Faith Formation in a Post-Christendom World. Part 1: Challenging our assumptions. By Jonny Price
This week, Jonny Price, Youth and Children’s Ministry Leader in York, returns to give us some insight faith formation with a post-Christendom culture. This will be a two part series, so check back for the next post soon.
Faith formation is important. Good faith formation is very important! How we do good faith formation has been the pre-occupation of Christian youth work for quite a while, and quite rightly, but there have been some significant changes over the last several decades that we maybe haven’t taken into account.
Christendom refers to the culture that exists when the Christian narrative has had a significant impact on the shape of that culture, and wide acceptance of that narrative is apparent. Post-Christendom is what emerges when the Christian narrative loses the central ground in that culture.
The decline of Christendom has been going on for quite a while, but for many in the Church it is still the narrative they hold on to in order to make sense of how faith and culture should hold together. It’s seen as a bit of a golden age of when people knew the Christian story and the Church was central to the life of the nation. Without Christendom you wouldn’t have conversations about the decline of Bible knowledge in wider society or the view that Christian values are normal.
So what assumptions do we need to challenge in ourselves (myself included) when we start to think about good faith formation in a post-Christendom culture?
1. Worship is a religious activity
Within Christendom there were a widely accepted set of values that were largely based on the Christian narrative. In such a society, what would mark someone out as being a Christian? It would be participation in the life of a local worshipping community. If that is the case, then ‘worship’ becomes a religious activity.
That, however, is not the way that the Bible uses the word worship. Worship is about the way we live our lives, the way we make decisions, the way that we treat those around us and move through the world. It’s making a big deal of God in all that we do.
When the Israelites worship other gods in the Old Testament, it causes them serious problems. Yes, there were religious practices associated with other gods that they participated in, but they were also living in ways that actively opposed who God was. Worship is about living in righteousness, a point made again and again through the Prophets – not simply about participating in religious activity.
If we carry this assumption into our faith formation, then being a Christian becomes a hobby or a pastime, rather than a way of moving through the world.
2. Information transfer is the same as character formation
This is almost impossible to avoid because of the way in the West we value intellectual thought and how we link academic achievement to personal wellbeing. If a person knows the right things, they will do well in life, and so we do the same in our faith formation. Many faith formation models, therefore, can essentially be boiled down to simple getting tricky bits of information into the minds of people.
But as mentioned above, when we look at the Bible, righteousness is the aim of passing on faith, not simply information retention. We should be aiming for developing people who put love of God and others before themselves, and who try to live their lives in that way.
Yes there is information that we do need to pass on for that to happen, but passing on information alone is not all that is needed.
3. Belief and faith mean no more than agreement
Most of the time belief is used to signal just how passionately a person thinks about a certain idea. Faith is used in a similar way, to show how someone thinks positively about an idea despite what the evidence shows. Think back to the last time you heard the word ‘believe’ used in public discourse. I am willing to bet it was used to emphasise just how much a person thought an idea would work.
Both these words are used to signal agreement with an idea, but little else. They are not associated with action or with ways of living, but with intellectual assent to an idea.
Faith and belief are all encompassing words to describe our wholehearted commitment to God. One of the most important things for good faith formation, I think, is changing the way we approach faith and belief. We will think more on this in part 2.
4. Faith formation is about institutional stability
With the decline of Christendom, much has been made of the inability of the church to pass on its faith to the next generation. The background assumption to this is that if we can get faith formation right, we can slow or reverse the decline.
What does this make the next generation? If we don’t challenge this assumption, then our young people we be reduced simply to resources. They become numbers on counting sheets.
What if the decline of Christendom is alright? What if it’s what is needed for the Church to be renewed? What if following Jesus in a post-Christendom context has little to do with institutional membership? What if God’s plan for the next generation has little to do with our institutional entrenchment?
Conclusion
There are some half-finished thoughts here that will be rounded up in part 2, when I explore what good faith formation might look like in a post-Christendom context.