A leading Christian educator offers a practical guide for revisioning a church's educational program. After identifying the weaknesses in current education programs, Charles Foster offers an alternative vision that is more cooperative, more attentive to the whole of the congregation's life, and that helps people critically correlate the Bible and Christian tradition to their own experience.

A leading Christian educator offers a practical guide for revisioning a church's educational program. After identifying the weaknesses in current education programs, Charles Foster offers an alternative vision that is more cooperative, more attentive to the whole of the congregation's life, and that helps people critically correlate the Bible and Christian tradition to their own experience.

In this important and groundbreaking book, Osmer develops a practical theology of the teaching ministry. He begins with the Apostle Paul, identifying in Paul's letters to his congregations the core tasks of the teaching ministry.

Children living in poverty have the same God-given potential as children in wealthier communities, but on average they achieve at significantly lower levels. Kids who both live in poverty and read below grade level by third grade are three times as likely not to graduate from high school as students who have never been poor. By the time children in low-income communities are in fourth grade, they're already three grade levels behind their peers in wealthier communities. More than half won't graduate from high school--and many that do graduate only perform at an eighth-grade level. Only one in ten will go on to graduate from college. These students have severely diminished opportunities for personal prosperity and professional success. It is clear that America's public schools do not provide a high quality public education for the sixteen million children growing up in poverty. Education expert Nicole Baker Fulgham explores what Christians can--and should--do to champion urgently needed reform and help improve our public schools. The book provides concrete action steps for working to ensure that all of God's children get the quality public education they deserve. It also features personal narratives from the author and other Christian public school teachers that demonstrate how the achievement gap in public education can be solved.

This book was written to help congregational leaders, clergy, staff, and laypersons, plan and organize a Christian education ministry from the approach of Christian formation in a community of faith context. This book provides a model for organizing the Christian education leadership committee or team of the church, demonstrates how to use the church year as a framework for planning the Christian education ministry of the church, and gives a model for assessing the effectiveness of the educational ministry of the church and a process to help congregations move toward the Christian Education Formation approach.

Based on extensive literary and field research involving surveys, classroom observations, and interviews with faculty, students, and administrators in Roman Catholic, mainline and evangelical Protestant, and Reform and Conservative Jewish seminaries, Educating Clergy explores the influence of their historic traditions and academic settings in contemporary classroom and communal pedagogies. The book describes elements in classroom pedagogies shared across these religious traditions that distinctively integrate the cognitive, practical, and normative apprenticeships to be found in all forms of professional education.

Christian Education is part of the vital ministry of all churches, but especially of small membership churches. In a culture that places great value on numbers, small membership churches often mistakenly see themselves at a disadvantage. Small membership churches can create wonderful opportunities to form and disciple faithful followers of Jesus Christ. In offering viable Christian Education, the role of the pastor is critical. This book invites pastors to lead their small membership churches to develop an imaginative and holistic vision of Christian Education. Read the Introduction