Learning from experience is an essential part of the Christian faith journey. Certainly, we all have stories of experiences that awakened us to a new way of thinking. Some of those experiences are big, like spending a night wrestling with fear in hopes of grabbing a blessing for the days to come, or an appointment spent receiving a good or bad diagnosis. Others are small, like a new coworker, a change in neighborhood, or simply growing older.
Our reactions to these experiences can vary. We don’t learn in healthy ways every time we experience change.
As Christians, we are called to new lives every day, and the rhythm of our years are shaped by a story of death and new life. So, grabbing hold of the transformation possible in the changes that come into our lives can be a crucial part of our faith formation. Jesus calls us to be willing to be disoriented and to then re-evaluate our current beliefs. To repent, and change our minds. And learning, at its heart, literally changes our minds.
Yet all too often, we get stuck.
It is obvious that we don’t always learn, even in very disorienting situations. Our human brains have some natural resistance to change.
Recent neuroscience research can explain some of our resistance to change. Our brains try very hard to protect us from danger. One way our brains do that is to flag anything that conflicts with our existing understandings as an error. This is done by activating our emotional brain activity in the Amygdala and decreasing our rational brain activity in the Prefrontal Cortex. New information is harder to process and can exhaust our memory and processing. Our brains also pay more attention to negative input than positive. This is important in learning to avoid touching hot stoves, but counterproductive in other areas of our lives, particularly in our need to press through the discomfort of change to learn what it has to teach us (Scarlett, 2016).
Without some intervention, big changes won’t always lead to learning that is healthy and beneficial for the congregation and its members. It is only when we support that learning that those of us with leadership responsibilities in the congregation can ensure that change in our church leads to transformative learning in our members.
Three key approaches can help your church members learn in ways that support their faith during or after big changes:
Take time to process.
People are most likely to learn from change when they take time to process the experience.
Jesus went into the desert for 40 days and fasted and prayed before beginning his public ministry (Matthew 4:1-11). He honored the need to process this change in direction, before embarking on a new way of being in the world. In the life of any church, opportunities to process our experiences should become a regular part of the life of the community.
While some people will take the time and have the connections to process experiences informally in their existing groups, for others, intentional structures for talking through their experiences will be needed. Such opportunities might look like a small group study, weekly prayer and listening sessions before or after worship or during the week, or an invitation for a facilitator or consultant to hold regular sessions with the congregation. You may wonder how to fit this into a busy church life. Trust me, the shortness of time is no excuse not to take it on. Remember, Jesus only had 40 days to have some profound spiritual experiences, and your congregation can do the same in the time you have. And if you absolutely don’t have enough time to slow down and engage with each other in deep ways, you are doing too much and something has to give.
Tell your stories – to yourself and others.
Talking about our experiences can also help with learning and transformation. Studies have shown that writing about or talking about such experiences, particularly when using story-telling or metaphor, helped people make meaning.
Simply talking about experiences in a group can help surface the emotions and impressions that change brings. Offer opportunities to tell the stories of your lives together. Offer other opportunities to tell the stories of feelings and other things left unsaid, to and among each other. Offer the opportunity to tell the stories of the church collectively. If those in your congregation are worried that such story-telling will lead to gripe sessions or unhealthy conflict, a trained outside facilitator can help make these sessions healthy and constructive, rather than destructive, to your congregation and the relationships within it.
Think reflectively
Transformative learning requires critical reflection. We learn best when we reflect on how our experiences intersect with our ideas, beliefs, and frames of reference. We can critically examine the new ideas our experience is forming in us, and avoid simply shoring up what we already believe. We can keep an eye out for points at which new experiences might be showing us a new way of thinking. We can stay open to changing our beliefs and ideas. We can take notes, so we can fully process all of these reflections, or talk about them with others.
We know a few things from research about how to do this sort of critical reflection in groups. Transformative learning in groups typically results from high stakes events and working on meaningful problems together (Watkins & Marsick, 2010; Ziegler, 1999). Also key is member support for one another as they make meaning out of experiences and how they are learning from them (Fleischer, 2006).
This type of collective reflection isn’t easy work, and it takes creating a culture of collaboration, trust, and honesty to even attempt it. In a loving community like a congregation, can we feel safe enough when thinking: “you know, I thought that, but I am realizing I was wrong” to say those words out loud? Can we feel held enough to stay in the discomfort of change long enough to pass through it to the other side? Getting to that point will take intentional effort on the part of congregational leaders: first to build that culture, and then to guide the reflection needed. Professional facilitators can also be helpful in this work.
The good news about learning from change
Doing the work of congregational learning is worth it. With the knowledge of Jesus’ call toward transformation, an understanding of the need to continually repent or change our minds, and a loving community for support, our congregations can find new understanding and depth in their lives of faith.