world religions, single-serving
My brother is a youth pastor-in-training. (His default year at bible college after high school took, where mine didn’t.) I don’t know for which class it was (Pastoral Theology, perhaps?), but this week he had to attend a service at a synagogue. He eschewed the three-hour sabbath service in favour of a Thursday-night minion.
My reaction to bible college exercises like this one is mixed. On one hand, I can’t say it would be better for Christian Leaders of The Future to not have any first-hand experience with other religions. On the other, I find a single field-trip to be inadequate and smacking of tokenism.
Maybe I have a bad taste in my mouth from when I went to bible school in another city and went on one of those field-trips myself — not because I was required to, but because some friends of mine were taking Religions of the World and I thought it would be fun to tag along. And it was, in a train-wrecky sort of way. It was a trip to a mosque, back in those innocent pre-9/11 days. I dutifully veiled my hair and covered my ankles and wrists and listened with great interest as a friendly and open middle-school teacher gave us the tour of his house of worship.
It was all going well, until some rabble-rousers whom I didn’t recognize (seminarians, perhaps?) started barraging the gentleman with questions about the divinity of Christ and such, all of which he fielded with a good nature. It was somewhat embarassing for many of us who had attended the pre-field trip meeting, however, at which we were instructed not to get all aggro and confrontational towards the people who had graciously allowed us to visit their gathering-place and expose themselves to the prying eyes of self-righteous bible school students.
I was embarrassed for myself and my fellow Christians, so after the interlopers were finished with their assault I lobbed a friendly one, asking about the challenges of observing the Muslim faith in a society that does not exactly make it easy to pray five times a day, much less wash thoroughly before doing so.
The trip was educational — I did learn a good deal about the practice of the faith, at least as it was done in that particular community. But at the same time, now, years later, I feel embarrassed for my brother, visiting the synagogue on a Thursday night for what is a much smaller, more intimate family service. I won’t speak to my brother’s thoughts or opinions, and I don’t want to imply that he’s like the obnoxious questioners that came along to the mosque. Somehowe, though, I still find the whole situation slightly offensive — the idea of the Christian student visiting a synagogue as though to be able to say, “Ah, yes, I have sampled this faith and have indeed found it to be inferior to mine.”
I’m being overly cynical, I know. And as I said, I don’t think it would be better for bible school students to never attend other houses of worship. So I guess there’s no way to make me happy. My discomfort with the practice of the World Religions Field Trip, I think, stems from a knowledge of the way most bible school students think. (Especially ones at Calvinist institutions like the one my brother attends.) Maybe it’s just that part of me misses the days when I was sure that Christianity was The Only Way. Being sure about stuff is easier.
December 29th, 2005 at 2:46 pm
i think you’re right. as christians we need to engage in real dialouge with world religions, not just window shopping. of course, dialouge scares some people because they fear being “influenced by the evil one.” however, i think that dialouge is just that- a discussion that furthers understanding and empathy.
i think the issue of how bible college is done is another problem all together. the model of “year one: destroy faith, year two: purge the remains, year three & four: rebuild faith stronger than before” only works for those who go for 3 or 4 years.
January 10th, 2006 at 10:10 pm
I did some volunteer work for Friend Ships, and they tell a story of a woman from a local Buddhist temple who would come over to their facility and serve them with quiet friendliness, doing menial work and asking for nothing. They would try to preach to her, and always she just politely nodded and returned to her service. Eventually they realized that she was living out to them what they were preaching to her. So we should be.