Thinking about Success with Rowan Williams

Around this time of year, as things quiet down and our church takes a collective breath before the fall, I often have the same unsettling thought: what did we accomplish in our church’s formation programs this last year?

It’s not because I don’t believe in our offerings for kids and families (I do) or our amazing Sunday school teachers (the best). Rather, it’s because I’m aware of how difficult it is to define and measure success in church formation programs. So in the summertime, when most of our programs experience a bit of a lull, I find myself reflecting on what has just passed and what lies ahead in the program year yet to come. Did we succeed in what we set out to do last year? What can be done to ensure success next time around?

The difficulty is, of course, that establishing metrics for success in church is quite complex. To borrow some language from the world of professional education, it’s very challenging in church formation programs to set learning objectives, perform assessments, and measure progress. There are so many complications. Children and families come to church with different personal histories, different goals in mind, and may begins from a different point in faith. We know too that the rosters shift each week, as families today juggle all sorts of plans on Sunday mornings. In this landscape, how can we even begin to think about measuring success at the beginning or end of a program year?

Recently, I stumbled across an old interview in Image Journal with Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury. In a comment about the fiction of Flannery O’Connor, Williams offered a fascinating aside, 

If you really inhabit that world of Christian religion—of grace, incarnation, spirit, sacrament—you needn’t worry about ‘getting it across,’ because the world that you’re depicting is one where you can actually trust the material to do the job, where you can let go in the confidence that some truth will come through. We’re back to this power and control question: if you really believe that the kingdoms of this world become the kingdoms of our God and of his Christ, and not the other way around, then you ought to be more relaxed than otherwise about these things. More ready to let the meaning happen.

I think this idea bears profound significance for the work of children and youth Christian formation. Too often, those of us in the church, myself included, default to using a simplistic metric to evaluate success: check the numbers. Are we growing? Are classes sizes trending up (or, heaven forbid, down)? But Williams shows us a different way to begin thinking about success in children and youth formation, one that’s grounded in the broader life of our church. Instead of relying on a vision of success that requires our preferred visible signs, like numerical growth, the model described by Williams is rooted in an understanding of faith formation as witness to and participation in the way of Jesus. 

In this vision, success in children and youth formation means trusting that God is at work as we explore scripture together, play games and makes crafts together, raise children up in worship leadership as lectors and acolytes, and invite children into deeper experiences of the faith. In short, it means trusting that God is the primary one at work in children and youth formation, not us. We are not here primarily to implement a program or even to communicate vital information about faith; we are here to witness to the life of God at work in our communities. 

When I start stressing about what we have or have not accomplished in our church school programs, I try to shift my mindset in order to hew closer to the paradigm that Rowan Williams suggests. Who is really in charge here? The perspective offered by Williams requires deeper faith from me, since it means that the health of our programs are not really measurable by class size or parent feedback. Rather, the health and success of our programs are about how we attend to the God who is already at work in and around us.