One was the work of a sociologist, Earl Brewer, who, with the aid of a theologian and a ministries specialist, sought by an extensive
content analysis of sermons and other addresses given in a rural and an urban church to differentiate the patterns of belief and value constituting those two parishes.67 The second was the inquiry of a religious educator, C. Ellis Nelson, who departed
from a
curricular definition of education to envision the congregation as a «primary society» whose integral culture conditions its young and old members.68 James Dittes, the third author, described more fully the nature of the culture encountered in the local church.
In a multiyear process, our
content leadership teams (one teacher representative
from each school) designed a set of
curricular resources aligned with the Common Core initiative.