Mission as public theology: Bridging the worlds of mission and Religious Education (RE) in Church of England schools

Introduction

In England there exists a historic partnership in the funding of public school education whereby Church schools are managed by the Church yet almost entirely funded by the state. Unlike the US school system that separates church from state, the English system reflects a nineteenth-century agreement whereby a school that was originally sponsored by a faith community (known as “schools with a religious character”) can continue to be organized on faith principles as long as the school demonstrates social cohesion and adheres to national guidelines and inspection processes, and so forth (see Worsley, 2013). This partnership between church and state to deliver free schooling in England and Wales began in 1870 when government funding joined in with the Church vision to provide free education for all, a project that had been instigated by the Church in 1811. It has been maintained by successive education acts ever since, though this is currently under threat as anxieties concerning the negative effects of religion combine with a better-organized secular voice.

In all schools in England, it is required that RE must be taught. As a subject it has an unusual position on the curriculum in that whilst it is part of the basic curriculum it is not included in the National Curriculum. In schools with a religious character (Church of England, Catholic, Muslim, Jewish schools, etc.), RE is required to be taught in accordance with the school’s trust deed that makes provision for the particular beliefs of the foundation. Currently there is growing demand for RE to be developed so that it serves a pluralist and secularist society (Burns, 2015). Whilst it no longer attempts to teach in a confessional manner, RE nonetheless attempts to connect with the religious faiths represented in the nation and to engage with secular thought (Louden, 2012: 5).

RE is one of two subjects (along with sex and relationship education) where parents have a legal right to withdraw their children from class (Long, 2016).

However, the task of offering RE has always been a complex one for Church schools (that is, schools established by a Church foundation, normally Anglican, Catholic, or Methodist in the UK). Historically Church schools were the focus of denominational and then interfaith rivalry and more recently their existence in the presence of growing religious diversity has been the subject of intense political debate. Many have doubted whether it is possible for Church schools or even faith schools (a wider classification that includes school sponsorships from any religion) to make a positive contribution to community cohesion without facilitating religious extremism or condoning religious separatism (BHA, 2016). More recently the language of “community cohesion” has been superseded by the discourse surrounding British values and the way that they might be similar and yet also different to Christian values (Draycott, 2016).

During the twenty-first century, the Church of England has worked with the strapline that Church schools are “distinctively Christian and yet inclusive” (Dearing, 2001), a comment that suggests both diversity and distinctiveness, hoping that the public will embrace its bid for inclusion rather than its hinted religious exclusion. In real time, the result of such subtle inclusion has often seemed to create an educational context that is potentially neither distinctively Christian nor inclusive to a wide sector of the community. To combat this, current Church of England policy is endeavoring to become both more Christian and also to serve “the common good” (National Society, 2016). In this document, theologians have joined educational practitioners in envisioning education that enables the community to live together (9) with greater dignity and respect for difference (16). The Church of England has now begun to use the strapline “deeply Christian” (rather than “distinctively Christian”) to describe their schools as being Christian in leadership, ethos, pedagogy, and curriculum (National Society, 2016), a concept that includes all aspects of the school.

Although a single National Curriculum for RE does not exist in the UK, all maintained schools have a statutory duty to teach RE. For Church of England schools, students can expect a religious education curriculum that is rich and varied. In the current draft of “A Statement of Entitlement from the Church of England Education Office” (June, 2016), Holloway et al. write,

Church schools should use some form of enquiry approach that engages with, for example biblical text, and helps develop religious and theological literacy. Links with the Christian values of the school and spiritual, moral, social and cultural development are intrinsic to the RE curriculum and should have a significant impact on learners. (Par. 2)

