Girl Guides Drop Queen & God from Pledge

The Australian Girl Guides movement has decided to modernise the pledge that its members give assent to. The changes are interesting. While the media has been quick to discuss the removal of any allegiance to God and Queen, it has overlooked what ultimately replaces the focus of their allegiance, the very foundation of their actions and life. The modern 10-14 year-old Aussie girl will now look largely to herself in order to judge the quality of their life and character.  Yes, they will 'serve their 'community' and 'country' and help others, but the test by which they will measure their life is by being 'true to themselves'. They will also 'develop my beliefs', but note that these don't guide. 

The pledge will no longer have any reference to God or the Queen, but will be a vow to serve country and community. The move follows about 18 months of consultations with thousands of members of the country's largest volunteer girl groups.

The national director of the Guide movement, Belinda Allen commented:

"We are open to girls of all cultures, all belief systems and we feel that to develop my beliefs is much more inclusive of our multicultural Australia".

The old Girl Guide pledge:

I promise that I will do my best.
To do my duty to God.
To serve the Queen and my country.
To help other people and keep the Guide law.

The new Girl Guide pledge:

I promise that I will do my best.
To be true to myself and develop my beliefs.
To serve my community and my country.
To help other people and keep the Guide law.

While in a diverse society like Australia it is understandable that some members (or perhaps more likely their parents) don't want to swear allegiance to God, this in my view is more reflective of a view that faith is seen as peripheral to the life of the individual, community and our country. There is a significant shift here in the commitment being made from the pursuit of virtue and the living of a 'good' life for the benefit of others and ultimately for God and Queen (representing the nation), to something that reflects the individualism of our age.

As MacIntyre reminds us in 'After Virtue', the modern man or woman is '...what I myself choose to be...'. But who we are, and what is for my good, is always to be for the good also of others, and take place in relationship to other inhabitants of varied life roles including daughter, cousin, citizen and servant of God (or some other god). Well, it certainly has been seen this way by diverse nations for over two thousand years. To ask these girls to swear allegiance to community and country while being true to 'self' is symptomatic of this age, where in western nations we see our responsibility as to self alone. In my view this is a sad day for the Guide movement.

New Perspectives on Anglican Education

UPDATE: The book is now published and is available from the Anglican Education Commission, St Andrews House, Sydney. Mailing address PO Box A287 Sydney South, NSW 1235. Email: info@aec.edu.au. Price is $10.95 AUS

I'm one of the authors of a new book that will come out in early December. It is titled 'New Perspectives on Anglican Education: Reconsidering Purpose and Plotting a Future Direction'.  My co-authors are Bryan Cowling and Michael Jensen.  While it is situated in the context of Anglican schooling, it has relevance for all Christian teachers in varied schools and Christian education in general. It is the outcome of a year of intensive reading, thinking and discussion with a group of nine other Christians.  The group was brought together by Archbishop Peter Jensen to consider a simple question posed in his 2009 Isaac Armitage Lecture, “Is there such a thing as Anglican Education?”

To answer this question we drew on the best that there is to offer from the fields of education, philosophy, humanities and the social sciences, and grounded our explorations and study in an understanding of the Bible. We sought to ask three sub-questions about Anglican education:

Why?   Knowing what our priorities and purposes should be in raising children, nurturing them in the faith and teaching them the skills they need for life.
What?  Seeking knowledge of what these priorities and purposes mean for the things we teach.
How?  Making wise and informed choices each day about schooling, curriculum and pedagogy.

We conclude from our work that an understanding of God’s plan for humanity should also shape our purposes for education, its content and the way schooling, teaching, curriculum and pedagogy are implemented. What we do as teachers is meant to help the children we teach to take their place as grown humans and mature citizens in the family of God. If we hold to such a purpose, then it matters what the priorities of the Anglican school are, how we teach, how we encourage learning, the nature of the social structures we promote, the methods we use to discipline our children and so on? If we keep our sights fixed on the goal of seeing children knowing, accepting and following Christ, does it matter how offer them education in our schools? We think that it does, because there is a relationship between our priorities shaped by the gospel, our faith in Christ, how we live out and speak of this faith, and our actions (Phil 1:27; Jas 2:14-26).

Haro Van Brummelen reminds us in 'Stepping Stones to Curriculum' that knowing, being and acting are all tied together in the biblical view of knowledge. In short, we cannot allow the ‘What?’ of education to become a list of curriculum content, or a set of lesson plans divorced from our biblical understanding of God’s purpose in creating us. He has made us as creatures who learn and for whom he has specific plans and purposes. 

We don’t believe for a minute that we can offer a simple prescription for how Anglican Education should be constructed and sustained, or exactly how we should teach mathematics (or any other subject), or which content should be in or out of the curriculum. But we do believe that all teachers can look to God’s Word to gain wisdom and insight as they grapple each day with what education means and how it can be used to bring honour and glory to our Creator.

With a right view of God and our relationship to him we are set free to consider research and writing about all that is foundational to education and teaching. But how do we do this? One of the challenges for all Christian teachers is how we relate that which was taught to us at university with what we continue throughout life to learn about our relationship to God. Our project and this book, is all about this tension.

