For the stranger that stumbles onto this, let me clear up several biases right away. I was homeschooled right up through high school, stayed at home until college (when I lived with my grandparents), and have other post-school siblings still living at home. Also homeschooled, if that is not apparent. And I have not regularly attended any kind of church outside of my family’s house since early childhood. And to the question of bias, yes, I do think there is more good than bad about that upbringing.

When it comes to opinions, though, “bias” is really a phantom. If I am biased in favor of homeschooling becasue that’s what I grew up with, how can there not be an equal bias among those who were shooled in public facilities? It seems to me even that when you cannot find evidence of bias, such as internal inconsistencies in an argument that are glossed over, the suspicion of greater bias ought to lie on those with the weight of public opinion on their side. Others would say the onus of bias lies with fanatics who buck the system. What you will; I will now make my anecdotal case without treachery.

Basically I think that church should be more like school and school should be more like home. I think Scripture is behind this, but the supporting texts are not clearly stated and adamantly repeated so that they could justifiably be called dogma or doctrine. They are at best implicit: it is more consistent with the clearly stated principles to do this rather than the alternatives. Thus to bring out this scriptural backing requires a whole geat lot of exposition and detailing of first principles, and I am not getting into that here. I’m approaching this idea from the other end.

Let’s start with school. Most people have experience with it and it is not so touchy as church and family. The best model of school I think we have today is college. This is where the mode of teaching shifts from a teacher telling you what to learn into a teacher giving you an opportunity to learn, and also where different modes of teaching are deliberately employed for different ends. In the vast lecture halls you have the seasoned professors presenting the core concepts and giving the big picture. Good professors do this well. A good lecture is not like any other kind of learning; you can’t replace a good lecture with a good small-group discussion. Good lectures are oral essays, and the speaker takes you on a tour of their own mind as much as of the subject matter. You begin to see how the professor makes connections, and you benefit from his off-topic experiences that have given depth to his understanding of the subject.

If you have been to any good lectures, take that mental setting and compare it with Jesus’ sermons, or any of the apostles’ famous addresses. Do you see the similarities? The speakers draw on their maturity to present to a large audience the vital kernels of the message, its broad outlines and the relationship of the key ideas to the wider reality.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, you have the same professor holding office hours where any student, no matter how fresh, can come and ask questions. At my school, even though few students ever availed themselves of office hours, professors who taught large classes usually had full offices. There are limits on how many people one person can address individually. But the man who speaks is not held up out of the range of mortals; he will speak to anyone who will come.

Think now of the times when the Disciples come to Jesus privately and say, “Uh… I didn’t really get what you said. Can you go over it again?”

Between these two extremes you have the discussion group, the awkward adolesence of the teaching relationship. Too often in my school, half of the people in these classes were too hung over or just plain tired to see straight, and half of the remaining were too timid to speak up; so a quarter or less of the class had the actual discussion. Too often the teacher did not have any interesting ideas, or know how to develop and encourage the expression of ideas, and you had the miserable situation of an uncertain teacher speaking to a bunch of silent, half-shut eyes.

But there were good discussion groups, too. There were times when students would propose ideas and other students would respod. There were times when the discussion class was too short, because the teacher had so many interesting thing to bring up and everyone had a comment to add. And this could happen even though the teacher was a grad student, as little as one year ahead of the rest of the class in studying.

Here, I think, is the kind of teaching and the kind of meeting that is supposed to be ordinary in the assembling of the saints. Not that there is no place for a very learned teacher to give a lecture–looking back to the academic world, fully credentialed experts will attend lectures given by their peers. But it is not thought in that field that one can pass from being a student to a professor, or professional, or aquately knowledgeable and skilled practitioner, by simply attending lectures. That’s not complete learning, and having micro-lectures that are called group discussion does nothing to fill the lack.

Think, then, if you have had that college experience or something similar, to what happened in good and bad discussion groups. In the useless ones, the students said nothing. The teacher repeated what the professor said. The teacher had some generalizations and perhaps some anecdotes and illustrations, but nothing provocative, nothing interesting, nothing that made anyone sit up and think, “Hey, wait a minute–that’s brilliant! And I can just see how that relates to the other thing the professor was trying to say—” and a hand goes up.

