Sunday School: Re-purposing A Habit of the American Church

Every Sunday, across the nation, a group of adults dutifully shuffle in to rooms in church buildings at the appointed time on a Sunday morning, arriving for “Sunday School.” In my church experience, the group has been the same crowd of people from week to week at the given church – a crowd that has attended dutifully for years, professed Christian faith for years, and heard lessons from a succession of pastors and lay-leaders for years. Some weeks I ask myself the irreverent question: is there really any point to this? Are we doing it to keep a routine and perpetuate a program only? Do we accomplish anything more than affirming people who know the right answers for knowing the right answers? I have asked this when the teacher was me, and when it was someone else. This feeling has bothered me at different churches in different traditions and in different cities. It is not a critique of any individual’s ability as a teacher, but of the habituated patterns and the educational context. This irreverent question brought me to do some reading about the origins of Sunday school, and I think in that story lies a challenge for churches today.

The Sunday school movement began, the story goes, in England during the Industrial Age. Christian people of the time saw children who lived the kind of lives described by Charles Dickens through the young street children in his stories. The people of the church at the time showed one of the distinct characteristics of God's people: they were motivated by compassion and a longing for justice. As these Christians witnessed children roaming the streets struggling to survive poverty by whatever means possible or being forced at a young age into long work days in grimy, back-breaking factory labor, they longed to help them to a better life. Various people began Sunday Schools to meet this social need. At these schools, poor children gained basic literacy skills that would allow them to advance to more financially stable lives, as well as becoming biblically literate and hearing the gospel. By joining a concern for social justice with a burden to share the gospel, young lives were impacted deeply. These schools began with a few motivated and compassionate people in cities in England and spread quickly through the British Isles and to America, largely thanks to the publicity of Robert Raikes, a newspaper owner who started a Sunday School and published articles about the movement.

Movements have a tendency, unless cared for very carefully, to begin with great vitality and purpose and gradually lose momentum as they degenerate into lifeless routines and habits. When I slip into Sunday School now, I feel little to no connection with the vital origins of the Sunday School movement.

But I have had experiences that carried the spirit of the compassionate evangelists and teachers who began Sunday Schools. (One example of this can be found here.) Although our culture now offers free education for all, a talk with the administrators, teachers and parents at many schools in America uncovers a great need for academic support for students from elementary up to high school levels. This need is especially pronounced in low-income areas, where family structures are generally weak, and families cannot afford private tutoring for students. A number of non-profit organizations are seeking to meet this need with after-school programs which depend on volunteers and community partnerships. I have seen firsthand how the direct student interaction necessary to this type of program leads to opportunities to speak about the love of Christ to students searching for meaning. A church could run such a program, including an optional activity and snack time at the end with a Bible lesson included.

What would happen if churches repurposed the volunteers, funds and time invested in Sunday School as it has been for the past couple decades to create after-school programs that look like “Sunday School” as it began? How would this affect the culture of churches – the member’s thinking about the purpose of programs (and the purpose of the church), their awareness of the needs around them, their sense of compassion for the needy, their attentiveness to creative opportunities to work with passion to reach the lost? How would it affect the perception of the church in the community around it? How many lives of students and parents would be touched by efforts to meet a real need and share Christ in the process?

We would need a new name for a different day of the week. We would need church leaders determined to change the paradigm of how ministry programs despite the potential objections of church members comfortable with routine. But we could recapture the compassionate, evangelistic drive that began Sunday School.

Did the "good old days" ever really happen?

