Mission Yearbook: ‘We would never tell a kid who painted off the paper they had no future in Sunday school’

The Rev. Dr. Almeda M. Wright

At Yale Divinity School, where the Rev. Dr. Almeda M. Wright is an associate professor of Christian Education, a Lilly Foundation grant helps cohorts to try, to fail, and to learn from their failures.

“I tell students, ‘I will give you money to mess things up,” Wright said Thursday during the second plenary at the Annual Event of the Association of Partners in Christian Education. “What I’m most interested in is what you learn in the process.”

In fact, Wright is so interested she wrote a foreword for a new book, “Nobody’s Perfect: Redefining Sin and Mistakes in Adolescent Christian Education,” which was published Feb. 25.

“The authors are pushing us in this work [as Christian educators] to consider mistake-making, particularly among young people, and to wrestle with centering the concept of making mistakes,” Wright said.

Wright began her career as an electrical engineer. “A skillset of engineers is I have an uncanny high skill level of messing things up. My gift is to blow things up,” she said. “A skill required of engineers is failing well. … Make mistakes and learn from them,” she said, adding this message to the pastors and Christian educators attending APCE’s Annual Event: “Build communities and transform cultures so one can be supported in failing and encouraged to try again.”

Too often, even for young people, the stakes are too high, Wright said.

“Instead of giving them room to fail, young people are forced into rigid expectations,” she said. “Perfectionism seems to be the only safe way.”

But Christian educators “can hold mistakes and embrace mistake-making.”

“The conversation is not simply over how to get it right, or how we can best be perfect,” she said. “It’s a reminder that as we wrestle with fallibilities, there is good news: the invitation is to create ways of telling more complete narratives about who we are and how we can live together” in ways where we’re “calling out, repairing [failures] and not being so afraid of messing things up that we don’t even start.”

The third cohort group is currently in place at the young adult ministry innovation hub for people 23–29 years old. “That’s a demographic most of our curriculum has nothing to say to,” Wright said. “We bring in artists, activists, and people who are dreaming. We try to help them think about different ways of doing ministry.”

When asked to give some examples, Wright mentioned an alternative Christian community with locations in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Hartford, Connecticut. Wright focuses on the latter because of its proximity to New Haven.

“They are dealing with people suspicious of the church,” she said. “They meet in coffee shops and gyms. Sometimes there’s a sermon, and sometimes there isn’t. They do a lot of talking and a lot of listening.”

“We mess up really well. We just don’t name it that way,” she said. The arts and crafts projects for the youngest participants can bring joy to the entire faith community.

“We know how to cover the surfaces and bring out the paint and the messy art supplies,” she said. “They put the paint on the canvas, and mother has never been prouder.”

“We need to remind ourselves of the ways we curate experiences like that with less predetermined goals,” Wright said. “How do we hold space to let young people know that making mistakes is part of life? We would never tell a kid who painted off the paper they had no future in Sunday school.”

It's an approach with biblical roots.

“I like the way the Hebrew Bible is full of stories of people messing up and God not counting them out,” she said.

Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service, Interim Unified Agency (Click here to read original PNS story)

Let us join in prayer for:

• Carissa Herold, Marketing Associate, Presbyterian Women 
• Nell Herring, Mission Specialist II for Volunteer Ministries, Presbyterian Disaster Assistance, Interim Unified Agency 

Let us pray:

God, thank you for the ripple effect on lives when we engage Scripture. Continue to encourage us “to take hold of life that really is life.” As we learn to share our faith and serve our communities, teach us how to be the church — rich in good works, generous, and ready to share. Amen.