Date

1-2016

Department

School of Education

Degree

Doctor of Education (EdD)

Chair

James Swezey

Keywords

Faith Development, Formation, Spiritual, Spiritual Nurture

Disciplines

Education | Educational Assessment, Evaluation, and Research | Educational Methods | Educational Psychology | Other Education | Religion

Abstract

Many Christian schools provide solid academic environments for adolescents. The programming promises to deliver an education to nurture the human soul. This qualitative, transcendental, phenomenological study was for the purpose of discovering how spiritual nurture in Christian high schools aided and encouraged faith development. Christian high school is the lived experience of adolescents going to school with spiritual nurture at the heart of their programming. The participants were 15 adolescents who attended a Christian high school that implemented spiritual nurture by use of prayer, worship, biblically-integrated curriculum, Bible study, teacher-student relationships, holistic correction, and peer relationships. The epoche was the isolation of my own thoughts about spiritual nurture in Christian high schools; my own thoughts did not become a formal part of this study. In phenomenological style I organized significant statements and then clustered those statements into themes: competent professionals, student mentors, like family, building blocks of faith, confirmation of faith, steeping in Stage Three, and walking towards Stage Four. I found synthesis between textual and structural variations (Moustakas, 1994). Findings not anticipated were how readily participants were to talk about personal problems, and also the comparison they have automatically with their public school peers. What the participants experienced regarding SN in their CHS was careful heard through interviews and journals and strengthened through observations.

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