Teaching for Spiritual Formation: A Patristic Approach to Christian Education in a Convulsed Age

by Kyle R. Hughes

Christians do not do theology (at least theology that has much merit) as if folks discovered God last week and the first good thinkers arrived a day or two later. Christians are part of a long conversation unfolding across time amid the communion of saints. More recent is not automatically better. As those who affirm the authority of Scriptures written many centuries ago, Christians have a pretty basic reason for affirming that vital wisdom and compelling direction can come from ancient sources.

Perhaps most importantly, the claim that we are educating children implies a claim that we are somehow making things better, helping them to become better than they would have been without our intervention. “Better” is a value judgment that requires a conception of the good and enough wisdom to see how it might play out in learning. Claiming that a strategy “works better” only makes sense if it is backed up by an idea of what kind of good we are trying to achieve: better for what, and why? Talking well about education includes ideas like assessment, outcomes, and cognitive development but at least as urgently needs ideas like justice, beauty, formation, and hope.

First, I hold that the goal of Christian education is not simply to produce graduates who know things about English, history, math, science, or even theology but rather to form graduates who become certain kinds of people—disciples of Jesus Christ.

the work of Christian education is in fact the work of discipleship, here carried out not in the sanctuary or on the mission field but in the classroom.

This, then, is what we mean by discipleship: the daily work of training our affections away from the things of this world such that, by the power of the Holy Spirit, we are transformed into Christ’s likeness in every aspect of our lives. As we put off the old, we put on the new (Eph 4:22–24), learning to find and embrace the presence of God in every aspect of our daily living.

Therefore, the truth to which the church fathers ultimately point us is that the spirit—that is, the defining or typical element—of Christian teaching is one in which the Spirit—that is, God’s own empowering presence—infuses all aspects of our work. If the goal of Christian education, and indeed the Christian life in general, is to be formed into Christ’s likeness, to become disciples of Christ, we can take heart from the knowledge that this is the work of the very Spirit of God, who seeks to draw our students into relationship with himself, not simply for their own salvation but for his purposes of mission and renewal in the world.

In other words, transformation happens not so much when we encounter ideas about God as when we encounter God himself; by the Spirit, God makes us a new creation, gives us new birth, and puts a new heart within us as we become increasingly transformed into the image of Christ.

While there is something to be said for being culturally aware and engaged, deliberately choosing to feast on those things that point us to the fullness of Christ reshapes our appetites and fills our spiritual bellies.

While they cannot and must not replace the local church, our educational institutions can nevertheless be important sources of Christian community and encouragement for our specific task of walking out our calling of shepherding students’ souls. To this end, we need what the Celtic Christians termed an anam ċara, a “soul friend,” with whom we can be in spiritually meaningful and vulnerable relationship.

While Chrysostom is clear that it is parents who are the ultimate authorities over their children, it is nevertheless the case that some aspect of this authority, in both Chrysostom’s day and our own, is delegated to teachers who stand in for the parent in providing the child’s education.131 This takes some pressure off teachers insofar as the primary responsibility for a student’s formation lies with his or her parents, and yet throughout the homily it is clear that Chrysostom sees the work of the teacher as possessing, by extension, this same authority.

Indeed, Chrysostom’s first powerful insight here is that he correctly recognizes the formative nature of everything that students are hearing or reading. Teachers, who have an infinite amount of subject material to draw on, thus have the obligation to select texts and topics that are not “base” but can point students to lives of virtue and faith.

Given the weakness of our learners on account of the corrupting effects of sin, their greatest need is not simply information about God but rather a personal encounter with God. To the extent that we are responsible for shepherding our students’ souls, our ultimate pedagogical aim must be nothing less than pointing them to another way of life, one characterized by faith, hope, and love, grounded in the same practices of contemplative spirituality that energize our own lives with Christ. While the primary way in which we do this is through our personal example and witness, empowered by our own rootedness in Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit, Chrysostom helps us to see that what we teach and how we teach can be just as significant in regards to the spiritual formation of our students.

If Christ is to be the true center of our classrooms, we too must make conscious decisions to utilize time in such a way that Christ is the priority. This must, of course, go beyond prayer at the start of class; the vision of faith-learning integration that we are developing in this book will help ensure that Christ’s presence is felt throughout the entirety of the class period and not just in an opening prayer.

Apart from an explicitly stated understanding of what we mean by spiritual growth, we risk a diminishment of the telos of our education to some variant of moralistic therapeutic deism or to the simple hope that our students will feel warm and fuzzy feelings about Jesus. Moreover, a lack of willingness to reflect critically on whether or not our efforts at spiritual formation are amounting to anything undoubtedly inhibits our ability to adapt and refine the structures that would guide any such approach. As a result, what we need is a clear and reinvigorated vision for the spiritual outcomes to which Christian education is to aspire, as well as a set of benchmarks by which we can measure if our efforts are bearing any fruit.

By their very nature as teenagers, my students exist in a liminal space between childhood and adulthood, having been exposed to the faith of their parents, teachers, and pastors, but now standing on the precipice of deciding if they are going to be led inside the king’s palace, take up their crosses, and bear the fruit of the Spirit.328 The time for decision, for many of our students as for Cyril’s catechumens, is very much at hand.

We are more likely, I suggest, to see students pursue purity of heart when we have placed before them a highly desirable, alternative version of the good life than when we merely condemn our culture’s false visions without giving them an imagination for a different kind of life and the practices and habits to begin walking in that way.

Operating on the principle of “you cannot give away what you do not have,” it will always be the overflow of our own spiritual lives that has the best potential to authentically invite students into this alternative way of life.