Transition to a Church in Mission: The Role of Adult Christian Education in the ELCIC
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The ELCIC has its roots in the Lutheran ethnic groups who immigrated to Canada from Germany and the Scandinavian countries, where Lutheranism was the state religion.For many years, ELCIC congregations in Canada have lived out a membership model based on worship attendance, financial contribution, and participation in Baptism, Confirmation, and Holy Communion.Since 2005, leadership in the ELCIC has been encouraging congregations to move forward from this model to one of the church "in mission for others".This phrase has become the tag line of the ELCIC and the theme of national and synodical conventions since that time 1 .People in congregations are being encouraged to reach out to their local communities, to identify and meet the needs of their neighbours.For many this vision represents a fundamental change in how they understand the mission of the church, not as the exclusive work of missionaries in far-away countries, but as the vocation of all in hands-on ministries close to home.During the same time period, some questions facing the ELCIC, such as the blessing/ marriage of homosexual couples and the ordination of homosexual leaders, have underscored differences in the use and interpretation of Scripture, biblical literacy, and the ability to reflect theologically among adults in the church.National and synodical leaders in the ELCIC have expressed concern about the biblical illiteracy and faith maturity of adults.One of the five vision priorities for the ELCIC adopted in 2008 was "Spirited Discipleship" 2 .ELCIC National Bishop Susan Johnson wrote several columns in the Canada Lutheran in 2010 about the slow drift to "Christianity Lite", and the call to return to "a deeper discipleship as expressed in our prayer life, study of scripture, generosity in giving of our money and our time, service to those in need, and sharing our faith so that others may come to know and love God" 3 .She has continued to emphasize her call to spiritual renewal through the provision of printed and electronic resources, by leading workshops, and in her preaching.Similar concerns in the ELCA led to the adoption in 2007 of a five-year Book of Faith initiative, "with the goal of raising to a new level this church's individual and collective engagement with the Bible and its teaching, yielding greater biblical fluency and a more profound appreciation of Lutheran principles and approaches for the use of Scripture" 4 .Previous research has identified some intriguing relationships among these identified concerns of mission, biblical literacy, and spirited discipleship.For example, one of the most extensive studies of Christian Education ever undertaken, Effective Christian Education: A National Study of Protestant Congregations, found that for adults there was a strong positive relationship between lifetime involvement in effective Christian education and faith maturity as defined by the T
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".