Your Hidden Curriculum - Christianity Today

Many years ago I heard a great teacher make a distinction I never forgot. Every educational institution, he said, has two kinds of subject matter. There is the formal curriculum. And there is what might be called a hidden curriculum.

The formal curriculum consists of agreed-upon topics. Algebra, geography, English lit, history, physics. Faculties and school boards and parents decide on—sometimes war over—what makes up the formal curriculum.

The hidden curriculum also involves learning, but no school board ever sets it. The hidden curriculum consists of questions like: Which students get called on and which go ignored? Who do other students want to sit next to in the cafeteria and who sits alone? How do the groups stand on the great Chain of Being from jocks and cheerleaders to chess club members to the untouchables? Whose jokes get laughed at? Whose body is shaped right? Of what does "cool" consist, and who possesses it?

The formal curriculum is intentional.
The hidden curriculum is inherent.
The formal curriculum is obvious.
The hidden curriculum is subtle.

What you learn in the formal curriculum often evaporates after your finals. Sometimes even earlier.

What you learn in the hidden curriculum lasts a lifetime.

If there is a contradiction between what's taught by the formal curriculum and what's taught by the hidden curriculum, people always believe the hidden curriculum. Always.

The reason this stays with me so vividly, of course, is that I work at a church.

What people take from our church is the hidden curriculum. Always.

We have a formal curriculum. It gets taught in classrooms and preached on weekends. It gets sung from the stage and facilitated in small groups. The formal curriculum is what gets taught when we study Romans, or learn about contemplative prayer, or take a spiritual gifts inventory.

But we have a hidden curriculum. Who gets fawned over, and who gets ignored? How do the staff and leaders get along when they're off the platform and think nobody's looking? How does a small group respond when someone shares a problem that is untidy and unresolved? Do leaders respond with panic or irritation or confidence or gentleness when a problem strikes? When there is a conflict, do people face it head on or go into avoidance mode? Does the church staff run on fear?

A couple told me recently of visiting a church in a city they'd just moved to. It was a church that prides itself on reaching unchurched people. But it was clear that the hip and the cool and the artists were prized above all there. The formal curriculum said God hangs with everybody. But the hidden curriculum said don't expect to get too close to the core if you tuck your shirt in.

When I teach the formal curriculum, I have the chance to think about it ahead of time. I can rehearse it. I can illustrate it with self-deprecating humor and humble-sounding personal disclosure. I can try to make it comes out just right.

But I'm teaching the hidden curriculum all the time. I cannot prepare for it. It just leaks out of me. I teach it when a staff member is under-performing and I respond by withdrawing. I teach it when a powerful leader blusters and I placate instead of confront.

We all tend to overestimate what people learn from our formal curriculum. (I have been frightened over the years by how often people will tell me they appreciated a point I made while preaching and—not only is that not the point I was trying to make—it's the exact opposite.)

And we underestimate what people learn from our church's hidden curriculum.

And when there is a disagreement between the two—when we claim "God so loved the world …" but we really love the beautiful or the useful or the cool or the strong—the message people take from our church is the hidden curriculum. Always.

What are we really teaching?

How do I recognize my church's hidden curriculum?

We have been trying to get concrete about our church's effectiveness, so we've developed a kind of dashboard to review together with our elders once a month. We're developing ways to gauge peoples' volunteering and community involvement and worship and growth and giving.

But we also realized that hidden curriculum issues are harder to assess. So periodically we'll take time with our elders to look at what are sometimes called the soft assessments. What concerns do we have as we look at our congregation? What kinds of stories are being told? What's the level of busyness in peoples' lives? Is prayer happening in ways that are authentic and wide-spread?

Sometimes it gets assessed even when we aren't trying. Since our church has been around more than 130 years, we have to keep working to see how it appears to outsiders. Recently a team of folks at our church hired some "mystery attenders" to come to a service and give us feedback. (It's a little like having a newspaper critic review a restaurant, except nobody gets to read it but you.)

It was fascinating to get to see our church through the eyes of a stranger who wrote about it at length. We got a chance to see where our behavior is congruent with what we say we believe, and where we diverge. There were many heartening comments, but one of the hardest was an observation that although we talk a lot about loving people, it did not always feel like that was a priority to the strangers who walked among us.

