Adult Education

Ladue Chapel’s Adult Education Program offers a vibrant and welcoming space for lifelong learning, spiritual growth, and community engagement. Classes meet on Sunday mornings before worship and are typically offered in four-week sessions. Organized into four tracks—Bible & Religion, Contemporary Issues, Arts & Literature, and Personal Growth—these courses provide opportunities to explore faith, culture, and life’s big questions with the guidance of experienced instructors and the fellowship of others.

What you'll Learn and Experience

Bible & Religion

Explore Scripture, Christian theology, and world religions through engaging courses led by scholars from local seminaries and universities. This track invites thoughtful reflection and dialogue on matters of faith and spirituality.

Contemporary Issues

Connect your faith to the world around you. Classes in this track examine timely topics—from local community concerns to national debates and global challenges like climate change—led by experts and practitioners in the field.

Arts & Literature

Celebrate creativity through courses that explore religious and secular works of art, film, literature, and music. Instructors from local arts organizations and schools bring rich cultural insight and spiritual depth.

Personal Growth

Deepen your understanding of yourself and your relationships through classes on health, wellness, parenting, aging, and more. Sessions are taught by trusted professionals from the medical, counseling, and consulting communities.

UPcoming Speakers and Presentations

Lance Jennott | Sept. 13, 20, 27 | 9:15 AM
Class: Matthew's Jewish Jesus
9:15 AM, Fireside Room
Class Description: Despite the fact that Jesus and his earliest followers were Jews, his teachings quickly became a new religion in their own right, distinct from Judaism. While the Gospel of Matthew has long enjoyed pride of place as the first book in the Christian New Testament, it witnesses historically to an early form of Jewish Christianity that flourished in the period before the birth of Christianity as a largely non-Jewish religion. This course will focus on Matthew’s special presentation of Jesus as the long-awaited messiah of Israel, his depiction of Jesus as a devout, even radical teacher of Torah, and Jesus’s arguments with competing forms of Judaism, such as Pharisees, over matters of divorce, remarriage, and sex. We will also look at how Matthew participates in ancient controversies over true apostleship and church leadership by improving the rather unflattering picture of the twelve disciples left by his predecessor in the Gospel of Mark.
September 13th: Filling in Mark’s gaps: Jesus’s Jewish heritage, his messianic credentials, and infancy story
September 20th: Matthew’s presentation of Jesus as a radical Torah teacher
September 27th: Matthew’s rehabilitation of the twelve disciples as leaders of the church and missionaries to the gentile nations

Dr. Emily J. Dumler-Winckler | Oct. 4, 11, 18, 25 | 9:15 AM
Class: Discipleship: Personal and Social Transformation
9:15 AM, Fireside Room
Class Description: Since the early church, Christians have conceived of moral and spiritual formation or discipleship as a matter of imitating or following Christ. Thomas A’Kempis’s fifteenth-century devotional classic, The Imitation of Christ (De Imitatione Christi) remains one of the most widely read devotional works after the Bible itself. For A’Kempis, imitating Christ primarily involves ascetic spiritual exercises, the virtue of humility, withdrawal from worldly goods, and the reform of self rather than world, society, or politics. In the Reformation, early Protestants began to re-politicize this motif. With these early modern and ancient texts as a backdrop, this class invites participants to consider what the Gospel’s invitation to discipleship, or the imitation or Christ, has meant in the U.S. context and might mean today. Specifically, we will consider the relationship between personal and social transformation or the relationship between following Christ, Christ’s message about the in-breaking kingdom of God, and movements for social justice. 
Dr. David Greenhaw | Nov 1, 8, 15, 22 | 9:15 AM
Location: Fireside Room
Presentation: Choosing Life, The Worlds of the Bible
Dr. Henry S. Kuo | Dec 6, 13 | 9:15 AM
Location: Fireside Room
Presentation: Reformed and Catholic: A Global, Timeless, Challenging, and Hopeful Faith