A Dream Job

As long as I can remember I wanted to be a teacher. I used to line up my stuffed animals and dolls in front of a chalk board for their daily lessons before I had ever darkened the doors of a schoolroom myself. All these years later, and in retirement, I still think that teaching was, for me, the best job ever. However while I always felt like I was doing what I was meant to be doing, I have come to see that it has shaped my life, and therefore my current reaction to events.

As a teacher, it was my job to see that the students under my care learned. And if they didn't learn, then there must be another way of presenting the material or another way of explaining it, that would make everything crystal clear. In fact, that what the student took away with them, or didn’t, was my fault! While I now realize that ‘fault’ is a strong word to use here, nonetheless that is what the school culture believed and taught.

In a way this is exactly what is happening in many of the institutional churches right now. If someone is not 100% behind the beliefs, doctrines and practices of that church, then they are the ones at fault. There is little room for dissension, discussion, or questioning of the established practises of that community. Just to make it even more difficult to traverse, these practises change from congregation to congregation, from priest to priest, from denomination to denomination. Very few welcome those who are searching with wide open arms, validating their thoughts and celebrating their questions.

And so my ‘dream job’ taught me that if my success rate was less than 100%, my skills were not up to the expected level. And my church has backed that up by teaching that their way, and only theirs, is the ‘right’ way. Whatever happened I was bound to lose unless I could stay within the confines of the box while still producing the required results.

Sound difficult?

I am passionate about empowering the laity by exposing them to the current biblical scholarship from the last 200 years, encouraging their questions, and supporting them on their journey.

And so I now find myself mentoring a group of adults in a programme called EfM, short for Education for Ministry [www.efmcanada.ca] and struggling with the result of my career in the classroom. It is extremely difficult for me to present the material and provide the necessary space for reflection without also feeling the need that they ‘get’ it or I have failed. Of course that also means that they ‘get’ it in the same way as I do … an inheritance from the institutional church.

This is the most difficult and also the most rewarding thing I have ever done with my life, as I become more and more aware of just who I am, why I react as I do, and that change, though slow, is possible. As it says in Luke 17:33: ’Those who try to make their life secure will lose it, but those who lose their life will keep it.’

Have you ever been challenged to do something difficult? What did it teach you about yourself?

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