Is It the Church’s Job to Teach History?

I’ve had the joy of teaching Sunday school for the same cohort of kids over the past eight years. I’ve watched them develop from preschoolers held rapt by our hedgehog puppet, Hedgie, whose antics livened up our weekly Bible stories, to the independent and thoughtful fourth graders they are now. When I was invited to help adapt the Covenant’s Justice Journey for Kids curriculum (written by a brilliant team of all-stars) for our church’s use, I was thrilled that the denomination and my congregation at Highrock Covenant Church would be elevating this core component of the gospel to teach our kids—but I was also daunted.

As I perused the curriculum, from the Bible passages to the discussion questions, it became clear how much our kids need to understand historical context in order to begin to grasp issues of justice. As Professor Soong-Chan Rah writes in Prophetic Lament, “Hunger, homelessness, and racism are very real injustices, but they can be misunderstood when taken in an abstract form. One of the most effective means of disengaging the church from the work of justice is making injustice a philosophical concept.”

It is crucial that we understand how our society is engineered to maintain power differentials and economic inequality via exclusionary housing practices, tax benefits to the wealthy, widely discrepant public school funding, and other policies (see Matthew Desmond’s Poverty, By America, for further reading). Too often, individual lenses end up inadvertently blaming the victim or rendering them incapable, rather than acknowledging the entrenched societal structures that have caused inequality over decades.

Some might say it’s the job of schools to teach history, and certainly, I hope that schools continue to broaden their history curriculums to include marginalized voices and perspectives. But growing up in Iowa, I received no instruction related to Africa, Asia, or colonialism in my public school. The civil rights movement was taught as a past era in which racism was conquered. It was up to me as an adult to learn my people’s own history because we had been erased from the educational curriculum, despite Asians accounting for 60 percent of the world’s population.

We reap the false blessings of increased convenience, decreased costs, and greater luxury.

My hope is that our kids learn from both historical and modern-day examples of economic injustice, racial discrimination, and inequality, so that they’ll realize that those of us with privilege actually benefit from the same unjust systems that hurt others as we reap the false blessings of increased convenience, decreased costs, and greater luxury. For true spiritual formation, those of us who are privileged must recognize our complicity. Otherwise, we will “help” individuals, pat ourselves on the backs, and remain willfully heedless of the systems that perpetuate inequality. 

It’s why I’m so excited about the opportunity that the Justice Journey provides—and why I hope we can extend that approach to church instruction for adults, where we explicitly name how history has shaped the structures of our society, rather than maintain the disembodied, individualistic relationship with God box that evangelical Christianity often lives within. As the church, we have an opportunity to highlight important pieces of under-told history and explore how Jesus might speak into that history, to examine societal structures and ask ourselves whether they facilitate God’s shalom for all people.

I love that our church has offered extracurricular learning opportunities to explore Black history and Asian American history—I appreciate how rare that is in faith spaces. I’d love for that history to receive more prominence in pulpits on Sunday mornings because everyone needs to hear it, not just those who self-select to register for supplemental courses. As Dr. Rah writes in Prophetic Lament, “The inability of the American church to deal with historical reality” is one of the reasons racism remains a persistent problem: “A deeply segregated church does not appear without history.”

If we don’t know where we have come from, the struggles of our ancestors, and the broader context in which we exist, we will be unable to bring those unrecognized parts of ourselves to God. Knowing our history means we can trace our origins, recognize generational and communal trauma, repent, and heal. And knowing our neighbors’ histories allows us to enter into genuine, restorative, loving relationships with them. As Professor Daniel D. Lee writes in Doing Asian American Theology, “The failure to bring our whole selves into God’s presence means that there are parts of ourselves that are not reconciled to God, missing from God’s shalom.”

It’s never too early to begin and it’s never too late to start learning our own and our world’s complex, heartbreaking, and sometimes hopeful history. When we probe our past together as a church, we may better see ourselves, our neighbors, and God—and become agents of shalom ourselves.