The Problem
I keep coming back to this challenge in Seth Godin’s book Linchpin.
What They Should Teach in School
Only two things:
1. Solve interesting problems
2. Lead
My university’s motto is “Integrating Faith in Learning, Leading, and Serving.” If it’s my responsibility to lead in a Christ-centered way, it’s certainly well within my purview to teach my students to lead in some significant way.
One Solution
I’ve been thinking this week about how this charge connects to the Great Commission, which my university coincidentally lists as its founding principle:
“Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.”
This commission calls us to teach: first, to instruct others how to join God’s family and second, to help them learn how to follow Christ’s commandments (which Christ elsewhere equates with loving him). This process is supposed to replicate itself through the power of the Holy Spirit. The Commission holds as much for those of us who were redeemed last year as those who were in the Upper Room. Disciples teach disciples who then teach more disciples.
I want my students to leave my class with the ability to teach someone about the role of literature in God’s redemption of the world.
Literature, just like any discipline, gives us a chance to see a specific way in which we live out the reality of being made in God’s image: we make symbols. We cannot avoid doing so because we are symbols ourselves (of our creator) AND our symbol-making is one of the most crucial ways we can see God’s image in us. It is part of our job as Christians to represent and create a world that reconstructs the meaning God has already symbolically given creation. Literature allows us to do that. One way we can lead is by becoming self-consciously Christian symbols and symbol-makers. That is a job for students and teachers, followers of and leaders for Christ.