• Journal of Christian Education in Korea
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• v.76
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• pp.27-49
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• 2023

Purpose of study: The purpose of this paper is to gain insight into the alternative possibility of Christian children's education overcoming the current church school paradigm namely schooling system by examining the characteristics and the direction of children's spiritual education. Research content and method: This paper is a review of the characteristics of children's spiritual education and ways to embody those characteristics. Therefore, it consists of two parts: the characteristics of children's spiritual education and the search for ways to embody those characteristics. First, children's spiritual education is a "formative" model that aims to form children's spirituality based on children's spirituality research that views children as 'spiritual beings.' This model specifically has three core orientations: 'experience', 'meeting God', and 'immersion'. In other words, children's spiritual education pursues 'experience rather than knowledge', pursues the experience of meeting God in the second person rather than teaching third-person knowledge about God, and values the spiritual moment of immersion more than anything else. Second, it searches for specific ways and methods through which those three core goals could be implemented, and found that they were 'sense,' 'liturgy,' and 'story.' The sense becomes a path that evokes experience, the liturgy becomes a place for 'meeting God,' and 'story' becomes a key path to 'immersion.' And when the three are organically combined with each other, the goals pursued by children's spiritual education can be holistically converged. Conclusions and Suggestions: Through these considerations, it found that the core values and direction of education are consistently maintained in children's spiritual education, from children's understanding to education methods. It also figured out that the direction should be shared not only by children's spiritual education but also by all who pursue holistic faith education: 'what to experience' rather than 'what to teach', 'liturgy' rather than 'teaching', 'story' rather than 'explanation', and 'sensory' experiences rather than 'abstract' knowledge.