Abstract
Religious educational literature in the United States often presumes the congregation as the primary context for the work of faith formation. Given the reduction of institutional affiliation and participation in Christian congregations, this assumption makes approaches to religious education requiring an identity-bearing community of affiliation less relevant. Several emerging models of religious education eschew the community provided by formal religious institutions for more provisional, radically contextualized communal approaches to religious education. These approaches spark a different and important imagination for religious education beyond congregations, embedded in provisional communities of solidarity and engagement.
Highlights
For a period of about five years, I did not teach an introductory class in religious education
The majority of the US literature about religious education presumes participation in a congregational setting that has some relevance to the formation of identity and commitments
Others were planning to work in religiously based nonprofits with a highly mobile client base and small professional staffs who engage the work for a variety of reasons, not all of them religious. Even those who were working in parishes knew that they would only see the bulk of their parishioners once a month for two hours or less, given church attendance statistics in this part of the United States
Summary
For a period of about five years, I did not teach an introductory class in religious education. While I can help these students to make connections between their vocational contexts and the academic literature of Christian religious education in the United States, this massive translation project ends up being a different topic entirely This literature often imagines religious education as a critically formative task in the Christian faith, where a vital congregation serves as a significant. I avoided trying to introduce the topic of religious education as an academic subject until I could figure out how to approach it in a way that made sense to my students in the current context This experience in finding my field largely irrelevant to my students raised the major question: What does religious education look like in the United States without the presumption of belonging to an established community of faith? If communities of faith did not engage in religious education in the United States, who would? Does the notion of “religious education” make any sense at all without formal congregations?
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