and grow in the life of faith by participating in these practices. Dykstra provides a number of examples such as worship, telling the Christian story, interpreting Scriptures and the church’s history, praying, confessing sin, encouragement, service, witness, giving, hospitality, and so on[6]. Hence, the educational task of the faith community is to encourage participation in such communal practices[7].

To inform his understanding of “practice” Dykstra borrows a very complicated definition from the philosopher Alasdair McIntyre[8]. As McIntyre describes practices, they are cooperative human activities through which individuals and communities grow and develop in moral character and substance, and continuously reflected upon to ensure they remain faithful to their tradition. However, McIntyre’s approach may have more far reaching implications, especially in the place of theology, his treatment of virtue, and his radicalisation by other authors[9].

The practices of the community of faith and the educative function are more than simply matters of socialisation or enculturation. Otherwise they would becomes self-referential, and devolve into mere ritualised formalism. Having lost touch with the substance of the faith, and no longer lived in the power of the Spirit, their power to form and transform is lost. Authentic faith practices are actions that enable us to live and grow as disciples, with their source in Scripture but lived in the world. They “grow out of love, and integrate love of God, neighbour and self in ways that can transform the world”[10]. These activities are how we “do faith”; how Christians practice loving God, practice loving others, and practice loving themselves. By learning the practices of the faith community, and through long, slow steady, patient participation, individuals and communities learn the Christian faith and grow as disciples[11]. Practices of the faith are ultimately habitations of the Spirit, in whom we are invited to participate with in the educating work of God’s Spirit amongst us. Thus, “education in faith itself becomes a means of grace”[12].

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[1] Seymour and Miller, Theological Approaches to Christian Education, 20.
[2] Robert T. O’ Gorman, “The Faith Community” in Jack L. Seymour (ed.) Mapping Christian Education: Approaches to Congregational Learning (Abingdon Press: Nashville, 1997), 41-57.
[3] Charles R. Foster, Educating Congregations: The Future of Christian Education (Abingdon Press, Nashville, 1994), 14.
[4] Benson, “Philosophical Foundations of Christian Education”, 34.
[5] Dykstra, Growing in the Life of Faith, 41. Here Dykstra is appealing for support to the title of Book 4 of Calvin’s Institutes and the Presbyterian Larger Catechism.
[6] Dykstra, Growing in the Life of Faith, 42-43.
[7] C. F. Melchert, “Theology Today: Growing in the Life of Faith: Education and Christian Practices”, Theology Today (July, 2001).
[8] Dykstra , Growing in the Life of Faith, 68.
[9] For a further critique see Melchert’s review in “Theology Today: Growing in the Life of Faith: Education and Christian Practices”
[10] Beth M. Halvorsen, Doing Faith: Basic Practices for Growing Christians (Augsburg Fortress, 1999), 15.
[11] Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. Retrieved on April 14th 2006 from
http://www.elca.org/init/teachthefaith/announcementsheet.html
[12] Dykstra, Growing in the Life of Faith, 78.