The "Messiness" of Grace

I am presently reading a book entitled "Teaching Redemptively - Bringing Grace and Truth Into your Classroom" by Donovan Graham.  The more I read the more convinced I am that, in many cases in Christian education we have missed much of the point of why the God of grace called us to this ministry.  I feel we have been, as Graham states, more concerned about right "doing" than we have right "being" and the result is students who leave the doors of our schools with a false sense of what it means to be a true child of God's magnificent grace.

Here is why, in many Christian circles, we have run from emphasizing grace in our approach to education.  Grace is risky!  In fact, grace is downright messy!  So because the last thing we want to do in our schools is take risks and deal with mess we have turned our ministry into ones of law and legalism and have not come to embrace the truth that true Christian education immerses the student in the grace of the gospel of Christ.

Let's face the truth.  It is much easier and safer to just create a set of rules and force the students to look right, act right, dress right, talk right, walk right, say the right things, "never smoke, drink or chew and date people that do" in order to comply and be seen as "right with God."  That's safe and, truthfully, it creates the image we want our schools to have in public eyes.  When visitors come on the campus they see all these well dressed, well mannered students and it's impressive to the public. Do we want that public image to be there?  Absolutely, but it must come from a student body that is immersed and transformed by God's grace.  Worse yet, we send many of our grads out to face the world having convinced them that the way to please God is compliance, conformation to a set of standards.  Sound familiar?  It should if you've read the New Testament.  In other words, unwittingly, we are graduating modern day Pharisees.  But it has been clean, black/white and safe for us.  We don't have to make subjective decisions in discipline.  We don't have to take time to invest in the lives of young men and women to find out what is really going on in their hearts.  We just have to ride shotgun over the herd!  We can maintain these surface relationships, close our classroom doors at 3:30 and go home to our "away from school" lives.  And we don't get messy!

BUT, is that truly educating in a redemptive, Christian way?  I submit to you that it isn't, at all.  Folks, especially those of you involved in Christian education, IF God deals with us by grace and calls us to live and teach by that same grace, what else can we do??

Over the next few days I want to unpack the question of WHY is grace so messy.  And then I want to share some thoughts on teaching with grace.  Stay tuned!  God wants us to be redemptive teachers and redemption is based in totality on the gospel of grace.  Get ready!  If you are going to teach redemptively, you're going to have to get messy!