Today I've been thinking about teachers and teaching. Yesterday in our worship service here in Aberdeen I was privileged to help celebrate a 60th anniversary of Ordination of someone who 44 years ago was my teacher. We did it in style - we prayed to thank God, we presented a book - his kind of book, and we had cake. Derek Murray taught me in College, and has taught me much ever since. He is a friend, he is a colleague in ministry, but before each of these he was my teacher who helped shape me towards ministry.
My earliest experiences of teachers at school didn't go well. For reasons I've spent a lot of time trying to think through and understand, I never got the best out of school, and school never got the best out of me. By the time I was fifteen I had left school, expelled as someone who had stepped out of line once too often. I was intelligent enough and could have expected to 'get my highers' and take it from there, but somehow never settled, never knew what I wanted or what I wanted it for.
I had several teachers who believed in me, tried to guide me into straight paths, encouraged me to settle down and do the work I was capable of doing well. I didn't listen, and no matter how good a teacher is, in the end you learn when you listen, pay attention, engage and commit, and allow what is learned to become transformative. Somehow I could never work within that necessary discipline. I read voraciously and learned almost by osmosis amongst books. I did well in the subjects I enjoyed; these were not maths, chemistry or physics. Having moved school far too many times due to dad's job, I was in three very different s chools in first year secondary. In science subjects needing a solid foundation in first year, I struggled, and never caught up.
What turned my life around was my conversion, becoming a Christian. Through an evangelical experience of Christ, along with the commitment of my life to following the way of Christ, came a discovery of new purpose and new reasons to learn to learn. I wanted to be a minister, to follow Jesus and invite and encourage others to do the same. Over a few months that life goal had clarified my plans and brought a focus to time, energy and ability that was entirely new to me, and both exhilarating and frightening. What someone called the 'expulsive power of an opposite affection' had happened to me. I had discovered faith displaced mistrust and anxiety; love replaced some of the affective and emotional handicaps caused by insecurity, the need for approval, low self-esteem; and hope dispelled the negativity of someone who had lost too many opportunities already in a young life, and had no real life plans at age sixteen.
So I went to night school; then further education College; then University followed by Theological College. In all it took 8 years from no O Level Standard Grades to University degree and diploma. And along the way I had many teachers, amongst them my friend who this past week celebrated 60 years of Christian ministry. In those years of catch up I had several teachers who modelled different approaches to learning and teaching. Remembering them now, and thinking about Derek, it's obvious that the good teacher is not a conduit of information, a supermarket of knowledge, or even a facilitator in our mastering of whatever subject.It is something beyond the reach of such superficality. It includes the moulding influence of knowledge that has become personalised wisdom, and the sense of the student that this teacher believes in you and can see what is there that is worth growing and bringing to fruition.
What I therefore came to value in my best teachers was their commitment to asking questions, and refusing to take unreflective, ill-considered, inadequate or even ignorant answers. Good teachers require and therefore inspire curiosity. They model and enable intellectual discipline, provoke and affirm vocational motivation, perform and practice the pursuit of excellence both in learning and in teaching. Some of my best teachers did that, some who weren't so good, it could likely be traced to some deficits in these qualities of the learner-teacher. For that too is the mark of a good teacher, that they are lifelong learners, and set out in teaching others to learn from them, and to create dialogue, conversation, shared exploration, the shared joy in the search and the finding, and companionship on the journey that is the fellowship of scholarship.
Some of my teachers at College became friends. My Principal was R E O White, who in his retirement and into old age I used to visit several times a year, and was humbled by being invited into the deeper places in his life and his own love affair with learning. We talked Greek Testament, Philosophy of Religion, the changing context for preaching, the novels of Austen (whom he loved), Hardy (whom he admired but disagreed with), Eliot (whom he thought formidable, which is true enough). He had little patience with systematic theology when it became an exercise in rational precision at the expense of spiritual power. Pastoral theology he defined in terms of pastoral care, the theology and practice of ministry as service, care and community sustaining.
Iit was one of the most humbling and satisfying moments of my life when I went to see him to tell him I had been appointed Principal of our College, 25 years after being his student. When he died I was invited to deliver the eulogy on behalf of the College. To be asked to sum up a life of intellectual and spiritual discipleship that had indelibly left its mark on my own development as minister, scholar and Christian, was for me a profound experience of the grace that had invaded my life and brought it to that moment.
Derek Murray became my friend too, and remains one of those special people whose presence is synonymous with blessing in my life. We share a love of church history and of much else in Christian scholarship across the disciplines. For both of us life is inconceivable, or at least impossible of enjoyment, without books, reading, study and the quest for answers and new questions. Occasionally we do a bookshop crawl, a day trip to one or two favourite places. It is a further characteristic of a good teacher that their enthusiasm for a subject is such that student and teacher get caught up in it and the distinctions of role and status disappear as both become learners and teachers of each other. My friendships with these two teachers are amongst the richest strands God has woven into and throughout my life.
I remember my embarrassment, and then the laughter, one morning I took prayers in College with all the students and staff present. I read from Psalm 119, but I somehow overlooked the implications of Psalm 119.99. So this first year student found himself declaring "I have more insight than all my teachers..." It was ironic then; it is still. I cherish in my memory and still in my present life, the dedication of my teachers, and the gifts they have each been in my life.
After 42 years in ministry myself, perhaps I have earned the right to say what I think the real gift of someone whose ministry just passed the 60 year mark. It is this. The gift to others, selflessly offered, of what the teacher knows, and with this the gift of encouragement to learn, and go on learning. Derek has done that for generations of students, and in serial congregations. And those who know him thank God for those who teach by who they are. And he's still teaching us!
:)
Posted by: ruthg | October 15, 2018 at 01:23 PM