To this end a project entitled “Understanding Christianity” was launched in 2016, ensuring that the key themes of Christianity can be taught in the classroom. The question, however, seems set to persist as to how RE might be a subject that encourages community cohesion or that enhances the means whereby faiths can speak to each other as opposed to being intrinsically separatist. It is apparent that separatism can occur in any school when some students are deliberately excluded because they are from a different ethnic, social, or religious group or when they are considered inappropriate to the well-being of others. Separating children can also happen as part of a school’s operational structure when certain students are selected on merit, leaving others in a different grouping. In religious contexts, there are some sectors that will opt for a separatist faith stream, such as the Plymouth Brethren schools (FLT, 2012) whilst others will wish to create interfaith dialogue, such as the Church of England school network (Chadwick, 2012). Still other sectors of the British populace would wish to exclude faith dialogue altogether, such as the British Humanist Society who deem religious discourse per se to be ultimately futile (BHA, 2016). In a pluralist society it is clear that pupils from narrow faith backgrounds need wider exposure to other religious perspectives in order to learn religious literacy but the task of acquiring such skills can be challenging to their nurturing religious environment. The right of withdrawal from RE can potentially be invoked, causing children from separatist faith backgrounds to be prohibited from attending situations where their faith comes under scrutiny. Similarly, pupils from secularist backgrounds need to be aware of the different perspectives that are offered by faith thinkers and this too is necessary for greater religious literacy and wider social cohesion. In the RE classroom, the question arises as to how students might be educated in mixed religious, secularist, and multi-ethnic groups in a way that is helpful to all groups. Might the future of RE be the establishment of interfaith dialogue or even discourse between secularism and religion?

This article is a reflection on how RE in a Church school might be the place where worldviews can develop the skills to engage with each other, without the need for either defense or proselytism. This can be described as being the application of the theology of missio Dei to the teaching of RE, a means of teaching that allows for the development of faith without enabling religious separatism or radicalism to hinder it. It is the basis for subsequent prophetic dialogue, a means by which religious discourse is enabled and religious literacy increased and the basis upon which an inclusive church school is founded. In order to discuss this further, the four phrases “missio Dei,” “Inclusive Church Schools,” “Religious Literacy,” and “Prophetic Dialogue” are identified and then explored.

Inclusive church schools (where schools are places of inclusive mission)

Church schools in the UK need to be carefully defined if they are to be correctly understood. Church of England schools were the earliest providers of public schooling in 1811 (Worsley, 2013) and are represented nationally in England and Wales through the auspices of the National Society. Their stated mission is to be “distinctively Christian and inclusive,” serving the common good in their neighborhood. By contrast, Roman Catholic schools have developed in England since 1847 and they are governed by the Catholic Education Services with a mission that is primarily for the benefit of young Catholic scholars but also for the common good (Catholic Bishops’ Conference, 2012). Methodist schools are far fewer in number and operate in a similar way to their Anglican counterparts. All these schools are sometimes confused with “Christian schools,” those independent foundations often set up to be separate from mainstream education and with a more overt aim of offering a particular Christian worldview (Baker, 2013). Other Christian school systems, such as that operated by the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church, exist only for children from that Christian sect (PBCC, 2013). In wider parlance, Church schools are sometimes less helpfully termed as “schools with a Christian character” or even as “faith schools,” an appellation that links them to all religions rather than to the Christian faith.

If the theological definition “missio Dei” is used, it is possible to open up an understanding for Church schools to be places of mission without implying a form of Christian proselytism or of Christian dominance, because the term allows for a wider notion of mission of which the church is but a part. Of course the construct “missio Dei” would not be in the vocabulary of a secular educational provider but it can be a useful overlapping term to enable Christian theology to be mapped against secular educational pedagogy. Missio Dei gives a Church school the tools to reflect on RE, to develop a religious literacy, and to leave the wider issue of faith formation to God. In a Church school, missio Dei facilitates the literacy for developing interfaith dialogue, a means of understanding that can rightly be described as being part of God’s mission. Working within the terms of “missio Dei,” interfaith dialogue can be termed “prophetic dialogue” (see below where it is unpacked more carefully).

To go further in discussing Church schools as being inclusive, it is important to address public concerns to the contrary. Almost a decade ago, following renewed suspicion of the value of Church schools, I wrote an article for the International Journal of Children’s Spirituality entitled “Church of England schools as centres for religious abuse or avenues for religious nurture?” (Worsley, 2008). In this I felt the need to defend the role of a Church school as being inclusive to all children and yet distinctive as to its Christian identity. At that time it was clear that the British public was ambivalent towards Church schools alongside the new emergence of Islamic schools, often seeing them as identical concepts. On the one hand there was an articulated sense that Church schools were successful in creating an ethos that appealed to a popular Christian spiritual worldview and that this was conducive to an inclusive yet distinctive form of education. On the other hand, mainstream polls were suggesting that the public did not agree with government plans to increase the number of state-aided faith schools. The reasons for this public ambivalence were complex, but two stood out.