In those poor and meager discussions, it didn’t matter if the teacher broke up the class into sub-groups, assigned topics, asked each person one by one, assigned five-minute stream of consciousness exercises, asked for creative expression, or stared blankly at the class until some student ventured to say something. In some of those discussions it would have been better if the teacher turned the class over to me. I might have known more about the subject–maybe, sometimes–but much more, better to say something half wrong and provocative than to say so little rightly that nobody’s brain turns on.

At the same college where I got all this expertise on methods of teaching, I also attended two Christian group meetings. In one of them we would work our way through a book of the Bible, in pretty much a free-for-all discussion. The teacher tried to keep us on track enough so that we would finish the book in a semester and that was a stiff challenge. But if someone had a sincere question that led a ways off from the topic at hand, we followed until we were pretty much all restating and insisting on what we’d already said and then we’d move on. Some people didn’t speak up much. Some people spoke up a lot. I can’t think of anyone who came frequently who never spoke up, though. It was great. Not perfect, no, but profitable. I’ll recommend it to anyone who’s in a position to go.

The other meeting was more of a lecture. Rather than crowding around a table in a small office, people sat in a semicircle facing the teacher, who presented on a topic and took questions afterwards. A smaller pecerntage of the attendees asked questions–perhaps even fewer in simple numbers. As with any lecture, since the individual points went by unchallenged, the lesson as a whole gained a kind of corraborative credibility, all the harder to discuss or reconsider because of the oral presentation. By the end of a lecture, the average audience member can only recall burning questions, not niggling doubts that signal large issues as yet unrealized.

Oddly, both of these meetings were put on by the same group, and both led by the same teacher. There was a substantial difference in what I felt I and the others in attendence were learning. Yet I do not mean that we learned nothing in the lecture meetings; as I said, they can convey what discussions cannot. But it is like making many sketches and no drawings, roughing out a new sculpture each week and finishing none, reading many books but writing no analytical papers. You might gain something from each exercise, but you miss a lot because of never following through.

Once or twice I went to another group’s meeting. Usually there I would find a painfully prefunctory and rushed attempt at a lecture and a small-group break-out, and then lots of stompin’ singining. Like playing house, where the day is condensed mainly into making and serving three meals (because you have the dishes and plastic food), many student meetings are codensed into the only spiritual lifework that these young people understand: making music. The bill paying, the laundry, the wiping snotty noses and the real work of a household, which is only punctuated by the enjoyable consumption of food, is not really understood in its spiritual corollary.

This is where the modern conception of family has undermined both school and church. While discussion is a profitable way to gain understanding of abstract concepts, it is a flaccid way to master manual skills. No matter how much good manners or good housekeeping is preached at children, if their lives consist of going to school and doing homework, that is what they understand. In our house, as in most homes two generations ago, the children always had some amount of work to do helping the adults. Good home cooking is more practice than knowledge, and so is time management, and the disicipline to do housework. There isn’t a college student alive who doesn’t know that good food is made in the kitchen rather than bought precooked, frozen (even if most of their lives that’s how they ate, still everyone knows about home cooking). Nor is there anyone who can claim to be ignorant that laundry needs to be washed. But how good are your average college kids at cooking, cleaning, and managing the affairs of small household when they arrive at college? Not good at all. They learn it at college. Having been thrown in the pond, they learn how to swim. Most will develop tolerable skills in a few years of real-world impromtu practice.

Spiritually they are coming out the same way. They know about prayer, they know about the reading and study of scripture, but they have never tried it. Worse, they have not grown up around anyone who has done these things with any kind of efficacy. Their parents and all those who “practice” godliness accomplish it mainly by going to a church to hear a lecture on what godly living is like–often a lecture on how they should stop just going to church and start doing something. But the things they wind up doing after such exhortation are still like playing house, like trivial and stultifying “experiments” in bad lab classes where everyone knows exactly what the experiment is going to show.