Another indicator is staff relationships. A church that I'll call First Methodist Church (not its real name; its real name is First Baptist Church) has a worship arts director and a student ministries architect who are not talking to each other. They are jealous and competitive and mistrustful. They are also talented and embedded and possessed of devoted constituencies. So the church allows them to live in a de-militarized zone.

The formal curriculum of the church includes things like Matthew 18:15, where Jesus commands his people to seek reconciliation. But the lesson people in the congregation take away is that talent and outward success trump reconciliation and authenticity.

On the other hand, I know of a church in the Midwest that says as part of its core values that resolving conflict is so highly regarded that staff members can be dismissed for violating it. And they have. It's not a perfect community. But the ratio of resolutions to conflict is much higher here than in the first church.

When I first got to this church, I drew a little socio-gram of our leadership team. Who is connected to whom? Who is withdrawn? How big are the distances? Where are the alliances? It was a very helpful exercise to know how the hidden curriculum gets played out in the central circle.

Facing what's hidden

How do I address our hidden curriculum?

When I was at Willow Creek, Bill Hybels would say, "We will teach our way out of any problem." Not that teaching alone can solve everything, but with whatever problem we face, we can make a start by acknowledging it publicly and pursuing a solution.

Sometimes a simple, direct quote can help. I know of one pastor who was battling a hidden curriculum that in order to belong to this church you can't have any real problems. He was talking with some folks who said, the first time they visited a church: "I didn't think I could ever fit in there. Everybody looked too together. Seeing the people gathered after the service looked like a bunch of people at a cocktail party." That was a great quote—from the mouth of an actual observer—to name the problem.

Another church is located in a suburb surrounded by a bunch of restaurants. Several members of the wait staff talked about how they hoped they didn't get church attenders at their tables, because they're such lousy tippers. One waiter said on Sundays at noon the cry goes up: "Here come the Christians." So the pastor of that church actually talked the congregation through the art of generous tipping.

Maybe the biggest single contributor to the hidden curriculum will be the people a church hires. This is particularly important when looking at spirituality.

Increasingly churches are speaking the language of spiritual formation, starting programs of spiritual direction, or creating spiritual formation departments. Often the question will arise: what kind of person should we hire to do spiritual formation?

The most important criterion is this: hire someone whose character and humility and attitude you would like to have reproduced in your church and in yourself.

Not simply someone who has read a lot of Merton and Nouwen. Not someone who is a certified spiritual director. Not necessarily a contemplative reflective academic introverted monastic over-achiever. I'm not sure why this is the case, but folks can be drawn to spiritual formation (just like to any other subject matter) for all kinds of reasons.

Ralph oversees spiritual formation at his church; he writes on it, teaches it, is known for it, considers himself an expert in it. He's also got a major league case of name-dropping. He cannot talk for five minutes without letting you know how important and well-connected he is becoming.

Leading spiritual formation at a church is different than being a surgeon. I don't mind having an arrogant surgeon, as long as she's a good one. But if someone is going to champion the cause of spiritual life, they have to be at least on their way toward living the kind of life I'd like to live.

Spiritual formation is not mostly about expertise in techniques. It's not about being able to pronounce lectio divina correctly, or preferring Ignatius' forty days exercises over Rick Warren's, or knowing the difference between the dark night of the senses versus the dark night of the soul.

It's having wisdom about how our spirits—our wills; our inner selves and characters—actually do get formed. It's being formed yourself in such a way that other people would like to grow in your direction.

A simple way to address hidden curriculum issues is to spend time talking with staff and key leaders about their spiritual lives. Eugene Peterson writes in Under the Unpredictable Plant how when he started a church, the official charged with monitoring him had him fill out paperwork on church statistics and an assessment of his spiritual life, but he suspected they were only reading the numbers.

Just for the fun of it, he started making up stuff on his spiritual life report. He started by inventing a deep slide into depression. No response.

He wrote about having an affair that got discovered and led to an increase in attendance when it turned out there were a lot of swingers in his community. No one from the home office batted an eye. Each report grew more ludicrous until eventually he was leading a congregation of hallucinogenic mushroom-ingesting cultists.