First, there was an increasing suspicion that faith schools were the reason for faith conflict. Whilst it could be argued that religions endeavor to provide the keys to a deeper common-value basis (Sacks, 2003), many feared that they were also the cause for tribal skirmishing. Since then, those fears have grown.

It has become more apparent that the greatest energy in any religion will lie on the fundamentalist margins of those faiths—places where difference is more important than unity, where separation is more appealing than reconciliation. It seems that this is where the seeds of terrorism might be bred. In the British context there is an increasing concern that the fundamentalist wings of Islam will lock horns with their Christian counterparts, causing further hostility. It is therefore conceivable to the general public that publicly funded faith schools could become centers of religious ferment where susceptible children are the subject for overzealous adults using religion as a tool for conformity. In this article, I wish to consider this justifiable concern by arguing that Church schools are actually ideally placed to promote global citizenship because they are best equipped to draw on the religious energy that emerges from the center of faith, rather than from the margins.

Second, a decade ago the British public were increasingly wondering if faith schools were built on a wholesome reflected faith or on false beliefs that are based on psychological projection and which lead to toxic lifestyles. This is the understandable concern that religion is based on conjecture and can ultimately only be an untested illusion. Since then, there has been a growing understanding of the way that religions are not just the instruments for releasing love and justice for the well-being of society but they can also be the defenders of complex webs of psychological control that manipulate believers by the darker forces of the psyche. The continued rise of terrorist warfare that draws on religious conflict has fueled such fears in the secular press. In this article I amplify this uncertainty and yet argue that it is possible for Church schools to create a zone in which faith is critically examined, as well as encouraged, allowing for children to be nurtured into wider society and equipped for a life enhanced by positive resources. The RE classroom in a Church school is the very place to examine faith constructs.

In this article, the definition of Church schools as being “places of inclusive mission” is a vision for Church of England schools being safe places where religious difference can be explored between faiths and between secularist atheism.

Religious literacy

This term was developed by religious educators who were endeavoring to understand religions not only in their own terms but also in their role in human experience. It is a term currently used in the RE document “Understanding Christianity” (2016). To be religiously literate, a student needs to learn both the language of a religious tradition (its history, texts, beliefs, and practices in historic and current contexts) and the ability to explore the religious dimensions of culture. To define religious literacy in the wider literature, the Harvard Divinity school have set up the “Religious Literacy Project” to clarify definitions and to ensure that religion is always understood within the two contexts of the religious world and of human experience (Moore, 2007). Moore’s book, Overcoming Religious Illiteracy, was a strong proponent in justifying why and how religious studies should be taught in the public educational system of America where it had formerly been absent. In the USA, Prothero (2008) went on to popularize the term as being “a necessary attribute for effective citizenship.” In the UK, the Labour government from 1997 to 2010 went on to adopt the term and define it as “the skills and knowledge required to engage in an informed and confident way with faith communities” that encouraged community cohesion (Dinham and Jones, 2010). Subsequently the term has been heavily utilized in the HEI sector with Goldsmiths University in London setting up the “Religious Literacy Partnership” in 2015. To date the idea of religious literacy remains highly contested as to whether it should be used for determining future pathways in public education (Dinham and Jones, 2010).

Prophetic dialogue

Missio Dei identifies that “prophetic dialogue” is crucial for interfaith dialogue, and that understanding interfaith issues might be better described as growing awareness in “interworldviews” to allow the dialogue to be wider than a religious conversation. This is why missio Dei needs to be understood so that interfaith dialogue does not simply become a means of conversation in which the divine being is only understood as a religious construct, thus surrendering the conversation to one that is secular. The Christian term missio Dei will not readily be construct-mapped into secular discourse because of its reliance on God as being core to its definition but its reliance on the tool of “prophetic dialogue” can be mapped as “interfaith dialogue.”

