GERALDINE FAGAN

Though hugged by the scenic River Danube and the now-invisible border with prosperous Austria, Petržalka retains an air of Iron Curtain suburbia. As if built to illustrate linear perspective, rows of thirteen-story brutalist apartment blocks vanish toward a gray horizon. Tourists head for the baroque churches and cobbled alleys of central Bratislava just three miles away, not here. 

Slovakia’s most densely populated neighborhood, Petržalka has many schools, similarly oblong and concrete. But one, almost camouflaged by a wall-sized Communist mosaic celebrating sun, flowers, and studious children, invites its pupils “to explore Christianity in an environment of free inquiry.” Those fooled by the mosaic might be struck by the sign above the main entrance: The C.S. Lewis Bilingual High School [Slovak: Bilinválne Gymnázium C.S. Lewisa]. 

Slovakia is facing a rising tide of secularism. Between 2001 and 2011, national censuses showed a 10.6 percent rise in those declaring no religious affiliation.1 In a separate 2011 survey conducted in secondary schools in ten Slovak cities, only 15 percent of teenagers said they trusted the Church.2 

This is a far cry from Christian expectations when the Velvet Revolution of 1989 ushered a peaceful end to Communist rule in then-Czechoslovakia. Head teacher of the C.S. Lewis School, Dušan Jaura, well remembers those days. “Everybody was happy that now there will be freedom, and there will be more and more people in the churches,” he recalled to the East-West Church Report in his office. And yet, “exactly the opposite happened.” Particularly in the larger cities, a once substantial core of committed believers is shrinking, he notes. “This zeitgeist is present everywhere.” 

Still, the Slovak picture is not simply one of indifference to Christianity. In the more recent census, 76 percent of respondents identified with a particular church or denomination (largely Roman  or Eastern Rite Catholic, with approximately nine percent Protestant and one percent Orthodox.) In the 2011 school survey, 54 per cent acknowledged Jesus to be the Son of God. Only six percent said they never thought about and were not interested in God.3

The “gray zone”

Back in Communist Czechoslovakia, explains Jaura, the committed core of Christians was surrounded by a tiny “gray zone” of people barely in touch with the life of the Church, but attracted to its values. With the fall of Communism, that “gray zone” has grown very much larger. Here, Jaura points to Tomáš Halík, a prominent Czech Catholic priesttheologian and former advisor to Václav Havel, the leading Velvet Revolutionary and late Czech president. Finding religiosity “at the periphery of the ecclesial religion and beyond its visible borders,” Halík has argued that enthusiasm for Christian values is not absent from famously secular Czech society, but “has just lost its traditional shape.”4 In neighboring Slovakia–an independent nation since 1993 but still in step with many Czech social trends–the C.S. Lewis School, says Jaura, “is very much operating in this area of the ‘gray zone’.” In keeping with what Halík identifies as the “shy religiosity” of society, he adds, “We are ‘shy’ in our approach.”5 

Dušan Jaura started life far from even the “gray zone.” Raised in a Communist family whose beliefs he did not question, he became a Christian while fulfilling his military service during 1985-87. At that time, Jaura saw Christianity as “a religion of old ladies who are afraid to die,” but then befriended a fellow conscript who revealed after some time that he was a Christian. This was a shock: his friend was not only not an old lady, but also highly intelligent. Still convinced he could change the world for the better through Communism, Jaura tried for many months to persuade his friend to join the Party, he told the East-West Church Report. “I was not able to persuade him, and after a while I did a life experiment.” 

Postulating the existence of God, Jaura listed everything he had against Him. Then one night, with his list and a candle, he leaped over the barrack wall and went to a nearby cross on a hill. Jaura had imagined himself reading his list of objections by candlelight and entering into a dialogue; “maybe it was a little bit romantic.” But strong winds meant he was unable to light the candle, “so I had to recite into the darkness from memory. And I was quite shocked, because there was some kind of special experience. I realized there was something that actually understood me, that I’m somehow known by somebody.” At dawn, Jaura returned from the hill and woke his conscript friend. “I don’t know what happened, but probably I became a Christian,” he told him, and began reading the Bible. 

Soon there were problems with the Communist secret police. Jaura’s own father was also “very afraid of what happened” and grew angry when his son decided to study theology in 1988. But in little more than a year Communist Czechoslovakia was no more, and by the time Jaura graduated in newly independent Slovakia in 1993, “the whole world had changed.” Yet the churches had not. Following the Velvet Revolution, he recalls, “They didn’t know how to communicate with society, because they had been oppressed. They operated only in the private realm.” While wanting to be open in the new conditions, they did not know how, and so behaved as if they were still under restrictions. “We call it, ‘the grip of the open palm.’”

