ABSTRACT
Due to the tendency of declining church membership and growing religious plurality, the transformation of confessional Religious Education as a school subject into something like a pure “teaching about” model seems to be the most promising future scenario. But there are good reasons for developing a Religious Education model with a certain confessional perspective, providing and combining didactical forms of “teaching about” and “learning from”. Such a complementary pedagogical and theological approach is not only very plausible and promising but also a sustainable model for a Protestant public presence in the broader field of public education. The prerequisite for this is a new self-understanding and clear conceptual form of the Public Church (in the broader sense of Protestant public presence) and a positive attitude towards the theological interpretation of freedom, responsibility and hope, manifested by its representatives in the different educational fields of church and school.