The term “prophetic dialogue” is often attributed to Bevans and Schroeder (2004) but writing in 1994, Scherer and Bevans detail that it actually comes from an Indian missiologist Michael Amaladoss who used the phrase in passing, saying, “Religion is called to enter into a prophetic dialogue with the world” (72).

Bevans went on to amplify this further in his article “Mission as prophetic dialogue” (2012), in which he discussed mission as being initially dialogical and then as being prophetic. In its prophetic sense, he describes mission as being about teaching and storytelling, aspects in which religion can find its voice within the classroom context. In concluding this article he wrote,

Mission is done in dialogue. Mission is done in prophecy. The two go together. While we can distinguish them to better understand the whole, we cannot and are not to separate them. Mission is prophetic dialogue. It is dialogical prophecy. The question is not “is it one or the other?” The question is rather when should the dialogical aspect of missionary service be emphasized or employed more fully, when should one act or speak prophetically in action, in words, in confrontation. Like life itself, engaging in God’s mission is art. One needs to be in touch with the sources of creativity, the Holy Spirit, to know just how to proceed. It is the Spirit who opens our ears to listen, and who anoints our tongues to speak, who enflames our hearts to witness. (p. 2)

To discuss how RE connects the mission of God in Church schools in the public sector, three questions are now posed. Each of these questions considers the context of the missional Church school in order to suggest how prophetic dialogue (the conversational tool of the missio Dei) can operate to serve the wider educational needs of society.

Missio Dei allows for church-based education to operate within society, not with the Church asserting a historic Christian dominance, nor as a means of providing a Christian ghetto, but as a partner in what God is doing in the world. Missio Dei has the confidence that God is working with many partnerships such as the Local Authority (or via the Multi Academy Trusts that are now replacing them as educational sponsors) or via the offices of the Secretary of State for Education. Missio Dei will also perceive that God is at work in other faiths.

When this theology is brought to focus within the RE classroom, dialogue begins to take place. This might be understood as the development of religious literacy. Confident that the task of the church is to make God known, and the task of the school is to open up educational understanding, the RE classroom becomes a place of “professional not confessional faith” (Hull, 1998). The teaching of RE can thus provide the tools to look at a faith within its own terms and it encourages comprehension of the “other,” with neither religious conversion nor nurture as being the primary objective. The Christian child brought up in a Primitive Methodist home is allowed to encounter Anglicanism or Roman Catholicism and to make sense of what is similar and different within Christian denominations. This will be the case for any denomination.

The Muslim child brought up within a Pakistani Wahabi Islamic tradition is made aware of the Sufi traditions from Turkey or the Shiite traditions from Iran and so similarly is given the tools to make sense of what is similar and different within Muslim traditions. Those children brought up within Muslim and the Christian homes can also be enabled to investigate the similarities and differences across their faith traditions. This will be the case for any faith present in the RE classroom.

Finally the child from a faith background from any of the faiths will be given opportunity to be aware of the philosophic traditions that do not believe in God at all and which affirm atheism or secular humanism. Similarly those children from such secular backgrounds will be able to encounter people of faith without fearing coercion.

The thinking behind missio Dei allows for dialogue that is called “prophetic dialogue” (Bevans and Schroeder, 2011) because it allows for the missional idea that it is only God who knows the outcome of mission. Rather than being a tribal viewpoint that needs to resolve difference by conversion or by overcoming with logic or force, prophetic dialogue works with the belief that it is only God who has the final outcome. In setting out to achieve this, better understanding is required for all participants. This becomes the core aim for RE in a school that is operating with missio Dei.

The problem then emerges as to whether parents will allow their children to encounter different worldviews or differing faith perspectives. Children brought up in separatist religious homes may be kept from being tarnished by more worldly perspectives. For parents in these homes, missio Dei might be considered “too liberal” because it does not offer a closed perspective on faith or revelation. It is also possible that from a secularist perspective, children brought up in secularist homes may be kept from encountering the dangerous virus of religion and that missio Dei is perceived as a deceitful means of proselytism. To overcome these two objections, there needs to be a vision of a cohesive society and a desire expressed from parents that if society is to flourish, greater understanding must take place. Focus needs to be given on finding a way to conduct prophetic dialogue as a means for respectful discourse to be found. This leads onto the second question.

