Harris Model: Religious Education
The Harris Model for Religious Education
Note Well: Religious education (including clergy formation) within the Independent Catholic Diocese
of Rumney Marsh is conducted in the spirit of the model proposed by the late Maria Harris
…the church's educational ministry has been embodied
and lived in five classical forms: didache, koinonia, kerygma, diakonia, and leiturgia.
If we would educate to all of these forms, as well as through all of them, then attending only to one of them
-- didache (schooling or teaching/instruction), or for that matter leiturgia (worship and prayer) -- simply will not do.
Instead, the fullness of the pastoral vocation will
demand that any ecclesial education must be one that educates:
- To koinonia (community and communion) by engaging in the forms of
community and communion;
- To leiturgia (worship and prayer) by engaging in the forms of prayer
and worship and spirituality;
- To kerygma (proclaiming the word of God) by attention to and practicing
and incarnating the kerygma, "Jesus is risen," in the speech of our own lives, especially the speech of advocacy;
- To diakonia (service and outreach) by attention to our won service
and reaching out to others, personally and communally, locally and globally;
- To didache (teaching and learning) by attention to the most appropriate
forms of teaching and learning (including schooling) in our own communities.
Should any of these be left out as full partners in
the educational work of ministry, should any of these be downplayed, should any of these be exalted to the denigration of
others, we would not be able to educate fully. All are needed.
-- Maria Harris, Fashion Me a People: Curriculum
in the Church [Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1989], pp. 43-44.
