Habit Training: The Path to Maturity in Christ

Do we really do habit training at Clapham? It is undeniable that some clear effect is gained; observing a Clapham classroom is an altogether different experience from any other school. Yet it is also true that the methods we employ in habit training are often not what immediately comes to our minds when we hear the phrase ‘habit training’. This is in large part due, no doubt, to the reality that incredibly few of us have actually been trained by a healthy version of it. I certainly did not!
However, there is another reason: the under-cover character of much habit training. You see, habit training is not to be isolated from the rest of the learning process that goes on at Clapham. It is secretly lurking throughout all our subjects as we facilitate their interaction with living ideas. The intellectual and moral power of distinguishing between good and evil—and loving the good—is a natural twin of habit training. And both have the ultimate goal of maturity. The writer of Hebrews implies as much in an aside to his readers in 5:11-14:

We have much to say about this, but it is hard to explain because you are slow to learn. In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God’s word all over again. You need milk, not solid food! Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness. But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.

At Clapham we are endeavoring, by the constant use of all knowledge in a morally committed way, to train our students to distinguish good from evil, in order that they might grow up into maturity and not remain infants. In spiritual terms maturity does not come naturally; time itself will not bring it as a matter of course. An education, defined as the coupling of spiritual interaction with living ideas and habit training, is the thing that is suited to that purpose in the life of the Christian child.