In the veritable mountains of reading that I have done lately for my master's course, I ran across this quote from John Dewey. Dewey was a leading educational reformer in the 1930's and eventually his views on education changed the way that all of western society taught their children.
Dewey was worried that the reforms he was propagating would eventually become so narrowly focused that they would become an "ism". To him this meant that the reformers had become too focused on all the things they did not like, that their entire set of reforms was in danger of being based solely on reactions to what they saw as wrong. His caution was that if the educational reforms became purely reactionary, then they had entirely missed their point. The point of educational reform, to him, was to envision the end-goal of democratic, experience based education and move towards that. If the goal was simply to not do what was done before, then the reforms were doomed for failure since there was not an end hope of where to end up at.
This was a wakeup call for me. As Christians, we need to stop focusing on what we see as the wrong things to do and instead focus on our end goal. If we choose to live our lives as reactions to what we have seen to be wrong teaching, hypocrisy, or wrong living then we are hedging ourselves onto a path this is purely reactionary and can never be full of the fruit that we long for. Our end goal should involve being able to understand what we don't want to do but, our chief aim is to lay everything down for the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus our Lord.
In a practical way I think it means that we need to carefully evaluate our motives. Why are we living the way we are? For example, are we trying to live in fellowship with others because we think the way we've seen people in churches interact before is the wrong way to do it? Or are we so convinced that this is the Biblical way of being a body that we want to pursue it? The question is important because both will types of living will look similiar for awhile. Its down the road when their fruit is seen that the difference becomes clear. Reactionary living cannot reproduce life, only life that is focused on the goal of Christ Jesus really reproduces life.
That goal takes my focus off of all the things that I want to react to and places it squarely back where I know it needs to be. In the end, I think that is revolutionary.
--- Jenny
