Discipleshipbuilding & Christian Classical Education (Part I of III)
Laying the Keel (on God's Word) and Constructing Compartments (Grammar Stage)
**Admin Note** For those three of you who’ve been clamoring for a post for sometime, I appreciate your patience. It has been a busy spring for me which has required a fair amount of study, reading, and writing for my “day job” as an associate pastor in my church. I teach fairly regularly which requires a great deal of study on my part. There are also many opportunities to meet with members in the congregation for various reasons. I have also taken on the role of tutor in a christian classical education homeschool co-op for next year - 10th grade level: British literature, Latin 2, traditional logic and Socratic dialogue, algebra and geometry, Western cultural history, and biology. In that role, I will facilitate discussions once a week to serve as an adjunct to their learning throughout the week at home. Finally, I have felt rather unwell for sometime, but I appear to be coming out of that rut.
Having been a part of the aforementioned community for a few years, a family recently asked me to give remarks to the graduation a few weeks ago of three remarkable young women, including their daughter. Over the next few posts, I’ll expand on those thoughts. The next few posts will weave the remarks (15 minutes) with some expanded thoughts here and there.
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Good afternoon. You briefly “met” me earlier as I had to step in for the opening prayer. I did have time then to properly introduce myself. Who am I? I’m an adopted son of God, who was gifted the privilege to be husband to Erika, father to a son and daughter (rising Challenge I and Challenge A students respectively). I’m a pastor, and next year I’ll be a Challenge II tutor. Finally, and somewhat important to these remarks I am a retired Navy Captain - specifically a surface warfare officer - warship driver. But this day is not about me, so let’s take in all mooring lines and get underway.”
Young ladies, as you prepare to get underway, or put out to sea to face the cultural winds, waves, and hidden reefs of the wide world out there, on the next leg of the voyage plan our Lord has set before you, I’d like to use an illustration that I think frames well what you, your parents, families and communities have been doing in this unique manner of education.
First, today’s celebration of your graduation is akin to the commissioning of a Navy warship. In civilian speak, this means to put a ship into active service, welcoming it into the fleet. Once commissioned, a ship becomes eligible for further training, missions, and ultimately deployment. Further training for both of you is attending college, where you will hone the keen edge of the strong education you’ve already received and learn to expertly wield the weapon system of your mind with greater precision. Well before any ship’s commissioning is another time-honored Navy custom and tradition: the keel laying.
For at least the past seven years or so each of you have been undergoing a process of formation in many ways analogous to warship-building. Of course, you are not inanimate objects, so let’s use the portmanteau (that is a smooshing of two words into a new one) of “disciple-ship building.”
That method was Christian classical education within Classical Conversations, whose beloved model is “To Know God and to Make Him Known.”
On this graduation day this disciple-ship commissioning echoes the Great Commission.
Matthew 28:16–20 (The Great Commission)
16 Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. 17 And when they saw him they worshiped him, but some doubted. 18 And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
If Jesus had been a Sailor, and let’s be honest he didn’t need to sail really because he could walk on water and rebuke storms, I could imagine him saying instead of “Go therefore,” “Get underway and make disciples of all nations.”
I digress. Knowing God is the foundational step of your education, this discipleship-building process. In warship-building the first, arguably most important step, even considering all technically impressive weapons systems we later add, is to lay the keel.
A ship’s keel is the main structural member offering strength and stability. It is the backbone of the ship, around and upon which everything else is erected. The keel serves as a counterbalance to the wind and the waves. It is the foundation of the ship.
Jesus tells us the importance of having the right, solid foundation in Matthew 7
Matthew 7:24–27 (Build Your House on the Rock)
24 “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. 25 And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock.
He goes on to warn what happens when that foundation is not a good one. My formerly naval mind thinks of these famous words in this frame: Everyone then who hears these words of his and does them will be like a wise disciple-shipbuilder who built his disciple-ship with a strong keel. And the wind and waves came and beat on that ship, but it did not capsize, because it had been built on that strong keel.
Because your parents were wise shipbuilders, they heeded this wisdom well. Your years in Classical Conversations has been the process of constructing a disciple-ship based on the strong keel of hearing God’s word taught in your home, in your churches, in your bible studies, and reinforced in weekly community through the vaunted classical education Trivium.
From that keel of God’s Word, the Trivium has been the means by which the rest of your disciples-ship — hull, compartments, superstructure and your weapon systems — has been constructed.
What is the Trivium? It comprises the foundational liberal arts: grammar, logic (or dialectic), and rhetoric. I’ll define each of those terms in turn.
Grammar comprises the building blocks of any subject. Typically we think of grammar related to language such as parts of speech and what their functions are. However, if one considers how one begins to understand any area of human knowledge and activity, each of those areas have their own languages, their own grammars. For example, there is grammar (even an ABCs) of compartments on a warship: storage & stowage e.g., fuel storage and service tanks, hazardous material storage rooms, ammunition magazines; command & control: radio rooms, combat information center; living spaces; engineering machinery spaces, etc. Recalling my attempts as young Naval Officer, not educated classically mind you, to learn this rather foreign grammar, I can see I used what we in Classical Conversations calls the Five Core Habits of Grammar (Naming, Attending, Memorizing, Expressing, Storytelling) to learn my ship. I had to learn the names of the different compartments as well as the names of various components and equipment in them, valves, pumps, hatches, doors, colors that identified that different systems fuel versus fresh water, etc. I had to attend or pay attention to the details of their differences, I had to memorize those details, expressing their interrelation through drawing system diagrams from memory even before I fully understood the operations of those systems. I even had to tell the story of being a molecule of air traveling from intake through a gas turbine propulsion engine out of the exhaust.
In this plan of education, think of the grammar stage at the construction of various compartments of knowledge, arranged and built atop that keel of God’s Word. Next comes the process of making it all really fit together, the integration. That is the logic or dialectic stage I’ll discuss in Part II.
Having spent most of my career in shipbuilding, this was very enjoyable for me. The keel is indeed critical to the survival of a ship!
Good to have you back--and sharing