The Marriage of Jesus and Jane Vella
I’ve recently joined a dialog with some other San Diego folks on the topic of leadership training. The common concern seems to be the development of a grassroots, trans-denominational, and locally generative alternative to traditional seminary. Recently Jason Evans introduced the work of Jane Vella as a catalyst, so today I want to briefly engage with how her work might be relevant to this topic by comparing it to Jesus’ leadership training methods and ask for your input.
(For an excellent orientation to this topic I’ll simply refer you to JR Rozko’s series, “Toward a Missional Vision of Theological Education,” Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, and Nine. If you’re interested in this subject, it’s a must read.)
Jane Vella is one of the leading figures in the field of adult education. In Learning to Listen, Learning to Teach she reviews twelve principles for adult learning and demonstrates their effectiveness through short case stories. Essentially, Vella asserts that adults learn best when immersed in a learning environment that models equality, demonstrates relevance, and provides opportunity for hands-on discovery. I think there are some important and obvious ways the twelve principles converge with Jesus’ practices:
- Needs Assessment: A posture of “sympathetic listening” whereby the teachers meet the learners “where they are.” Teachers must learn student’s needs before knowing what and how to teach. The incarnation of Christ is the greatest example of sympathetic listening in human history.
- Safety: Adults learn best in an environment of grace. Jesus formed an environment of safety by assembled his community of disciples, going so far as to redefine their familial loyalties to himself, God, and one-another.
- Sound Relationships: Teachers and learners are committed to acting on each others behalf. Jesus included his disciples in almost everything he did, ministry, friendship, eating, sleeping, traveling, etc. His process was essentially deeply relational.
- Sequence and Reinforcement: Deliberately building chains of mastery. The Sermon on the Mount is sequenced from the simplest, basest human issues to the most complex relationships and struggles. Each teaching point (i.e. “blessing those who curse you”) depends critically upon and reinforces previous lessons learned (i.e. “letting go of anger”).
- Praxis: A learning feedback loop of action and reflection. Adult learners require concrete application not merely intellectual abstraction. The disciples were involved in ministry tasks from the beginning, starting with the simple and moving to the more complex.
- Respect for Learners as Decision Makers: Adults are decision-makers who need to determine their own learning path. By teaching in parables Jesus was providing open-ended stories and questions for his hearers to engage with, even honoring their choice at times to stubbornly misunderstand.
- Ideas, feelings, and actions: Adult learning must include the affective realm as a means of natural reinforcement. With Christ, the process of discipleship was hands-on and often involved powerful emotions, provoking ideas, and real-life situations.
- Immediacy: Adults need immediate relevance in learning. Jesus’ disciples they knew they were getting into something that had immediate, even urgent importance. As N.T. Wright has shown, to be a follower of Christ meant you were engaged with the most pressing matters of political life in first-century Palestine.
- Clear roles and role development: It’s important for adult learners to understand everyone’s role, especially their own. Jesus utilized the clear roles of rabbi and disciple that were inherent in ancient Jewish culture, and then redefined their roles at the end of his ministry, saying they were now his “friends.”
- Teamwork and small groups: Adult learning works best in a plurality of people focused on a unified lesson or task. Jesus sent out his disciples in teams to do their work. There were no isolated learners in Jesus’ community.
- Engagement: Adults need learning to be immediately hands-on. Jesus’ classroom was his ministry mission. He didn’t train his followers first, and then begin his mission; they were learning while doing in the midst of a lab environment.
- Accountability: Adult learning is reinforced by the support and positive pressure of peer expectations and feedback. The intimate relationships among Jesus and his disciples provided a natural setting for mutual accountability.
I’m struck by how transferable the ideas of Vella and the practices of Jesus are to our current cultural climate. The twelve principles of dialogue education seem to mirror many of the value shifts occurring in the emerging post-Christian era:
- Rejection of hierarchy/embrace of equality: Hierarchy communicates dominance and supremacy to emerging generations; open dialogue emphasizes the equality of teacher/learner, and learner/learner relationships.
- Rejection of mechanistic/embrace of organic: In light of the conspicuous failure of some Modern systems, emerging people pessimistically reject strict cause-and-effect thinking. Dialogue education allows for an organic apprehension of learning.
- Rejection of monologue/embrace of dialogue: The dominance of one voice can communicate supremacy and simple-mindedness. Dialogue allows complexity.
- Rejection of certainty/embrace of uncertainty: Again, certainty communicates arrogance, a posture that post-moderns often mistrust. Uncertainty, however, communicates humility and the self-confidence to be authentic.
- Rejection of monism/embrace of pluralism: In an increasingly pluralistic world, dialogue embraces the truths that everyone brings to the table. This is a far reaching subject that not only impacts the way we interact with learners, but shapes how we interact as the church with the world becoming learners ourselves.
Some Questions for Consideration: How are these similar to current models of ministry leadership training? How are they different? How could these be used to create a discipleship and leadership training approach both effective and accessible to anyone? What are opportunities and pitfalls?
The “poverty of the gift,” as Hyde puts it, is the economy of faith. Thomas Merton once said, “The essence of the Christian faith is the beggars bowl.” To put it brutally, we Christians are merely beggars. Each day we extend our empty bowl in faith and God meets our needs. Yet the economics of God’s house don’t stop there because the first rule of any gift-economy is that the gift must always move – and this is the rule in Exodus 16 as well. Gifts that are hoarded soon rot and decay like day-old Manna. So like the ancient Hebrews, as we encounter the needs of our friends, neighbors – and yes, even our enemies – we empty our bowls to enrich others, making ourselves, at the end of each day, merely beggars once again.