If Church schools are to be understood as a means whereby the church engages in meaningful partnership with society so that the higher purposes of missio Dei might result, then community cohesion is a principal goal.

However, within the sociological circles of society, as well as in the different faiths and denominations, separation is a common feature. Speaking in their capacity as parents, many adults wrestle as to whether they apply their beliefs of an inclusive society to the choice of education they make for their own biological children (as opposed to their attitudes to social policy for other people’s children). Many politicians who advocate a comprehensive policy for education have found themselves sending their own child to a private school. The same story is told around the world. The battle for secondary school places is always acute, because parents are in direct competition for places at the “best” school for their offspring. Community cohesion does not come easily.

Many parents will justify some degree of separation for their child. If a family with financial means and resources finds itself living in an inner city, it will not necessarily wish to avail itself of the education provided by the state at the nearest school to their home. Is it wrong for those parents to send their child to a more selective school by availing themselves of the opportunity to allow their child to go elsewhere? Similarly, is it wrong for parents with a desire for their child to access their own particular faith tradition to send their child to a school that focuses on that denominational provision? Are faith schools selective and are they preventing societal cohesion? I have discussed such issues of separation in greater depth in a recent book entitled Sleeping Beauty Awakens: A Theological Response on How the Curse of Separation Can Be Removed from Christian Education (Worsley, 2017).

In 2003, Gerald Grace, a Catholic researcher at the University of London Institute of Education wrote,

Much of the political and public debate about faith-based schooling is conducted at the level of generalised assertion and counter-assertion, with little reference to educational scholarship or research. There is a tendency in these debates to draw upon historical images of faith schooling (idealised and critical); to use ideological advocacy (both for and against) and to deploy strong claims about the effects of faith based schooling about the effects of the consequences of such schooling for social harmony, race relations and the common good of society. (2003: 152)

In 2013, ten years later from when Grace was writing, the Theos Think Tank published the report entitled More Than an Educated Guess (Oldfield, Hartnett, and Bailey, 2013), because the debate involving faith school education remained one that was often ideological or lacking in correct representation. The Theos report was part of a process that turned the debate into one that is based on facts and empirical data. It asked five research questions:

In broad terms, the More Than an Educated Guess research details that faith schools actually contribute positively to community cohesion in relation to race, ethnicity, and minority religious communities, although there is scope for these schools to better articulate their efforts in a faith-based approach. However, it also concludes that human rights and equality issues at faith schools remain a legal gray area. The compatibility of faith-based admission criteria with the right to education has not been tested in a British court of law. Similarly, there is no ruling on the compatibility of faith-based employment criteria with international human rights norms.

Working with these arguments that allow the Church school to be seen as inclusive, missio Dei (working with prophetic dialogue in the RE curriculum) raises the status of RE to that of a key value provider in the Church school. The school itself has set out to be inclusive but it does so with the intent of allowing open religious discourse. Ultimately the missio Dei is evident when it is apparent that the school is working confidently and humbly within God’s overarching mission and therefore it can work with virtually any discourse as long as the language of God is allowed airspace.

If missio Dei is the overarching theological worldview for the school’s engagement in society, then the Church school need have no fears about its admissions policy. It does not need to screen its intake. The only point at which it might need to draw back from being inclusive is if the language of “God talk” is marginalized so that there is no space for interfaith dialogue. This then becomes the distinguishing specialism of the Church school. The third question can now be asked,

The simple idea of this article is to imagine prophetic dialogue becoming a central feature in RE as a means of enabling the development of religious literacy and as a way of facilitating interfaith dialogue. Within the context of Church schools, a theology of missio Dei that encourages prophetic dialogue is likely to bring community cohesion. It will allow space for faith to be heard in the public sphere, without it being privatized, and it will ensure that the process of faith is open to dialogue. This in turn will promote religious literacy, that ability “to discern and analyse the fundamental intersections of religion and social/political/cultural life through multiple lenses” (Moore, 2007: 13). When this objective begins to be achieved, RE will be doing its job by allowing the discourse of faith to be heard without friction and by releasing the virtues that are core to faith.