Back in the day I was a good student. I made the honor roll, won academic awards, was inducted into the national honor society.  But back in the day, before SOLs, AR, and “No Child Left Behind” (or as I like to call it “We’ll Just Sit Here Until Everyone Catches Up”) you could be a good student and still have a life. I did most of my homework in study hall, did the rest as soon as I got home, and had time to shoot some hoops, read a book, watch a “Hogan’s Heroes” rerun, call a friend, work on a sermon, listen to “Frampton Comes Alive” on my 8-track stereo etc…  In High School we usually had a 10 page paper to write for our core classes. 

 For each paper you received two grades, one for content and one for form.  I always got an A for content, and a C for form, which meant I got a B on the paper, which, with A’s on the tests meant I got and A for the class.  My friend would say “If you had typed it over you could have made an A on that paper,” to which I would reply “If I had typed it over I would have missed Hogan’s Heroes, besides I didn’t need an A on the paper, I only needed a B.  My 95% is just as much an A for this class as your 99%.”  “Well it shouldn’t be!” he would say and storm off.

            Those idyllic, bucolic days of my youth are history – gone with the hum of the Selectric typewriter, and the whir of flipping pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica.  Now-a-days students carry backpacks full of homework heavier than themselves.  Now they have long-term projects which culminate in multimedia presentations combining power-point with rap and drama in an effort to explain the Treaty of Ghent.  Such projects can not be accomplished alone.  Now-a-days our children receive the bulk of their grade for group projects.

            If I were a student today, I’d crash and burn.  Given the choice between a life and an A, I’d probably choose a life.  Besides, there are fewer things I am worse at than collaboration.  I know how to lead, and I know how to follow.  I know how to play on a team where you have your own, clearly defined, responsibilities, and you watch each other’s backs.  But collaboration – I’m neither normal enough, nor nice enough to make that work.  I despise group projects. “My children should be responsible for their work and their work alone!”  I have often exclaimed (sometimes to the teachers, even).  It is hard enough to keep track of your own children’s homework, but when that homework is tied to the work of five other kids, three of whom, you suspect, swam up from the shallow end of the gene-pool, the task becomes unmanageable.

            Senator Clinton wrote a well-known book “It Takes a Village.”  I wanted to write a response entitled “Raise Your Own Lousy Kids” but I thought it inappropriate for a minister of the Gospel.  I was complaining to Tom Ritchie about group projects a while back and he replied “That’s the one thing they do in school that is really like adult life.”

            Well said.  Point taken.

            This got me thinking about the church.  We are responsible for our own choices.  Our response to Jesus must be our own – no one else can make it for us.  Yet we are a family, a body, and members of each other.  The Bible is clear on this: faithfulness is a personal matter (Ezekiel 18.5ff), and a corporate one (I Corinthians 12.12ff)- an individual and a group project all at once.  This is hard – difficult to balance.  If I can barely restrain my bad impulses, how can I be responsible for everyone else’s?  What I want to know is this – how will I be graded?  How do I earn an A, and get to heaven?

            And, of course the answer is that I alone, and we together will not earn anything.  We are saved freely, by the grace of God, through our faith response to the blood of Jesus Christ (Ephesians 2.5ff).  A refusal to take responsibility for my own choices, and for the burdens of my extended family because it is all so overwhelming is faithlessness – plain, simple faithlessness because the strength to bear up is not my own, but God’s (Psalm 28.7).  Giving up, then, does not reflect a lack of faith in myself so much as a lack of faith in God.

            And without faith, it is impossible to please Him (Hebrews11.6).