The Church and the Learning Society

Abstract

The thesis underlying this study is that in a learning society the church has to discover how to implement a pedagogy of the question rather than one of the answers. In order to achieve this, the church must become a learning organization. Consequently, the paper falls into three parts: the first examines the idea of the learning society and shows that the church has a place within it; the second argues that the church needs to become a learning organization and some of the literature on learning organizations is reviewed to show that the early church was, in fact, very similar to this; in the final section the changing nature of pedagogy and a theory of experiential learning are examined to provide a framework within which the pedagogy of the question might operate.