APCE 2018: Christian Education as a ministry of deep and wide hospitality

BY ARCHANA SAMUEL

This is my first time at APCE. The theme of APCE 2018 is Deep and Wide Hospitality. I have learned one significant model of Christian Education: as a Christian educator, be a facilitator and a channel who lights the light of transformation in the lives of a faith community. Irrespective of ages and abilities, Christian education is a tool of transformation where the faith community learns to include all in the process of learning and contributing as equals. The workshop that so inspired me was “Hospitality, Spirituality and Disability” and the facilitator, Terry A. DeYoung, is a person who lives with a birth disability and a lot of complex health issues. He is living with artificial hips and knees. He says that deep and wide hospitality needs to flow from “abled” bodies and minds to “disabled” bodies and minds but, at the same time, it needs to be an act of “equal and opposite reaction.” Christian education is the place of birth and growth for such hospitality.

Christian education needs to focus on spirituality, which is beyond the concept of “abled” and “disabled” bodies. We are at a point of danger to evaluate our deep and wide hospitality model of Christian education in our local and global churches. Deep and wide hospitality invites the teacher and the learner to come to a point of “respectful negotiation” with people who live with their disabilities. This will enhance the process of learning and teaching towards the goal of transformation of Individuals and communities. Persons with disabilities can contribute to local congregations if the congregation hospitably invites them and includes them and provides a place of belongingness and safety to them in their own languages and expressions. Christian education needs to provide a platform not only to learn but to transform the mindset of the faith community. Physical limitations, emotional challenges, and intellectual development issues need not be a hindrance for people who live with disabilities if Christian education follows the deep and wide hospitality model in local churches and communities. Transformation will happen where there is a sense of inclusion of all and a secure feeling of belongingness in the process of learning and contributing. Educators are not gatekeepers of knowledge; they facilitate and learn in the process of transformation and growing in the path of Christian discipleship.

Archana Samuel is a M.A.C.E. student at Union Presbyterian Seminary.