Explore a variety of approaches congregations have taken to embrace differences; identify leadership issues diversity creates in congregations; and discover programmatic suggestions drawn from the experience of multicultural congregations to address these issues. This book helps readers to understand their own experience with racial and cultural differences and is a guide for gathering diverse people into the life and mission of the congregation.

CHRISTINA BRAIT PAULSTON There is an important difference between merely experimental and genuine experiment. The one may be a feeling for novelty, the other is rationally based on experience seeking a better way. - Frank Lloyd Wright Wright was talking about architecture, but the same difference can be applied to analyzing the relationship between standard and vernacular languages in bilingual education; surely we are also seeking a better way to handle bilingual education based on experience. How rationally based our efforts are, is another question. Works on this and similar topics can at times become the scene for very emotional-and very moving-presentations which sometimes are more utopian than rational. One can perhaps call this a very 'rational' text, because so few of the contributors are members of ethnic subordinate groups. Am I suggesting that minority group members are less rational? Of course not. I am suggesting that it is much easier to be calm, objective and scholarly about the lot of others than about your own. The most salient feature about the bilingual education of vernacular speaking groups is the social and economic exploitation of its members by the dominant group. The papers herein, treating bilingual education from a psychological perspective, agree at least on the issue that an understanding of the social and economic factors underlying bilingual education is crucial for understanding the psychological studies on bilingualism.

This is a new release of the original 1960 edition.

Synopsis: Mainline Protestant congregations face a profound adaptive challenge. In the midst of significant social, cultural, and technological change, the denominations they represent generally abandoned a view of education capable of maintaining and renewing their faith traditions through their children and youth. New curriculum resources and innovative pedagogical strategies appropriated from the marketplace of religious education options have not met the challenge. A transformation of consciousness is required in congregations seeking a future through their children. It involves the exercise of an ecclesial imagination to reclaim a view of education rooted in the revitalization of their religious traditions in the past and re-envisioning the congregation as a catechetical culture of faith formation. Endorsements: "From Generation to Generation begins in lament for all that has been lost in education and spiritual formation . . . and ends by reimagining those tasks and laying out the practices that will form the faith of the next generation. . . . From Generation to Generation makes an important, creative, and practical contribution to that conversation." --Michael E. Williams, Senior Pastor, West End United Methodist Church "No one has more wisdom about congregational education than Charles Foster, and in this challenging book he turns to one of the most urgent questions of all: how can we enable our children to be formed in the Christian faith? He is aware of the obstacles--the shifting religious and cultural landscape, troubled denominational structures, theological amnesia, the decline in intergenerational mentoring--but fortunately, he is also able to describe a wise and hopeful path ahead toward equipping children with vital, imaginative, and courageous faith." --Thomas G. Long, Professor of Preaching, Emory University "Charles Foster makes a compelling argument for the development of catechetical cultures in congregations capable of helping their members to anticipate, prepare for, rehearse, participate in, and analyze the heart of the Christian story. His masterful analysis of mainline Protestant churches suggests that unless we can retrieve and re-member the developmental, practical, and discovery elements of such a culture, our congregations will fade even further into irrelevance." --Mary Hess, Associate Professor of Educational Leadership, Luther Seminary "Charles Foster's ecclesial imagination, cultural insight, strategic savvy, and experience as an educator make him the best possible guide for congregational leaders committed to revitalizing Christian belief and practice in the twenty-first century. Congregations face no challenge more crucial than this one. This book will allow them to face the challenge with practical wisdom and well-founded hope." --Dorothy C. Bass, Director, Valparaiso Project on the Education and Formation of People in Faith "Foster invites all of us invested in the life of faith to look forward. He calls on those concerned about Christian formation and education to cultivate capacities of collective 'ecclesial imagination' in churches that can envision the future of congregations through the faith of our children and youth. . . . From Generation to Generation is an insightful resource for the church today and its future, and it is an invaluable gift to religious educators." --Joyce Ann Mercer, Professor of Practical Theology, Virginia Theological Seminary Author Biography: Charles R. Foster is Professor of Religion and Education emeritus at the Candler School of Theology, Emory University. He is the author of Educating Congregations, project director and lead author of Educating Clergy: Teaching Practices and Pastoral Imagination, and coauthor of Working with Black Youth and The Church in the Education of the Public.

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"Bill Myers has offered a much needed picture of black and white styles of youth ministry. His own style of writing is stunning. The book is so rich in historical reflection and descriptive detail that one cannot avoid being confronted by the urgent issues of race, culture, and social history--all vitally important in shaping ministry." Mary Elizabeth Moore, School of Theology at Claremont

Black Religious Experience is an examination of the role Christian education has played in the African American community, as seen in the work of one of its greatest interpreters, Grant Shockley.

In 1903, W. E. B. DuBois coined the term "double consciousness" to refer to the fact that African Americans always view the world through two lenses. First, they see it from their own perspectives as members of an oppressed community, living out the consequences of a particular history. Second, they perceive life from the point of view of a dominant culture that seeks to impose on African Americans its own false understanding of their status and worth.

Christian educators working in the African American community have often drawn on this idea as they seek to apply the gospel to the spiritual formation of members of that community. The heart of the work of Grant Shockley, the preeminent African American religious educator of the twentieth century, was combating the negative attitudes and perspectives that the larger society would dictate to African Americans, while providing positive and powerful images of their self-worth drawn from the Christian story.

Charles R. Foster and Fred Smith, friends and colleagues of Shockley, seek in this book to interpret the significance of his work for Christian education, both in the African American community and beyond it, for the twenty-first century. They draw on personal encounters as well as Shockley's written and published materials to indicate how this seminal thinker continues to speak to the need for faith formation in Christian congregations today.

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A leading Christian educator offers a practical guide for revisioning a church's educational program. After identifying the weaknesses in current education programs, Charles Foster offers an alternative vision that is more cooperative, more attentive to the whole of the congregation's life, and that helps people critically correlate the Bible and Christian tradition to their own experience.