People of good quality

Yet Jaura had encountered a quite different attitude from his spiritual advisor Milan Jurčo, who was a pastor with the evangelical Church of the Brethren [Slovak: Cirkev bratská] until his death in 1989. Jurčo’s granddaughter Mária Kulisková–now a teacher of religion and ethics at the C.S. Lewis School–points to her grandfather’s steadfastness despite repeated secret police interrogations and several years’ forced labor in Bulgaria. “Even under socialism, he said that we are not second-class citizens,” recalls Jaura, “that we have to be active, and society has to recognize us as people of good quality who can contribute.” By the early 1990s the Church of the Brethren was seeking to put these words into practice by developing what Jaura describes as “platforms” in secular Bratislava society. One long-standing member of the church, Milan Cicel, played a crucial role. During the Communist years he had liaised secretly with the international Christian mission organization The Navigators. Once the Velvet Revolution broke out, Cicel told East-West Church Report, he and at least 10 others who were ready to work as full-time missionaries “assumed that right now, when there is freedom, our contacts would intensify, and we will use the freedom somehow.” Instead, he recalls, they were surprised to find no Navigators’ leadership available to give direction to their ministry. It took a few years before they understood the message: “That we are actually on our own; that we have to think how we are going to live right now in freedom.”

Challenges of freedom 

There were two immediate challenges. They could not follow the American model of approaching church members for gift income for one simple reason, said Cicel: “No one had any money!” Second, “Missionaries do not have a good reputation in this country.” Here, Cicel mimicked an average Slovak’s response: “Being a missionary means you are paid by some kind of foreign agency to twist my mind! We’ve had enough of those; for 40 years the Communists were trying to make us swallow something we don’t like!” This spurred Cicel and his friends into developing a new philosophy: “To set up platforms that would be both a genuine service to the community and incorporate the values we build our lives on. That’s how the C.S. Lewis School started.” 

The association with British Christian writer C.S. Lewis was an obvious choice for a Christian venture seeking to engage with wider society. In twentieth-century Christian thought, notes Cicel, Lewis was “the first dialoguing person.” He could “communicate Christianity in the secular world in a special way,” points out Jaura. First, the Church of the Brethren opened Narnia Elementary School–named after Lewis’ renowned series of children’s books–in Bratislava in 1993. Together with a sister school in Pezinok, some 15 miles away, it now has 700 pupils. Founded in 2004, the C.S. Lewis Bilingual High School itself has 400 pupils. While they receive some state funding, these schools are private; at the C.S. Lewis School, annual fees are 2,000 Euros (approximately $2,300). While this is prohibitive for many, Jaura acknowledges, a 2017 scholarship scheme has begun to admit those with financial difficulties. “We don’t want to live in a sociological bubble.” 

The school’s distinctive character is apparent at the front door. Beside a circular welcome desk, a world map pinpoints locations where alumni have studied, including France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, as well as Boston, Minneapolis, New York, San Diego, and Tampa in the United States. The central foyer beyond is set aside for table tennis. Briefly a teacher in the building when it still housed a Communist-era school, Dušan Jaura recalls prevalent signage reprimanding pupils for loitering in the corridors. Now this is positively encouraged. “The space outside the classrooms is as important to us as what is inside the classrooms,” Jaura explains. The space is punctuated by relaxed sitting areas with clusters of brightly colored chairs and beanbags. It also contains the Eagle and Child Café, named after the Oxford pub where C.S. Lewis socialized with J.R.R. Tolkien and other writer friends. This is run entirely by pupils, who also produce its baked goods.  

The usual subjects–science, history, foreign languages, and IT–are taught here. But the school places particular emphasis on character development through mentoring. In the future, explains Jaura, “many things will be replaced by technologies, so you might not need to go to a place just for  information. The question then is how schools should operate in order to survive. And it seems to us that what will still be very important for students is to have some kind of guidance.” Ján Ban, a younger member of the Church of the Brethren, is one of the mentors. His counselling takes place in the context of numerous extracurricular activities, such as sports, drama, and movie clubs. The pupils “don’t leave this school after 3 pm,” Ban tells the East-West Church Report. “But it’s more the environment than the activities– they feel like this is an environment where they belong.” “They want to live here, some of them!” quips Jaura. 

