Responsively Yours: New Pathways
You might not think my grade school education in New Jersey public schools would be the best background for engaging in this summer’s United Methodist Women mission study. But I have a very clear memory of Ms. Wahala’s fourth grade class studying the Lenni- Lenape tribe at the beginning of New Jersey history. I remember learning these early residents were peace loving, lived in extended family systems, and had many ways of living with the humid summers and cold winters of our area. We also learned diseases imported from Europe and conflicts with settlers killed or drove away most members of this network of tribes.
This education included what we might now call “appreciative inquiry,” in which we focused on attributes we value rather than evaluating. Whatever motivated my teachers and the writers of the approved texts, I did not carry away with me a sense of these people as “other” in a negative sense. You could certainly argue that the curriculum did not take adequate account of the responsibility of the majority culture for our inability to share land and common well being. However, it laid the foundation for the judgments I would make later, the voices I would treat as being credible and who I recognize as parties to the conversations.
At the same time, I was being formed and shaped in the United Methodist Church, and I believed (then as now) that Jesus truly did love “all the children of the world, red and yellow, black and white.” In true United Methodist fashion, I access this profound truth through singing!
What does this have to do with this summer’s mission study? Think about how we study, how we make connections and how we let those connections shape us. In New Jersey, there are a plethora of place names that refer to our Native American history — Ramapo, Hohokus and Wenonah, for example. There are also roads winding along natural features of the landscape in ways defying any regular grid-based naming conventions. We learned many of these roads followed paths native peoples had long used. Ms. Wahala was able to make connections from things and places we saw and knew to things we could only imagine.
Brain theorists tell us today this is not only how learning works, but it is also how the brain functions as a physical organ. The neurons and synapses build from existing patterns to new patterns, from present knowledge to new knowledge, and from linking familiar experience to new experience.
Over the next two years, we have the chance to build pathways to new understandings as we embark on the Native American mission study. Native peoples and their impacts are all around us. What are the reference points for the folks who will be participating in your United Methodist Women School of Christian Mission? The materials or the plenary at the school can serve as part of the participants’ common reference points, but it can’t take account of your local context. How can you as teacher, learner, dean of a School of Christian Mission or member of a school planning committee help the participants expand their present knowledge, and be open to new voices, new viewpoints and new challenges to action?
Schools of Christian Mission are the settings for transformational learning experiences. What we learn this summer will impact our being and our doing in mission. As we learn more about our Native American sisters and brothers, let’s be open to transformation and growth. Our history together and our present study together will shape our future together.
Harriett Jane Olson
Women’s Division
Deputy General Secretary
- Audio version of Responsively Yours (MP3 4MB)
- Please click here to subscribe to Response.
- Cover of Response April 2008 Issue (PDF)
- Content of Response April 2008 Issue (PDF)
Date posted : Apr. 23, 2008