On the first day of my Theology in Life class every spring,
I start out by telling students in the class that theology is about life and
can’t be truly learned in a vacuum of a classroom where you can take notes and
pass tests. Those two things are important – after all I have to turn in grades
at the end of the semester – but they are far from being the whole story.
While I think writing well about theology is a good
discipline, I also think that actually doing something that connects what we are
learning with how life works is a good discipline. Students in the class do
have to write – especially summaries of textbook chapters and supplementary
reading responses; but the big project is not a term paper on a theological
topic. They are asked to do what I call a “Theology in Life” project.
The process looks something like this. Early in the semester
I assign them to groups of four. I do my best to create the groups in a way
that doesn’t allow best friends to be in the same groups. I don’t want all
athletes or non-athletes to make up a group. I try to create some ethnic
diversity in each group. Creating the groups like this in itself makes the
project a challenge. For those of us who have been around Point for a long
time, we remember the days when everyone knew everyone else and our backgrounds
were very similar. That’s not true anymore, and that is one of our great
stories to tell!
Today, we are far too big of a school for that to be true
and the rich diversity of our student population in so many areas means that in
order to do well on the project, students have to learn to work together with
people they don’t know, people from different backgrounds, and a whole host of
other “different” sort of things. If students succeed in doing that, the
project has been worthwhile. Every team either in their classroom report or
written assessment of their project noted how good it was to learn to work with
people they didn’t know.
This year my class had ten groups of four students. After
the groups were formed, they were required to read a collection of comments on
issues of social justice and evangelism from the books of John Stott. That
assignment is designed to give students an awareness of how the Christian
gospel can impact the world around us at every level.
Students know from the start that they can’t do this project
in a local church. I’m not opposed to serving the local church, I’ve spent most
of my life doing just that. But that’s too easy. I want them to do something
that creates a little discomfort and forces them to stretch themselves in ways
they aren’t always sure they can. Every team, while making their report in
class, had someone on the team say something like “I didn’t think I could do
this” but they did!
The ten teams this years contributed somewhere near 250
hours of volunteer work in this community because of these projects. They did
everything from working on an elderly lady’s home and yard to having a diaper
drive for a ministry in the Greater Valley Area that ministers to unwed
mothers. They bought enough diapers for a baby in this area to have a clean and
dry bottom for over three months! Another team spent the day with women who are
in a home for alcohol and drug addiction issues. Another team had a field day
for students at a school for special needs students. They taught them tennis
and soccer skills.
Another team worked with a coffee shop to create an evening
of interaction between various Latino groups in the area with others, and
several teams did after-school events for students in different schools. A
group worked with an animal shelter run by a couple who do most of the work on
their own, and helped get a few pets adopted in the process. Still another
group worked with Circles of Troup County, a ministry that helps poor people
learn job skills, budgeting, and a host of other activities that can lift
people out of poverty.
One of the most encouraging moments in each presentation was
hearing students say “I plan to go back” or “I can do something like that also.”
A few students said something like “I wish someone had helped my family when I
was growing up like we did.” For most students, I don’t think these projects
end up being a “one shot deal.”
Group Six worked at a local community garden called “Garden
Patch.” Mr. Jack Coombs is the one who has headed up that project for years.
Four students contacted him and spent an afternoon working with him. They did
nothing glamorous – and in fact spent a good bit of time picking up litter on
the streets around the garden. In their report, they talked a lot about how
appreciative he was of their help and that they had never met a person more
grateful for volunteers. They learned some great lessons from Mr. Coombs.
As I was writing this post, a friend who works at Point and
lives in this community told me that Mr. Coombs died suddenly last week. I sent
the four students an email letting them know and told them that a part of the
blessing of this project was that they were among the last volunteers to help
him at the garden, and I hoped they would remember how grateful he was – and how
their service impacted his life.
These projects weren’t complex, costly, time consuming
activities. But each one of them made a difference in the lives of a variety of
people – including my students who discovered that I was telling the truth on
the first day of class. There is an academic side to theology, but when all is
said and done, theology has to be acted on to be learned well.