Christian component

The school’s Christian component comes as part of a religion and ethics course unique to the school, which each student follows for 90 minutes a week over five years, from ages 14-19. In the first year the goal is simply to make “the classes like a community,” says Ban, where pupils “understand they can talk freely and openly about their personal stuff, and they are not judged by other people. We open big subjects like family, relationships, and the meaning of life.” The second year examines the whole issue of human personality, using material such as Richard Rohr’s The Enneagram: A Christian Perspective to consider positive and negative behavior.6 The third year examines themes such as happiness and morality, using as a textbook Os Guinness’ Steering Through the Chaos: Vice and Virtue in an Age of Moral Confusion. 7

At this juncture, classes begin discussion of the seven deadly sins. “It’s funny,” observes Ban, that–while most pupils do not subscribe to objective morality–“they really understand the concept of sin when we present it, and they accept it.” He sees the most powerful transformation in this third year. “Maybe because they struggle with life–they are trying to have good relationships with their parents, but they are failing; they want to have a good future, but they are really lost. And suddenly they see this as a kind of answer.” Jaura agrees: “They understand it’s definitely something connected with their lives because they understand what is bad about being in sin, in the sense that Martin Luther understood it as being incurvatio in seipsum [Latin: turned in on oneself].” The fourth year follows another Os Guinness work as a textbook, The Journey: Our Quest for Faith and Meaning.8

 This contains passages considering the meaning of life by historical figures from Plato to Martin Luther King. It is not until the fifth year that pupils focus on Christianity specifically. “We are trying to make space to talk about Christianity and religion freely and openly,” says Ban. “We see Christianity here as an offer, as an opportunity, but we don’t push it.” The goal is to present Christianity in a language the pupils understand, agrees Jaura, “not as our, but their topics.”

Gauging the impact

What is the impact of this approach? While only a minority of pupils–20-30 percent–are Christian at least by background, Ban believes the course has a great influence on the way they think and live their lives. “But it’s really hard to measure it. We don’t know how many become Christian.” 

While the impact is indeed hard to gauge, the East-West Church Report gleaned some impressions by briefly interviewing two older pupils outside the school. Clearly benefitting from the school’s bilingual status–both spoke nearly fluent English– they were forthcoming in their views of the religion and ethics component. Sporting a biker jacket with Ramones and System of a Down buttons, Dóra, 16, said she did not believe in God. But she appreciated the C.S. Lewis School’s approach when contrasted with that of her previous, regular state school. “It was basically blind following, and we had to believe everything they said,” she recalled. “That’s what I like about this school, that they are not pressuring this, they want you to believe in what you actually believe in.”

Tall with a blond ponytail, Samuel, 17, said that he definitely believes in God. “But it’s a bit different with the dogma,” he continued to the East-West Church Report. “I have my values, which are very close to Christian ones, maybe the same ones, but I don’t like somehow the blind following of the crowd in the Christian Church.” He also praised the C.S. Lewis School’s approach. “They want you to think critically about everything, that’s the thing. First you are going through the human psychology, and you are talking about yourself and community. Then you jump to the question of justice and morality. And it’s very good, because you’re not just learning something that you don’t even know what it is about.” Despite evident excitement at talking to a native speaker of British English, Samuel then apologetically interrupted the conversation to help a person in a wheelchair he had spotted having difficulty ascending the ramp to the school’s entrance. 

Dóra characterized everything in the school as “real;” both Jaura and Ban similarly stressed to the East-West Church Report that pupils should respond to real questions. Education has succeeded, the two teachers believe, if pupils become seekers. “We can’t just say that Jesus is the answer,” sums up Ban. “What is the question?”

Notes:

1. Dana Hanesová, “Religiosity and Its Current Educational Context in Slovakia and the Czech Republic,” Hungarian Educational Research Journal, vol. 3 (2013), no. 4, 5. 
2.  Ibid., 8. 
3.  Ibid., 5, 8. 
4. Martin Koči and Pavel Roubík, “Searching the Altar of an Unknown God: Tomáš Halík on Faith in a Secular Age,” in Tomáš Halík and Pavel Hošek, eds., A Czech Perspective on Faith in a Secular Age (Washington, D.C.: The Council for Research on Values and Philosophy, 2015), 109. 
5. Ibid.
6. Richard Rohr and Andreas Ebert, The Enneagram: A Christian Perspective (New York: Crossroad, 2001).
7. Os Guinness, Steering Through the Chaos: Vice and Virtue in an Age of Moral Confusion (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2000). 
8. Os Guinness, The Journey: Our Quest for Faith and Meaning (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2001).

Geraldine Fagan is editor of the East-West Church Report.