Since graduating in May, I’ve been interning at St. John’s Cathedral in downtown Knoxville—my parish home for the past four years. I’ve had an absolute blast, but—seeing as I moved all my stuff up to New Haven this past weekend—I’m increasingly aware it’s all coming to an end. Or, perhaps not to an end, but at least to a moment of transition; I’ll still be part of the St. John’s family, just living into a different role (discernment/seminarian/what-have-you). All that said, now seems as good a time as ever to reflect on what I’ve learned.

I’m passionate about Christian education at the parish level. It was, of course, my job at Tyson House for the past two years, but I feel more and more that teaching is my particular calling within ordained ministry; leastways, it’s where my (to invoke Buechner) greatest passion meets the world’s needs. It’s not just that I find theology interesting on a personal level or even that I think it’s “relevant” to people’s lives (whatever that buzz-word means). I think we’re all engaged in theological work—whether we realize it or not. We live into and out of narratives our whole lives long. Taking time to step back, pause, and reflect on the theological ideas bubbling beneath the surface of these narratives is important. (This is something I’ve learned from reading more of Graham Ward this summer.) It’s not so much a matter of if you’re doing theology; it’s a matter of which and how. Helping Christians (all Christians, not just professors and clergy) live into their callings as theologians, as the makers and wielders and perpetrators of their own theologies, is something I think the Episcopal Church could do better. We’re a denomination amazingly blessed by an educated and curious bunch of folks. You’d think we could do a little bit of this “critical reflection on praxis.” (This is part of the beauty of Gutierrez’s definition of “theology,” by the way. You’re already engaged in praxis; you’re acting and living and doing and being; theology is critical reflection on all this—and using the specialized vocabulary of a particular tradition to do it.)

But I’ve also learned that this work is amazingly difficult and tedious. You have to simultaneously meet people where they are with regard to their theological education and their life circumstances but also refrain from selling them short. I think we’re pretty bad about assuming people know the language when they don’t (that they know what “baptism” means, or “salvation,” or “sin”); I also think we’re pretty bad about, upon realizing they don’t know the language, giving up on ever teaching it to them—either because we think they won’t be interested or because we think they just won’t understand it.

Those are all poor excuses for being bad teachers—or, else, being unwilling to actually buckle down and think creatively about pedagogy. What I’ve seen at St. John’s—in John and Thom, Paul and Kerry, and countless lay leaders—is a real, wholehearted attempt to get the balance to which I refer above right. And what I’ve heard over and over can be summed up using a phrase my friend, Zack Nyein (now chaplain/campus missioner to the University of Tennessee: Chattanooga, by the way!), taught me just this afternoon: people are the new program.