Anglican Schools Commission Christian Purposes Day HBF Stadium, Mt Claremont Monday 30 April 2018 Borders and Margins When I was a school child borders and margins mattered. In all sorts of ways. In primary school it was colouring inside the lines. What some might now see as inhibiting and unhelpful and perhaps even lacking in understanding about the development of our fine motor skills. I remember the struggle and the achievement. I remember that every page of an exercise book was required to have a one-inch red pencil (and later ink) line from top to bottom with a double line ruled at the first horizontal line of the page. Margins were for teachers to place ticks, marks and comments. One Western Australian school (not in the ASC system) policy has specifics for each Year from 1-6 regarding matters to do with margins, ruling up as part of a policy which makes clear the expectations for students from kindergarten to Year 6 and aims to guide a consistent approach to the standard expected. These days someone else has taken charge of the default margin settings in the various computer programmes I use. Click and drag are about the level of my competence. We live on an edge in this part of Western Australia s coastline, constantly aware of the challenges and chances of the ocean, the climate, the boom and bust of resources, margins and borders, borderlands. Borders and margins are part of the daily political landscape. Many will remember the Scottish Independence referendum of 2014; all of us know about the UK Brexit referendum of 2016. Australia s asylum seeker off-shore detention policy and recent talks between the leaders of North and South Korea have all focussed world attention on the issues of borders on borderlands that people inhabit. A number of years ago while travelling with a school group to Israel, there came a terrifying moment when it seemed that our one Hindu student would not be allowed to cross from the Sanai into Israel at Ramada border. It seemed that Hindu could not be easily fitted inside the margin assigned by the checkpoint border military for people born in India. There were more than a few moments of real anxiety. Especially as we had crossed the Sinai by bus with an armed escort. Not something I think I would be doing as a school chaplain in 2018. Last year 12.6 million Australians participated in the Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey- a Samesex Marriage plebiscite resulting in the marriage equality bill 2017. For many this move brought about the seismic shift from life in the margins and a kind of border crossing that was unthinkable just a few years earlier. For those of us inside the church the last few years have seen the church s place in community further and further on the wrong side of the popularity border. Rather than a main event, the Christian church in multi-cultural, multi-faith Australia now occupies a different space. But, people do still attend church. People do still send their children to faith-based schools. Anglican Schools in the Anglican Schools Commission have around 20,000 children and young people in them every day. Despite the fact that the Church seems to have been relegated to the margins of Christmas and Easter, or as a 1 P a g e
place of prayer and refuge at a time of national crisis or when watching a Royal Wedding on TV, the latest census figures show that 52% of Australians identify as Christian. The sociologist Hugh Mackay identifies and describes the increasing numbers of people who are not church attenders but are interested in matters spiritual as SBNR- Spiritual But Not Religious. I think our schools are home to many who might be comfortable with this anacronym. And that is good news! At least I think so. Having spent the majority of my 35-year old working life in ministry in the church being mostly on the edge or in the margins and as one of the advance party across new borders, I rejoice that people seeking a spiritual space for their children to be educated in, or who are looking for a way to shape their spirituality choose Anglican schools for their children. The vision of the Anglican Schools Commission is: To fulfil the Gospel imperative to teach and live the faith and nurture the young by strengthening and growing low-fee Anglican schools as centres of excellence in teaching and learning, pastoral care, worship and service. Its Purpose has been stated as: To establish, acquire and support low-fee Anglican systemic schools which provide a high quality, inclusive, caring Christian education. The ASC Core Values are shared by every one of you in every school both here and in Victoria. Faith Excellence Justice Respect Integrity Diversity Living and teaching Gospel values and Anglican traditions Pursuing high standards in all things Demonstrating fairness, compassion and conviction; advocating for the educationally disadvantaged Respecting self, others and our world Acting with honesty and openness Promoting social inclusion and celebrating difference In the midst of a rapidly changing world it is sensible to ask again how the purpose and values live in our schools? Is faith and spirituality at the heart of our schools or at the very edges? And why? Is it the business of one person or of all? In his 2016 book, Beyond Belief, sociologist Hugh MacKay s research shows the reasons that people still go to church are numerous; people go to church to worship God, to nurture faith (or their desire for faith), to have a community to belong to, to have access to pastoral care, some go because of a sense of duty, some because it keeps them on the straight and narrow, some for the peace, some for the aesthetics, some because the ritual grounds them in a story bigger than their own, some because they want to get their children into a church school i. Regarding church schools (and we know this is the high fee-paying schools as well as Anglican Schools Commission schools around the country) he writes, One of the paradoxes of the current religious scene in Australia is that, as church attendance has declined, enrolments at religious schools have soared ii. Recent media reports regarding school funding have also highlighted this. Although it is now a lot of years since I was a school chaplain, I am guessing that the matter of faith is still largely relegated to a teaching department, an individual or two and the timetabled framework of chapel services (do not bring your marking!!), from which it might permeate the whole school. Or not. 2 P a g e
