The Protestant educational work in Germany offers a wealth of qualified offers for different ages and phases of life, from day care centers to youth and confirmation work, schools and religious education to adult education. The Chamber for Education and Upbringing, Children and Youth of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD) advertises in the publication “Religious Educational Biographies Enable. A direction indicator for the networked control of Protestant education” that the individual fields of action are more closely networked and mutually relate more clearly to one another in the interest of comprehensive control.
A central requirement of the text is that religious educational work should not only be designed for a certain age and phase of life, but should also be biographically connected. To do this, their content and concepts would have to be consistently geared to the life situations and the diversity of the people for whom these offers are made. The focus should be on topics that are formative and relevant for the addressees in the respective phase of life. Those responsible for concepts in the field of Protestant education are therefore called upon to perceive, promote and stimulate people’s religious educational biographies.
With regard to church development, the church as a whole faces the challenge of reaching people regardless of age, gender or social status. According to the foreword to the text, “It is important to invite people of all ages and in the most varied of life situations to share their own biography with others. When it comes to questions of belonging, there is also a need to find biographical points of contact and deepen relationships. Particular importance is attached to evangelical educational work with children, confirmation candidates, young people, families and adults. Your decisive probation horizon is not institutional, but determined by life history.”
Against this background, the text is primarily aimed at people and institutional actors who assume control responsibility in the field of Protestant educational work, who design and develop it further. Using specific test questions, they can reflect on whether and to what extent they already take this biographical perspective into account. But it is also addressed to all those who deal with educational biographies in educational science and pedagogy in general and are interested in religious contexts and influences.
The text was published by Evangelische Verlagsanstalt and can be obtained from bookshops for 9 euros (ISBN 978-3-374-07112-8).
The text is available for free download at www.ekd.de/bildungsbiografien.
Hanover, January 13, 2022
Press office of the EKD
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