When the teacher becomes the student…

Having taught for over 20 years, there is one truth I learned long ago. I might be the teacher, but for me to really do my job well, I must also be the student. This lesson was reinforced this past week in Glendo at our book study.

After years of reading spiritual and theological books we chose something different this time: Shop Class as Soul Craft by Matthew B. Crawford. It is a book about working with your hands both creating and fixing things and how our culture lost something vital when we moved away from this kind of work.

What this book does not directly deal with is anything to do with church or religion. It is an experiment to see if we can identify where faith and communities of God are present in a non-religious book. Now I believe this is true in theory, but I really have no idea how to go about exploring this concept. So I have been coming each time with a whole set of questions and observations about the chapter, throwing them out until the discussion takes on a life of its own.

From the beginning this book study has attracted a few people who take their faith seriously but for whatever reason, do not attend Sunday worship. It turns out that they are the real teachers. Let me give you an example from our last session. In the chapter we were reading Crawford talks about the dilemma he struggles with in his motorcycle repair shop. A customer will bring him an old broken down bike, which will probably cost more to repair than the bike is worth. But the customer loves the bike and even with this warning, authorizes the repairs. Now the author takes great pride in his work, so he wants to do whatever it takes to make the bike right. The problem is that to do this will take so many hours of work that he doesn’t feel right charging the customer. This is especially true when he knows he can do an ok job and the bike might well run just fine for quite a while. Financially this is what makes sense, but emotionally it is a decidedly unsatisfactory solution. What should he do?

For me the answer seemed obvious. He should call up the customer and let him decide. It took quite a bit of discussion before I began to understand that the problem here is not giving the customer the right to decide, but rather getting a person emotionally attached to the motorcycle to hear the decision that needs to be made. It’s a process of learning about how to best serve the customer while satisfying the need to make things right.

When this finally made sense to me my teacher went on to say: “It’s like faith where we seek to serve others as Christians all the while we are growing in our walks with God.” Bingo!! There it was. - So simple. Yet I am so entrenched in my theological language and concepts that I could not see what was right before my eyes. It was a great evening.

We have such a need in our church families to invite and then listen to those people who are not entrenched in our traditions and teachings - for they will bring us new ways of understanding faith that will enrich all our lives.