In my experience of meeting and talking with students in Anglican schools this is where the chaplain or the Christian Religious Studies teachers invite people like me to come and speak with students on any issue at all. We are part of the experience for your students about faith and life and the hope that does not give up on us. You will not be surprised to hear that most often students do not ask about the doctrine of the Trinity, or the theology of atonement in Christian thought over the last eight centuries. Nothing so easy! They want to know about things that are on the centre of the page of their lives things like science and religion and their relationship to each other. No, I don t believe the earth is flat. The ways in which people read and interpret the bible. No, I don t believe there were seven days no matter what the text says. Then there are the hot button issues like refugees and asylum seekers, the church s place in the marriage equality debate, and the recent Royal Commission. Your students, our students, want to know if what we say and what we do adds up for them. Is there a place for them on the page, and if so where? In the light of this I have been reflecting on faith as the spiritual environment of educational conversation. A conversation to be encouraged and engaged with in the culture of the whole school. Faith as part of the environment, the culture, the landscape and the foreground of every part of its life. By which I mean a safe place for honest exploration. A conversation and dialogue which arises within the context of the curriculum and explored by learners in the community of learning. How does Shakespeare speak to faith? What questions arise in the glories of complex mathematical equations? What does ANZAC mean for the spirituality of a nation? What does a Christian understanding of life and of death mean in a debate about assisted dying or euthanasia? Or a discussion about the edges that Tim Winton s character Bruce Pike lived as he surfed the edge of life as a teenager in Winton s 2008 book Breath. Helping young people see that having faith does not mean shutting down the questions, but encouraging them to question and finding what might come to light as all sit in a safe framework. These are interior conversations, they expose the inner landscape of the human person and shape the values which we carry into our future. Biblical theologian Eugene Peterson wrote, the largest area of the human continent is impoverished technologically. The vaunted technologies of our day are used only along the shoreline of the human condition; the vast interiors are bereft. The consequence is that lacking adequate tools (a technology) most people done venture into these interiors, at least not very far. Life is constricted ion the boundary, between ocean and wilderness where a narrow competence in doing and getting is exercised iii. In the biblical literature the book of Psalms stands out as a particular environment for honest exploration. The book of Psalms consists of 150 carefully crafted prayers and poems each with its own rhythm and cadence through which people have entered over thousands of years. They are tools which allow for space as life unfolds. The Psalms offer a way of seeing how life, learning, prayer and spirituality are part of a movement in which we participate as people of faith. They have often been read as verse and response, back and forward. And they help make sense of the great Jewish learning traditions which see people engaged in learning though debate one with another. In a community of learning where the tools are many these ancient prayers and poems offer another kind of tool. One which gives prayerful space for the business of the day. 3 P a g e
They are a place of dialogue, of lament and frustration and anger. On ANZAC day Psalm 46 is often used. Its rhythm begins: God is our refuge and strength: a very present help in trouble Therefore we will not fear, thought he earth be moved: and though the mountains are shaken in the midst of the sea. Psalm 46:1-2 Psalm 137 gives voice to the longings of a people displaced from their homeland: By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept: when we remembered Zion As for our harps we hung them up: upon the trees that are in that land. Psalm 137:1-2 They bring to light the yearning of the human heart for a bigger place in which to reside. They give words to wonder and hope for the future and the now. or Lord you have searched me out and know me: you know when I sit or when I stand. It was not my enemy or I might have borne it: it was not my foes that dealt so insolently with me, or I might have hidden myself from them; but it was you a person like myself: my companion and my familiar friend. Psalm 55:13-14 Everything depends on how we read, on how we enter the magic circle of a text s meanings; on how we smuggle ourselves into its words and allow the texture of a text to weave its web around us. iv I have highlighted the psalms because there is nothing that is hidden in them. They stand as a body of work, a tool bag for the enquirer and an invitation to the community of learners to invite God into the conversation we are having. Politics, friendships, family, literature, history, biology, maths. There is a place for the bigger picture in every part of the curriculum. Surely your questions stand as large on the horizon of each new day as those of the young people in your charge. The values of faith, excellence, justice, respect, integrity and diversity loom as large for you. What rhythm helps you enter into conversation with them in the context of your school, your subject areas, your responsibilities and you as person of value and integrity? There is a needful rhythm of dialogue and listening. Verse and response. And, in the centre stillness which can move us all. This needful rhythm was writ large in recent weeks as students in America called out adult investment and vested interests in gun laws. My point is that schools are environments in which dialogue, lament, wonder, learning, inclusion are part of the movement of the day by day. In this movement theology and spirituality have a place. Not in the margins, or sometimes on the edges, but rightly, properly in the centre. Spirituality is a movement that helps us grow toward thoughtfulness, to school us all for maturity and wholeness and action in the world. 4 P a g e
Your school is as particular as every person, has its own rhythm and cadence, is an environment bigger than any one of us or all of us together, with a Godly vision of the common good- a vision for the mending of the world in which we all have a part. i Hugh Mackay Beyond Belief p59 ii Mackay p87 iii Eugene Peterson p2 iv Eugene Peterson 5 P a g e