April 19, 2006
How to Kill Sunday School
Simply repeat after me, ‘Sunday school is no longer effective’. Now, tell that to the congregation, repeat it to one another, and report it on surveys. Walla! Your Sunday school program now begins a slow death. As children, the majority of us were introduced to the church through Sunday school or VBS (Vacation Bible School). Because of that, I find it surprising that we so easily buy into the propaganda that Sunday school is no longer effective in ‘today’s church’. It’s my belief that the problem isn’t the Sunday school program, but rather it’s the lack of support from the directors, ministry leaders and administrators. Leaders weary of teacher training, recruiting teachers, unreliable volunteers, and restricted funding find eliminating a program to be a quick fix to their problems. My hat goes off the Baptist churches who continue to place great emphasis on the importance of Sunday school.
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Gail,
You've struck my hot button. There is only one thing that turns me from simmer to red-faced, whistlin' steamy more than purveyors of social reformers citing endless surveys, studies, and cherry-picked antidotes. And that is when church leaders do it. Today's version of the social reformer and the Biblical version of a church leader derive from two diametrically opposed attitudes. The social reformer has fixed his persistance upon what he needs to obtain from the general social structure. He then sets about finding any bit of persuasion that will play upon his fellow man's natural tendency to conform. We see their efforts in TV entertainment, advertisements, the movies, the music industry, and most abhorently, in the news industry. These weenies of change understand that if they can create enough perception that the new social element of their craving is being accepted widely, that a sufficient majority of people will indeed exhibit the change.
For thirty years I have watched and studied this process erode our society into decadence. During that time there has always been two social attitudes conjured up and praised by the perveyors of social change: 1) there is no validity to general pattern except for that promoted by the perveyors, 2) there is no recognized authority except that of the perveyors. With these two attitudes subtly woven into the backdrop of social consciousness, political correctness has shaped our society into forms that it otherwise would never have accepted.
But this is not the technique the Bible teaches church leaders to use. Biblically, church leaders are to recognize the freedom of the Lord's people to naturally form into a general pattern arising from who they are. Biblically, church leaders are to guard the scriptural boundaries of church behavior without generating and amplifying their own authority. The leaders are to be servants. They are to look for what the church people need. He is to look for what delivers the supply to those needs the most efficiently. The church leader is not to be about his own ambitions except for the fact that the needs of the church people are to be his ambitions. Therefore, in meeting the needs of a particular group of people there is no necessity to study the needs and behaviors of some yahoo's church on the far side of the country! There only needs to be a study of the needs of the people at that leader's particular church.
Then it becomes quite obvious that every effort must be made to teach as much as possible on Sunday morning since the overwhelming majority of folks come to church on Sunday morning only. If the church leader is trying to redirect the whole flock to some other time for its food and water, then the leader evidently has some ambition other than feeding and watering Jesus's sheep. I am still trying to determine what that ambition is.
But simply stated, if we have them on Sunday, feed them on Sunday. Call it Sunday school or anything else, it is still only sensible.
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