To be an Anglican School is to be a different school, not just in the results we achieve academically or socially in the leadership roles that our graduates take on, but in how the very institution is used redemptively by God; not just in the lives of the students and families associated with the school, but in the wider community.

Similarly, when looked at from the perspective of the teacher, we conclude that to be an Anglican teacher is to be a different type of teacher. It would be our hope that the Anglican teacher is someone who is being transformed into the likeness of Christ, one different in character, motivations, moral views and purposes.  But we would also argue that the teacher in an Anglican school is also one who in teaching children reaches qualitatively different decisions day by day as he/she nurtures and teaches the children God has entrusted to them. Just as the Bible offers us guidance on how not to act, it also teaches us how to act as a child of God (Eph 4:17-5:21). As well, we want to argue that the Bible offers us wisdom that enables teachers to make wise choices day by day as we make numerous decisions about what, how and why we teach.

While the parent body might well choose to send their children to an Anglican school to achieve academic excellence, or to meet all the 'right' people, above all, our schools and their teachers must surely seek to create a classroom and school environment (perhaps community is a better word) in which children grow in body, mind and soul. At the core of this is the extent to which all that the teacher and the school does communicates the wisdom of God revealed in Christ.

The book culminates in a challenge to consider the fundamentals of pedagogy that will help us to create Anglican schools and classrooms that are different. It also outlines the next steps in this project that we hope will widen the conversation.  'New Perspectives on Anglican Education: Reconsidering Purpose and Plotting a Future Direction' is published by the Anglican Education Commission. It will be available from December and will sell for $10.95 AUS.

Everyday Theology: How to read cultural texts and interpret trends

I've been reading Kevin Vanhoozer's book 'Everyday Theology: How to read cultural texts and interpret trends'. It's a great read, with much godly wisdom and practical theology. Vanhoozer's challenges us to consider how theology applies to everyday life. As Vanhoozer points out, there is nothing new about everyday theology; the Reformers had plenty to say about the relevance of theology for life, Calvin, for example, spoke of the Bible serving as our 'spectacles of faith'. But Vanhoozer argues that we don't just seek understanding in the Bible, faith can also 'seek understanding' in our everyday world. He suggests that we should embrace an additional form of literacy, learning to 'read' and 'write' culture. By culture he means "..the distinctly human world that persons create by doing things not by reflex but freely as expressions of desire, duty and determination." (p.23) Culture is understood as "the meaning dimensions of life". Every aspect of life signifies something about the values and beliefs that shape our culture.

Culture communicates meanings to us as we participate in it, and it offers us frameworks for interpreting the world in which we live. Culture also "..spreads beliefs, values, ideas, fashions, and practices from one social group to another." As well, he argues that it can shape, orient and form our hearts (or our spirits).

In 'Everyday Theology' Vanhoozer includes chapters written by his students who had been part of his cultural hermeneutics class, and who apply everyday theology to cultural texts in their world. The topics include the supermarket checkout, rap music, megachurch architecture, film etc. Here is a brief excerpt based on the chapter 'The Gospel according to Safeway: The checkout line and the good life'. In this description and analysis, theology is applied to to the shopping centre checkout, seeking to understand the objects, images, behaviour, sights, sounds, and the values and beliefs that are suggested by them.

What does the checkout line have to do with Jerusalem? In one sense, they overlap and compete, for there is a Christian vision of the good life, what we may call the good life according to the gospel. If the point of the good life presented in the checkout line is to become like a celebrity (or at least to dream about it), then the goal of the good life according to the gospel is to become like Jesus.

What emerges from a biblical consideration...is that...Sex, beauty, health, information, and wealth can all be good things in the good life of the gospel, but not if they are elevated too highly. The checkout line puts our loves out of order, an indication itself of how culture can have a subtle impact on our idea of the good life. In contrast, the good life envisioned by the gospel relativizes what the checkout line sets forth as essential.

Vanhoozer suggests a basic framework that Christians can apply to any representation of culture. I've paraphrased it below:

1. Try to understand the intent of any cultural text before we try to interpret it. By 'text' we mean any meaningful artefact of culture, including films, images, fashion, media, building, advertisement etc.
2. Ask what the meanings are 'behind' the text (what it inherits, reflects, interprets etc) and 'in front' of the text (what is it proposing for the world)?
3. Consider what powers are served by the cultural texts. Whose interests are served?
4. What does the text say about the world and what it is to be human; what anthropology does it suggest?
5. Endeavour to be comprehensive in your interpretation of a cultural text - find evidence that makes sense of the parts as well as the whole.
6. Attempt to discern what faith the text expresses directly or indirectly; what convictions does it suggest about God, the world and our relationship to both?
7. Consider where the text sits within the biblical schema of creation-fall-redemption; God's plan for his world and his creatures.

The following quote from 'Everyday Theology' sums up (for me) why and how we might use Vanhoozer's framework as an aid as we apply theology to everyday life:

"Thanks to the Spirit's ministry of general revelation to the fractured image of God that we are as fallen human beings, part of what culture says is true, good, and beautiful; other parts, however, are false, bad, and ugly. It follows that we must hearken to cultural texts as possible vehicles for appropriating new insights into justice and truth while at the same time maintaining Scripture as our normative framework of interpretation." (p.44)