We are people of the text. Christianity is a religion shaped by the written and preserved canon of Scripture, and belief in Scripture's authority provides parameters for orthodox belief. For evangelicalism in western culture, the democratization of Bible reading after the advent of the printing press and the growth in literacy of the masses through broader education efforts has brought us to view individual reading of Scripture as a critical practice. We hear this in the emphatic appeals from leaders and teachers to be faithful in having a personal "quiet time."
As we read, we relive the stories of the faith of past saints, and we sense the vibrant power of the messages of the prophets in the Old Testament and the letters of the apostles in the New Testament as they spoke to their faith communities. The natural and appropriate response is to want to relive these experiences, to see the powerful acts of God in our own time and experience the passionate joy of a relationship with God in our own faith communities. Those who expose themselves to the accounts of the heroes of church history will often experience the same feelings of wonder at God's past works and a desire to live out these same kinds of experiences in our own lives. May this passion burn in our hearts and spur us on to good deeds, deepened fellowship, active evangelism, and warm piety towards God!
But let us remember something. From the times of the earliest faith accounts until now, no matter how carefully and eagerly we search, we will not find a perfect age of church history. The fact is, there is no ideal age of the church. Generations of church leaders have thought and worked carefully to devise the ideal way to practice "real New Testament church life," only to have the next generation point out the faults and inadequacies in their methods and put forth new ideas on what perfect church life looks like.
Whether it be the New Testament church, the reformation, the Patristic age, or the modern age, we cannot find a time period that gives us a faultless example of Christianity. If we look throughout the world today, this search is frustrated again; persecuted churches in hostile settings can be idealized for their tenacious faith, but with more scrutiny their faults appear (sometimes in the form of serious doctrinal problems). Churches freshly emerging in new places tend to repeat mistakes from early church history in other places rather than giving a fresh, clean and pure form of Christianity, as may be imagined. In prosperous and peaceful areas of the world with the advantage of developed Biblical, historical, and theological study can use these resources to carefully define accurate doctrine only to find that the response to this highly accurate and developed teaching is apathy, as the distraction of wealth and comfort makes radical faith an entirely uninteresting concept.
In the content of the New Testament, there is sobering reality that the glowing descriptions of the early community of believers is quickly followed by descriptions of various controversies and problems, and that many of the letters were written to give correction and rebuke to erring churches with rebellious members. In the earlier fascination of protestantism to imitate the reformation ideals we do not find perfection. In the liberal attempts to make Christianity into modernism with a Jesus label pasted on top, ideal Christian practice remains far out of reach. In the recent postmodern fascination with the early church fathers and the spiritual disciplines and contemplative practices of the middle ages, there will again, despite the benefits of imitating the positive practices of these eras, be glaring faults as their weaknesses also carry over. The next generation will passionately decry these faults and seek a new example to follow.
So am I merely spouting off a pessimistic monologue to weigh you down with hopelessness? No, because in spite of these faults God's redemptive power still triumphs. I raise the issue to make an appeal that we approach Christian thought and practice with the recognition that we can't get back to the "good old days" when the church was pure and ideal, because there were no such days. Instead, let's seek to learn from the strengths of the New Testament church, and every subsequent age, as well as from each period's failures. Our standard in every age remains the principles, patterns and ethics taught by Scripture. If we seek fervently to live these out in our age, fleshing them out in continuity with the essential beliefs of all church history, but with a unique incarnation in our own context. In this way we can avoid high-minded condemnation of others who do not practice "Biblical Christianity" as we do and instead humbly allow their approaches to instruct us as we seek to do the best we can with the time we have and pray that God will redeem even our own faults and blind spots in the way only the sovereign and gracious God over the people of God in every age can. The question is not "how do we get back to how things were when the church was the way it ought to be?" but "How do we learn from what was in an effort to get closer to what ought to be?"

In celebration of Single's Awareness Day

In the style of the mosaic generation, I'm going to start with a topic here and swirl off to a related topic that is not necessarily in sequence, but is loosely related by the associations in my own mind.

