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This approach depends not on teaching technique but on people like you and me who strive to live our lives in Jesus' name. While it's nice to have saints to emulate and great teachers to learn from, most of us on most days simply need fellow believers to help us walk the walk.

All well and good, but how do you live out this profoundly communitarian vision in a highly mobile, technologically-driven economy that tends to pull communities and families apart?

It's not easy, which is why we so easily fall back on other models of education. I want to grow in my knowledge of God and the life he calls me to. But I'd rather do that in classrooms by listening to lectures, or in my study as I read a book. I love knowledge that can get pumped into my head—I have a pretty big head, after all. But when it comes to sharing my life with others and letting them speak into my life—the sort of thing that happens in weekly small groups, for example—well, that can be a little unnerving, not to mention time consuming.

This type of education is costly in other ways. My wife and I supplemented our children's Sunday school by encouraging their participation in Christian summer camps, running anywhere from two to eight weeks in length. These intense experiences can transform people for a simple reason—they imitate the Jesus model of education outlined above. But such camps are not cheap, and I have sometimes been sorely tempted to tell my kids to skip them and other similar experiences.

I need to be regularly reminded that the cost of discipleship is not paid just by people who suffer persecution. For people like me, it costs money (maybe even helping other families send their kids to camp!). And it costs time. And vulnerability. In the life of faith, we certainly need classrooms and curriculum. But we especially need community, where two or three are gathered to work out their education in Jesus—face to face, so we shall know more fully, even as we have already been fully known.

Mark Galli is managing editor of Christianity Today, and author of Jesus Mean and Wild: The Unexpected Love of an Untameable God (Baker). Comments welcome below or on his blog.

Copyright © 2007 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Other Christianity Today articles on education and public schools are available our site.

Previous SoulWork columns include:

Surviving a Family-Wrecking Economy | What the church can do about working mothers. (May 17, 2007)

The Real Secret of the Universe | Why we disdain feel-good spirituality but shouldn't. (May 3, 2007)

Peace in a World of Massacre | What Jesus calls us to when we're most frightened. (April 17, 2007)

The Good Friday Life | We need something more than another moral imperative. (April 4, 2007)

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May (Web-only) 2007, Vol. 51