Life-Involvement Learning

Just as secular schools have discovered the need for "new math" and "new reading," churches have had to devise new ways of teaching religion. No U.S. denomination has spent more time and money ($5,000,000) solving the problem than the 3,227,157-member Lutheran Church in America, which last week introduced the most modern and most comprehensive Christian education program in the nation's history.

Nine years in the making, the Lutheran Long Range Program combines sound scholarship, modern educational theory and a correlated curriculum for every teaching agency of the church. The aim is to provide a cradle-to-the-grave "life involvement" with religion, and the more than 400 texts range from colorfully illustrated kindergarten paperbacks to bibliography-laden study books for adult courses. The lessons have been carefully geared to the learning capacities and interests of the students. Thus for eight-year-olds, who are learning how to play and live equably with classmates, the title of the Sunday church school book is Fellow Workers for God. If they attend a vacation church school, they will learn about Exploring God's World.

Modern in Tone. For some Lutheran conservatives, the curriculum is almost painfully modern in tone. There is a candid text for teen-age students on Love, Sex, and Life, and a seventh-grade Sunday school course on the Gospels admits that there is a considerable discrepancy among the Evangelists' accounts of the Resurrection. Another seventh grade text explains the grandeur of God by making this comparison: "When you stand before a 6-ft. 10-in. basketball player, you feel like a runt."

At all levels, teaching material has been carefully vetted in the interests of interfaith good will. Biweekly newspapers for children will describe Jewish feasts of the season, and explain what the Vatican Council means to Roman Catholics. Says Dr. W. Kent Gilbert, executive secretary of the Board of Parish Education and director of the project: "It is an attempt to understand what the beliefs of others are, rather than try to render judgments about people."

Church-Tested. Gilbert says that the ultimate success or failure of the program will not be known until the year 2000, when three-year-olds now learning about God will have become church leaders. But the Lutherans have painstakingly tested it. For four years draft texts were tried out in 62 congregations, and rewritten in the light of weekly critical reports submitted by the churches. The pilot parishes reported that their teen-age group classes went up in attendance as the program unfolded.

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