Growing Up Christian

McGuffey’s Readers. Public school. Family prayers. In the 1800s, these were primary — and successful — strategies by which children learned to become Christians. Sunday school was developed to support what was already being done at home and in school. Today many churches still rely on the nineteenth-century model to encourage young people to become disciples of Christ.

In Growing Up Christian, Dr. C. Ellis Nelson explores why these strategies are inadequate for the twenty-first century and offers practical, specific guidance for congregations who wish to nurture disciples of Christ more effectively. Part 1 describes the pattern of influences that form our images of God. Given the way culture and family influence the rising generation, Part 2 outlines a strategy for nurturing disciples that capitalizes on the persuasive power of the congregation in fellowship, worship, and instruction. A detailed discussion guide further assists congregations who wish to form a study group to assess and improve their Christian education.

C. Ellis Nelson, research professor of Christian education at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, has written many books and articles about the biblical and theological basis for Christian education. Dr. Nelson has been a research fellow at Oxford University and has lectured in many seminaries and universities in North America, Australia, and Europe. His book How Faith Matures was named one of the ten best religious books of 1989.

Ellis Nelson has thought longer and better about Christian education than anyone else on the planet. After a lifetime as a distinguished church educator, this book offers what I take to be his "final answer" to the crisis of church education in a secular culture. Nelson thinks in large terms of a new cultural context wherein the infrastructure of church nurture has largely disintegrated. Nelson urges that in the twenty-first century fresh ways of nurture, socialization, and incorporation must be undertaken with careful intentionality. He focuses on the informal influences of home, family, and church community and on the formal influences of educational and liturgic enterprises. Nelson knows how "up hill" such a venture now is; but he also knows, full well, that Christian nurture matches profound human hungers, and so we do not lose heart. Nelson as a practical theologian thinks practically in a way that will support and summon other educational practitioners. His "final word" is a splendid, powerful, grace-filled word.

—Walter Brueggemann
Columbia Theological Seminary

C. Ellis Nelson has spent a lifetime thinking deeply about how children, youth and adults are nurtured in Christian faith and its way of life. This new book is full of wisdom concerning this crucial question. The congregation as a whole is the key. Parents, pastors and teachers all have crucial roles to play. Nelson shows how we can all work together to nurture Christian disciples in the twenty-first century.