In raw family life, it is not like this. The older brother thinks he can show the younger brother how to play the video game. At first, maybe, the younger brother is impressed; but soon he will say “Let me try,” and if the two are anywhere close in age the younger will try with a vengeance to excel his brother. Older children inspire the younger. Older children translate, in their flawed way, the workings of the wide world into the vocabulary of their younger siblings.

Good parents allow the children to tutor one another, tolerating a certain amount of misinformation, of foolhardy stunts, of domineering. Like good discussion group teachers, they will allow each person to express themselves in both their wisdom and their folly. A good parent and a good teacher will make up for the inability of young children, cleaning up their messes, answering their questions, meeting their needs. But a good parent and a good teacher will also not tolerate this dependence to continue unchecked. They will allow their children to take greater risks and they will insist that their children accept greater responsibility.

I have heard parents, or heard of parents, who will do all kinds of things for their children. They will call them from work to remind them to go to school. They will admonish them not to be foolish with their money. They might even help their twelve year old children brush their teeth. But parents who understand growth, maturity, and fulfillment will not do these things for older children. Through the entire lives of their children, good parents let themselves stand a little further back from their children than the children think the parents can reach in to save them. Experienced mothers do not come running every time their infant cries. Wise fathers let their children experience the terrors of a barking dog or a skinned knee without immediately swooping to the rescue.

So, too, in church, growth does not come by having all diet, exercise, work, and play carefully prescribed by experts. A new convert needs everything explained, needs above all else answers and reassurance. But as students in school are taught to find their own answers and then to formulate their own questions, so should Christians also be taught. Teachers and lectures never become oboslete, any more than parents do; but the flood of protection must gradually recede if any solid ground is to emerge.

I have made brief reference to how I think lectures and office hours are reflected in scriptural teaching. I made no comparsion with discussion groups. There are a couple of places where I think similarity can be observed, but in the main I think that there was no need to comment on or detail these kinds of meetings; they were presumed, they were self-evident. If you get a group of people together and you don’t give them a set of rules, they will behave more or less as a discussion group does–or a gang of children. The mature among them will have a kind of standing that allows them to guide and influence the direction of the group, but they have no absolute control. Some are quiet, some are vocal, but nobody is prohibited from speaking. One is considered and expert in this matter, but another in that, and everyone is free to ask the opnion of any of the group members as well as of the leader.

Now, on top of this organic, familial model, there are guidelines, limitations, and structures for a church meeting, that are enumerated in scripture. These are worth discussion and more than worth adherence. But these guidelines shape a kind of meeting that is not like Jesus’ sermon on the mountain, or a two-hundred student lecture, or a plant manager addressing his entire factory. They are like a meeting in an upper room in the New Testament, or a discussion section at a university, or a board meeting in a coporation. The rythym of church should be familiar to all of us from our real lives–and in a way it is, but only from those saddest parts of our real lives: bosses who are out of touch chiding their employees, parents who serve poor food and poor discipline, teachers who can’t get a comment or question from a classroom of thirty students.

Children bicker and teachers attempt indoctrination. There at least as many bad examples for church in family and at school as there are good examples. Blind imitation of one form in another will not help, but I suggest shifting the frame of reference. Why is church considered something different? What’s wrong in the church is the same thing that’s wrong in our homes and offices and schools. The pleasures of fellowship are the same as the pleasures of good coworkers, strong families, and smart teachers. We have tongues to taste good food, ears to hear good sayings, and eyes to see good works. Although there are many who allow themselves to be herded unthinking through the system, there are many good parents and good teachers and good workers who could form a more vibrant, growing, nuturing, effective church, if only they would stop thinking that church is different. Like eating, learning, and growing up, church is from God for people; people have the latent ability to do what is required. They need each other’s help, but they are all capable of contributing.

It becomes hard to illustrate this example, because those who abdicate their spiritual lives to the care of their pastors are the same ones giving over the rearing of their children to teachers. We are asking restraurants and supermarkets and colleges and churches to provide good food for us prepackaged, when we ought to be getting our nourishment for ourselves–with help, yes, trading recipies and buying ingredients, but also on our own, trying, sharing, learning.