Each year the closing banquet features the presentation of the Christian Educator of the Year award. This year’s recipient, Linda LeBron, the daughter and mother of preachers, credited her mother the DCE for most shaping what she would do in Christian vocation.
Among the guests honoring her were her pastor-daughter and musician-son who led the crowd in a song he had written in her honor.
LeBron retired in 2002 after serving for seven years as the director of children’s ministries at the Preston Hollow Church in Dallas. Previously she held the same position for 11 years at the Canyon Creek Church in Richardson, Texas. She also has served APCE in various capacities including the presidency, has served on the design team of Covenant People, and wrote the first intergenerational summer curriculum for We Believe. She co-wrote with Joyce MacKichan Walker the recently published PC(USA) resource for ‘tweens. She continues to serve as educator certification advisor and as volunteer resource coordinator in her presbytery.
Through her career she has focused primarily in two directions. As a local church educator, she sought to train parents to become effective and comfortable discussing and nurturing the faith of their children. In the larger church she has developed networks of care and support for fellow educators.
In her acceptance speech she reflected how these two roles together serve Christian educators. “We seem to have no proprietary sense of ownership,” she said. “If we’ve tried it and it worked, we figure it came from God, so it is to be shared with all of Christ’s church.”
Keynote speaker for the conference, Eileen Lindner, a pastor-educator-sociologist has shared similar passions in ministry. The New Jersey pastor, presbytery executive, and author of Thus Far on the Way: Toward a Theology of Child Advocacy, reflected on the ironic challenge facing the church in general and educators in particular in these days. How are we to be light to a world that we have exploited, where our American lifestyle, “consumes a disproportional proportion of the world’s resources,” she pondered. “It wasn’t just Wall Street that got drunk. The whole culture is drunk with consumption.” It’s no wonder that others look upon our proclamations “with a hermeneutic of suspicion.”
In fact, she recounted the discomfort she felt when the APCE leaders foisted upon her the assignment to speak to this theme. “Why did I say yes?” she asked. “Precisely because of the irony of it all. The church is always called beyond the wisdom of the moment, the obvious certainty of the moment. And right there you have an irony.”
“Irony is our vocation,” she added. “And who have known that better than the educators?”
As former deputy general secretary for research and planning of the National Council of Churches (NCC), Lindner edits the NCC’s Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches. She shared some of the insights drawn from those years of research.
The vast majority of membership losses through the past 45 years have resulted from the increasing mortality rates and decreasing birth rates of folks in Presbyterian churches. The statistical truth about it, she explained, is much simpler than many people have surmised. “We’ve discovered why those Presbyterians are not coming to church. They’re not coming to church because they’re dead.” A burst of laughter followed.
She elaborated further: “They’re not not attending because there’s a band. They’re not not attending because of homosexuals. They’re not not attending because the pastor doesn’t wear a tie any more. They’re not attending because they’re dead.”
After another burst of laughter from the crowd, she added, “It’s sure better than ‘the dog ate my homework.’”
Weaved between Lindner’s reintroduction to the folks in the pews and church schools, J. Herbert Nelson, founding pastor of Liberation Community Church in Memphis, reintroduced participants to many of those outside the church. “The struggles they are facing are right in your face,” he said. “If you ask them how they are doing, sit down for 45 minutes, and be prepared. They’re going to tell you how they are doing.
“What they want to hear from us is how God works to do something in me. ‘How can I have this demon exorcised from me?’ ‘How can I get this demon purged from my spirit, this thing that has been riding me for years?’”
They really want to see some light, and in order to do so, they also need to hear something that will make a difference. “Do you have a word from the Lord?”
The educators did seek words from the Lord, and new ways to shine the light by attending dozens of workshops made available between plenary sessions. They also collected ideas and sample materials from dozens of organizations sharing their wares in the exhibit area throughout the conference.
