Our country faces the same challenge and threat that our Christian faith has faced for over 100 years – the devaluation and decimation of education. As I watch the daily destruction of the Department of Education and its commitment to guarantee a basic, solid, honest, truthful, and equipping education to all ages, classes, races, and statuses, I reflect on what we in the church have so glibly and reductionisticly called Christian education.

Education is a means to an end, not an end in itself. We teach, we train, we equip, we encourage, we inspire, we challenge, we introduce, we foster curiosity and discovery to enable functionality in the world. We prepare individuals to succeed in a wide and vast variety of interests and occupations. The more individuals that are well prepared for the future, the healthier that future will be. In the latter half of the twentieth century, we realized the importance of education not for the privileged few, but for the masses. Good education results in all boats rising with the tide. The better educated a society, the better cared for the common good.

But not anymore. Decision after decision, cut after cut, elimination after elimination, and decimation after decimation from our federal government says three things: 1) we don’t value education, 2) we could care less about making opportunities for advancement available to minorities and the marginalized, and 3) ignorant and unprepared is the new default for U.S. citizens.

We in the Christian faith could have and should have predicted this trend. After all, we mastered it a century ago when we allowed Pentecostal ignorance to trump Christian intelligence by the artificial and disingenuous challenge to choose either “faith or science.” Resurrecting the ancient distrust of knowledge over faith, a fundamentalist ethos emerged that set intellect, knowledge, wisdom, information, scientific inquiry, and common sense against “trust” in God. The flaw to the reasoning was so simple: our knowledge, our intellect, our curiosity, our hunger for improvement are not threats to God, but are gifts from God.

My lament, as I look back at almost fifty years of ministry, is the wanton and ubiquitous acceptance of ignorance among church goers. I fought the battle so many times. When asked to develop curriculum for the UM Publishing House or Discipleship Resources I was constantly asked to “dumb it down.” I was told that every new piece of curriculum needed to be geared to the “101 introductory level.” When I developed the FaithQuest Bible Study, I asked a number of the Fellowship of Christian Educators for review and feedback. What I heard from almost all of them was “this is too hard, too demanding, too rigorous.” “No one will be interested in this; it expects too much.” “You’re writing at a high school level; write at a third-grade level so people will understand it.” I ignored all these comments and received a significant number of thank yous from end users for not treating them like infants. Our tendency in the church has been to set the bar so low that Christian education fails in its basic purpose – to educate.

A great joy in my ministry has been to sit with a small group of people and open them to what our scriptures and theology really teach and mean. One specific area that I rejoice in is in the area of human sexuality and the challenges of LGBTQIA+ Christians in the church. Over the years I have met with somewhere between fifty and a hundred individuals or small groups who believed “homosexuality is incompatible with Christian scripture” and living. I am deeply prideful that in almost every case, where people sincerely and truly wanted to understand our Bible and our faith, I was able to show them that there was absolutely no incompatibility; that the ethos depended on a completely different standard than we use today. In just about every case, the people I spoke with offered three responses: 1) thank you, 2) why isn’t this more widely taught and understood, and 3) why aren’t our pastors/preachers doing a better job teaching the Bible?

Christian education should not essentially be about understanding the Bible. The Bible is a tool for equipping, educating, inspiring, and guiding the incarnate body of Christ to live and serve in the world. If the United Methodist mission of “making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world” is either valid or true, then we need to understand what discipleship is and how it is the most effective pathway to transforming the world. As long as we continue to use the Bible as a weapon instead of a tool, we won’t get very far. And as long as we reduce the Bible to its most simplistic and reductionist roots, we cannot grow as disciples.

I know pastors who have proudly and loudly proclaimed to me that they haven’t opened a commentary or work of Biblical scholarship since they left seminary. All too often, the very best theologians, biblical scholars, and spiritual guides are dismissed as liberal, progressive, or intellectual. We are destroying the credibility of our faith by disdaining intelligence and scholarship. We are making ourselves the object of ridicule and dismissal because we opt for a puerile and naive belief system.

Luckily, my experience has been that people have flocked to good, solid, intensive scholarship. My last congregation burst into laughter each week because I introduced the Greek into all my sermons. They loved it. And one year, when I served a small, rural New Jersey congregation, we struggled to get three or four people out to Bible study. I decided I was going to teach a seminary level class based on Ched Meyer’s Unbinding the Strong Man (a political analysis of the Gospel of Mark) I ended up with over seventy people by the end of the five-week series. I learned then not to dumb things down and to stop underestimating the hunger and capacity of laity Christians to learn and grow.

So, now in retirement, what would I say to my younger self? “You were right!” Don’t condescend. Don’t listen to the Christian Educators Fellowship. Don’t dumb down. Don’t disrespect. Study scripture – your education DID NOT end with seminary. Smart is not a lack of faith. The true lack of faith is to disrespect the gifts of knowledge, inquiry, discovery, curiosity, intelligence, wisdom, advancement, information, study, exploration, that God offers to us all. Science is not the enemy of faith; it is one of faith’s most important aspects.