In an insightful CT article last summer on gender issues, on of the contributors pointed out that the complementarian camp has a tendency to emphasize strongly that a woman's primary role is in the home, as a wife and mother. This doesn't seem like a problematic statement to someone familiar with traditional western culture, until you start to think about possible situations. What about the mother whose children have grown and left home? What about the widow? What about the young, single woman who is yet to be married? Is a woman in one of these situations somehow "out of place" in the kingdom of God because she is not attached to a man? This is clearly not the case. Although marriage certainly gets good press in the New Testament, so does singleness. Women who make investing in their family and home life their top priority should be commended. After all, we have in our culture many more examples of success in a variety of career fields than we have examples of strong, healthy families that nurture children until they become adults who are mature disciples of Christ. But if accepting male headship in the home and the church means that women are not recognized for accomplishments other than being homemakers and volunteering for nursery duty, we have a seriously flawed view of what this means and are regressing from much positive progress western culture has made in the past century. Let us acknowledge and affirm in our thinking and from the pulpit the tremendous contributions that women make in all sectors of society, including, but not limited to the home. Complementarianism that packages a cultural limitation on women's roles in society together with the theologically-supported idea of submission does a disservice to the church and society. Accepting the timeless principles from Paul's writings does not mean railing against mothers who have careers, women who take leadership roles in churches and communities, or who - heaven forbid! - send their children to public school instead of teaching them at home. It simply means setting guidelines that expect male leadership in the top leadership spot in a church assembly and loving headship in the home.

This brings me to my loosely associated topic: how does the evangelical emphasis (found even more so within the subcategory of fundamentalism)on "family values" affect the culture of our churches? In many cases, churches have emphasized being "family churches" and thus been a tremendous boon to families in their community who desired to live out their marriages and raises children in a way that pleases God. Props to these churches for making a difference on a family-by-family, grassroots level! (This is in addition to the political activism on family issues promulgated by many of these churches.) Families need support, encouragement, Biblical teaching and wisdom from Godly mentors and examples to be strong and healthy. I pray that a growing number of godly families develop in our country. But are there any side-effects to this emphasis? Is it in any way related to the fact that single people ages 18-30 are largely absent from our churches? (Since yesterday was February 14 and we observed Single's Awareness Day, this seems an appropriate time for the topic). Is it possible that the unmarried, the divorced, the single parents, the teenagers from broken families, etc., who visit our churches looking for a place to belong as part of a faith community are alienated by the "family values" emphasis? Are we in some cases so enamored with this issue that we forget to broaden applications of teaching and the structure of programs and events to include the listeners who don't have a "properly-arranged" nuclear family?

I do not raise these questions to say that we should in any way relax our stance in support of the biblical view of marriage, divorce, and parental responsibility just because so many in our culture are failing to match it, so that we don't make them feel bad. No, stand strong on these issues. I just have a couple suggestions.

To church leaders: Please be thoughtful to structure the church so that events, small groups, etc. provide a place for singles and "non-traditional families" to interact and be included. Please don't spend weeks and weeks talking about only marriage and family issues. Give us some other messages and applications, too. Teachers and preachers, you could even mention the positive opportunities coming with singleness that Jesus and Paul point out (more than just to say why they aren't an argument against marriage). Challenge singles to develop a vision for how they can use their situation to God's glory.

To church members: Please be hospitable to those who come in to your church alone. Invite them to be part of things, and make them feel welcome and included. Just because you are completely comfortable sitting in your regular pew with your family doesn't mean everyone feels at home as soon as they walk in the door. The young and single are gladly welcomed and freely accepted at bars and parties. They long for a place where they feel like they belong; church should provide it.

To the young and single: Don't abandon your church just because there aren't many people who are like you there. Interaction across generations is good for you. Your church needs you to pour your efforts into it, and to reach out to others in your age group and connect them to church life. And please, don't look for your friends in da club.

Perhaps I am just venting the collective frustrations of me and my friends who are young, single and evangelical. Perhaps we're just self-conscious and self-centered. Or perhaps there's something to this. Give me your thoughts, my friends.

I want to come back at you with some thoughts on what exactly it means to be a Christian family. But this is long-winded enough for today...