And what of "Sunday School"?

I think this is well worth discussing (the allusion to the Simpsons is not meant to be flippant!) but I’m not sure where to begin. Not with Revelation, that’s for sure!

We had a stab at the topic a year ago (see ‘Children in church’) but didn’t get very far. I suspect that part of the problem is that we haven’t really worked out what or how we should be teaching adults yet, let alone children. I wonder, though, now that you pose the question, whether addressing the challenge of teaching children might not help us to bring clarity to our thinking.

It must surely be the case that our current need to ‘deconstruct’, as you put it, arises at least in part because of the way in which the Christian worldview was originally inculcated in us as children. To what extent, then, do we perpetuate the sacred-secular dualism, for example, by the way we teach Bible stories? To what extent do we reinforce western individualism by assuring our children that God loves them and has a plan for their lives?

It seems to me that a key emphasis should be on nurturing a sense of being part of a community that has a history (a narrative) and a calling in the world (mission). Perhaps we could learn something from the way traditional communities (such as tribal groups) teach their children what it means to belong to the group and participate in its life and culture. How are children normally socialized?

These are merely random thoughts in the hope of stimulating a bit more discussion. Anyone?

I’ve been watching OST for quite a while without posting, so I’m not sure why this topic caught my eye except that I’m currently a high school teacher as well as a former Sunday School teacher. I also grew up in a Baptist church where Sunday School for all ages was considered essential.

I’m going to assume, for the sake of argument, that having separate Sunday School for children can be good.

I also ought to admit that, at least up until high school, I always like Sunday School. So it’s easy for me to draw from my own childhood some good things.

Or, I should say, one really good thing: I know the stories.

I think, from the time I started up to junior high, we did little else. Every week there was a Bible story. Sometimes, yes, there were cheesy felt-boards and wrong-headed blue-eyed Jesus pictures. But what stuck with me were the stories, and it was always obvious to me that those were the things that mattered.

So, that satisifies partly the first suggestion in Andrew’s list:

It seems to me that a key emphasis should be on nurturing a sense of being part of a community that has a history (a narrative) and a calling in the world (mission).

The times, I think, that my Sunday School went wrong was when it veered into a kind of limitation of those stories: e.g., emphasizing that they are “true” as opposed to “not true,” or artificially abstracting them into moral principles. I think the important thing has to be to give children a sense of the sort of narrative authority of Scripture; that we should behave in certain ways because it fits the continuation of the story that God has put us in (Wright’s 5th Act idea), not because it is right in some universal, abstract sense.

How do you teach that? Is it ever appropriate, for example, to tell a Bible story and then say, “So, boys and girls, what did we learn from this story?”

Aside from Bible stories, I think that Sunday School ought to tell the story of the Church; that is, kids ought to learn a little bit about church history. That’s something that is, I think, sorely lacking in a lot of evangelical Sunday School classes that I’ve seen. I grew up having a great sense of the stories of the Bible, but having no idea what exactly this whole church thing was.

That second thing — the sense of mission — is important as well. And maybe we would do well not to separate that from the traditional moral teachings of Sunday School. And all that really means is making “right and wrong” say a great deal more than what is right and wrong in terms of individual things like violence and obeying your parents. But again, there’s the question of how you teach it.

I think there’s one last thing that ought to be mentioned. Rather than trying to teach children how to be adults, Sunday Schools should explicitly focus on nurturing childlike questions and explorations. As I got older, I remember there were more and more questions that you just weren’t supposed to ask. That’s no good. Whereas stopping and questioning things every few seconds in the midst of community worship (or liturgy, whatever church you’re in) could be destructive, questioning ought to be at the heart of Sunday School, as it is in any “school.”

Fantastic! Putting together what you say with the whole “mission” and “purpose” makes it all make sense to me.

I was assuming that children’s education needed to take place separately, because, of course, they couldn’t possibly understand what the ‘big people’ were talking about.

Must we entertain our children with puppet shows while we “do serious worship” in “the big room?” Am I barking up the wrong tree?

After all, as in the small group/bible study example, my kids learned how to pray for others by participating at the big table, rather than watching Veggie Tales.

Thank you *so* much, everyone, for your insights! I feel so much better now, without knowing what the solution is. Bring on the curriculum, but I’ll still probably continue to plop little kids on my lap and read to them, then sing songs in a circle.

After all, is it more important to live Christ-like love, or have an audience devoid of squirming children and the occasional cry of a baby?