Christian Education - John Bauerlein

The plethora of newsprint and masking tape generated by Church of the Servant's nascent discussions while meeting at College Park School exists only in our oral history. Were those documents available, commitment to Christian Education would be consistently inscribed and codified in magic marker.

Our first Rector, Clem Jordan, focused our search for, and eventual adoption of a curriculum via his familiarity with the Saint Louis Education Center. I became committed to the Educational Center's core principles during my twenty-five-year Christian Education involvement. I believed my job was to create an environment that allowed participants to discover what they already knew and considered myself a facilitator; never a teacher.

Esteemed Christian Educator Verna Dozier led a workshop on parables at our parish in 1987. It was her belief that focusing on the first character mentioned was the key to understanding any parable.

My co-facilitator, Susan Sims, and I decided to test Ms. Dozier's hypothesis during our next class with 4, 5, and 6-year-olds. Also, at a workshop I attended led by the late Episcopal priest and Jungian analyst John Sanford, he said children pay more attention to a story which is told, rather than read to them.

So, on Sunday, I told the children the parable beginning "A Man Had Two Sons" (commonly called "The Prodigal Son"), saying only it was a story from the Bible. Afterwards, Susan, using a large poster board, asked the children to draw what they heard in the story.

Once finished, Susan then asked the children if they could suggest a name for their art. As can be imagined with that age group, there was a dearth of responses. The children rejected our first two suggestions, "The Son Who Ran Away" and "The Son Who Stayed Home." After a few moments of silence, one child said, "You know, there was a daddy in there." The class agreed their art should be named "The Man Who Had Two Sons."

This remains a seminal moment in my years of facilitating Christian Education at Church of the Servant.