Churches need to figure out how they will address the spiritual lives of their staffs and leadership teams. Some churches will make days of solitude or retreat times part of their staff schedules. I actually think that's a bad idea. I think we want to model the life we call our congregations to. And most people who work for the phone company or Yahoo don't get days off for prayer and fasting. I think it helps our integrity if we call the folks in our congregation to engage in practices in the same way that we ourselves pursue them.

But I do think it's good to ask certain questions of our leadership teams about their lives and relationships:

Are we able to laugh easily together?
Is there a general sense of strain and unease and preoccupation with numbers and techniques?
How many friendships get formed across departments or ministry areas?
How many people honestly have a good and close friend?
How easily do we give up in the face of difficulties?
How much energy do we have left over to bring joy to each other?
What is the level of cynicism?

The hidden curriculum in me

There is an added dimension to the hidden curriculum when it comes to my own life. One of the ironies of existence is that I am (theoretically anyway) able to view the head-to-toe-to-front-to-back body of any human being on the planet, except one. There is one human being whose body I can never directly see in its entirety.

Me.

And that's not just true of my body. It's true of the formation of my own spirit. I sometimes think the biggest spot in the world is the blind spot.

Jesus, as the greatest teacher of all time, was among other things the master of the hidden curriculum. In our churches, the line between "teaching times" and "non-teaching times" seems clear. Worship services and classes are clearly marked off; people expect prepared talks, but then in the breezeways and parking lots we're "just ourselves."

For Jesus and his little community, the line between teaching moments and "just living" got wonderfully blurred. He was so aware of his Father that for him the curriculum was never hidden, and never finished.

"What were you arguing about along the way?" he asked them, and they did not want to answer, because they were arguing about who was the greatest.

He washed their feet. He blessed a child. He spoke to a shady Samaritan lady. He got the whip in the Temple. He pointed out an impoverished widow giving her last two cents. He noticed how people jockey for seats of honor at a party.

He was always teaching. Not because he's overly pedantic. But for the same reason that you and I are always teaching. Our actions and words proclaim our beliefs, and invite other people to reflect and respond. Always. Jesus was just more aware than the rest of us.

Paul told Timothy, "Watch your life and doctrine closely" (1 Tim. 4:16). If "doctrine" makes up the formal curriculum, "life" is the hidden side. But I need people to help me see the hidden curriculum I'm teaching.

Several months ago my wife called me into our bedroom, closed the door, said we needed to talk, and brought out The List. She told me how, when our marriage is at its best, we serve together as partners, and our kids see us sharing the load, and lately I hadn't been doing that. She noted that when our marriage is at its best, we each know the details of each others' lives, and I'd been letting that slip. She named preoccupation and a "weakness of presence" in me.

She reminded me of one of our earliest dates. We went to Dancing Waters—a cheap (actually free) fountain outside Disneyland. At one point inside the lobby, I was waiting for her to come out of the restroom, and when she did I said (loudly and theatrically): "Good heavens, woman, I can't believe you've kept me waiting here hours and hours while you were in the bathroom."

She immediately replied—equally loud—"Well, I wouldn't have to if you didn't insist on having your mother living with us so I have to wait on her hand and foot." This was our second date. My reflexive thought: I like this woman!

Nancy recounted that story, and reminded me that when I am living right, there is a kind of freedom and joy in life.

"I need that guy," she said. "I miss that guy."

And she was right, of course. I didn't tell her that right away, because my spiritual gift is pouting. But what I lived with over the next several days was the pain of living in the gap between the formal curriculum I teach and the hidden curriculum I live.

The light bulb came on for me when I realized that I want the reality of the hidden curriculum in my life more than I want to be successful at teaching the formal curriculum. Not just that I'm supposed to want the hidden reality. I actually do want it. Because my illusion, my temptation, is to believe that if I'm successful enough in teaching or writing the formal curriculum, that success will lead me to the inner aliveness and joy.

I have to choose the inner life, the hidden curriculum, first. Not because I think I'm supposed to. There simply isn't enough power in "supposed to."

In the life of every teacher, every church, there is a formal and a hidden curriculum. The formal one matters. It's worth getting right. But it cannot overcome a hidden curriculum that is misshapen and twisted.

The hidden curriculum shapes souls.

John Ortberg is editor at large of Leadership and pastor of Menlo Park Presbyterian Church in Menlo Park, California.