Substitute Lutheran

Evangelicals think that their kid drawing on a Noah's ark coloring book in Sunday school will undo 30 hours a week for 13 years of secular education by liberal atheist teachers Then Cry that satan took their kids away

Flippant execution of the liturgy, incoherent gobbledygook sermon, unnecessary “comic relief.” This is not how Lutheranism should be. Especially today. But hey, at least I received the Christ’s body and blood. I pray God helps my church and helps me from being overly critical.

A little more here. 1. The fact that no high school student has anything interesting to say about Beowulf is just incontrovertible. I will just take it as assumed and if you disagree you and I just live on different planets. 2. Direct Instruction (DI). This is one of the few results in education science which is actually robust, the studies show strong effects and replicate across time, locations, demographics. And it shows that the old system of education, where kids listen and take notes on a lecture which they know they will be tested on later, produces the most learning. More than "Socratic" or "constructivist" approaches (with the exception of Montessori, which is not relevant for high school). DI is not just any lecture. In DI lectures are highly scripted, with the teacher being more like an actor memorizing and playing a part than the more informal style prevalent. This will become important later. Teachers hate hate hate DI because it tells them they’re not a unique Robin-Williams-in-Dead-Poets-Society snowflakes and they should just give lectures written by someone else. 3. I feel like most people who care deeply about things like teaching methods and curricula were precocious kids who had a bad time with boring lectures in school and felt really good about answering teachers’ questions and showing their teachers and the class how brilliant their insights were. I feel confident in making this ad hominem because…I was that kid too! You are My People. And I would surmise that my fellow kids may be slightly misremembering, and confusing their memories of the classes which they *enjoyed the most* and the classes in which they *learned the most*. Naturally enjoyment is important and all else equal we want kids to have the maximum enjoyment but enjoyment is instrumental: we believe the goal of school is learning, and enjoyment is desirable *because* (putatively) it aids learning, not as an end in itself. Otherwise we can just do Xbox school and call it a day. I would also gently suggest that not every kid is like this, and some kids would just like to receive information from their class, and derive no particular pleasure from being called upon to expound on their brilliant insights. 4. In France we have things called classe prépa. These are highly competitive high schools that prepare you for elite university entrance exams. Being the sort of kid I mentioned, I dreaded going to prépa, which is entirely lecture-based. What I found getting there, however, is that the *firehose of information* coming from the lecture was so strong that it was impossible to get bored because the material just demanded constant intellectual engagement. But this demanded highly intelligent students, and highly talented teachers with clear goals and mandates in terms of the material students had to absob. Hence my observation about DI. Bad lectures suck, yes. But good lectures are really good or at least really effective at getting kids to learn material. If you have a high school with the curriculum thus described I am assuming that you are a selective school with talented teachers. Therefore, you can do really good lectures. Therefore, this will be a more efficient and effective use of everyone’s time than a seminar. 5. Anyway, AI is making this all irrelevant.

Listen up. It is time to set the record straight on contemporary worship services. We are not dealing merely with style. We are dealing with a fundamentally different theology of worship. Take this chart as an example. At first glance, someone might assume that the difference between a Liturgical Divine Service and a Contemporary Evangelical Service is simply a matter of preference: guitars versus organs, praise bands versus hymns, screens versus hymnals. But the chart shows something much deeper. Now, pay attention: The architecture of the services differs because their goals differ. The Contemporary Evangelical Service moves toward response, next steps, connection, and integration into the church’s ecosystem. The Liturgical Divine Service moves toward reception: Christ gives His gifts through His Word and Sacraments so Christians can return to their vocations. That is to say, these are not merely different styles accomplishing the same thing. They reflect different theological assumptions about what worship is, who is acting, and why the congregation is there. That is why the so-called “worship wars” cannot be reduced to instrumentation or aesthetics. Indeed, the issue is much deeper than guitars versus organs. It is about theology embodied in the service's structure. And this is precisely why the Confessional Lutheran Church must take the ordo seriously. You see, Lutherans should not be naive enough to think that the historic order is merely an empty shell waiting to be filled with whatever style happens to be popular. The ordo has a theological direction. Its architecture confesses something. And here is the point: The shape of the service reveals its theology. Change the shape long enough, and you may eventually change the theology with it.

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