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What Is Going On in Sunday School?

IN MANY church organizations around the world millions of people attend what is called Sunday school.

It has been reported that in the United States alone about 20,000,000 boys and girls between the ages of three and twelve attend the Sunday schools of 223 Protestant denominations. There are also Sunday-school classes for all adult age-groups.

The potential of Sunday school for doing good is high, since so many are said to attend. If such a large segment of people, young and old, could be properly taught sound Bible principles, backed up by a wholesome family life, the moral tone of any nation could be lifted. But are Sunday schools bearing such good fruitage?

Problems

Clergymen and parents alike agree that the Sunday school faces many problems. High on the list is disappointment with results.

Disappointment with the results, or end product, is traceable in part to the motives that influence parents to send their children to Sunday school. Many parents feel that Sunday school is an easy and popular shortcut to religious education for the young, relieving themselves of the responsibility.

There are those who say that this motive is even outweighed by parental desire for social status. Redbook magazine stated: “In suburban areas, particularly, parents tend to join churches and send children to Sunday school to fit in with community mores. These parents have little interest in what is being taught​—and why and by whom—​or taking part themselves.”

With such limited interest in the spiritual condition of the young, the end product is not hard to predict. In an enrollment that numbers millions of youngsters, it is found that their moral atmosphere is not any better than that of an equal number of neighborhood youngsters who have never seen the inside of a Sunday school.

The main reason singled out for such a disappointing result is the unwillingness of the parents to participate with their children in religious training or back them up with a Christian atmosphere at home. So sooner or later the young conclude that, since the parents do not have any real interest in religious training, why should they?

Who Will Teach?

One of the problems that has led to such disappointing results is the qualification of those who teach Sunday schools. The National Sunday School Association’s Donald Reeder said: “The training of leaders and teachers is the greatest single unresolved task of the Sunday schools.”

A survey of five denominations, conducted by the National Council of Churches, concluded that the church school’s “greatest weakness” is its teachers’ lack of knowledge of their own faith and their lack of commitment to learning about it well enough to teach it.

Thus, even though modernization programs have been instituted, with new textbooks outlining programs, and with visual aids being provided, still the Sunday-school structure stands upon a foundation of quicksand. It is no stronger than the knowledge of the teachers. And since most churches are in no position to hire professional Sunday-school teachers, they must depend upon volunteers, often parents who are already busy.

It is hoped that such parents will have the knowledge and determination to impart good religious training because they come from families that are tight religious groups. They presume that such parents regularly pursue religious instruction and set good examples in their homes.

However, the assumption that tight-knit religious families with good knowledge can supply adequate volunteer teachers is not a reality. Indeed, deterioration of family religious life is a basic weakness upon which the entire Sunday-school program falters. As one volunteer Sunday-school teacher lamented: “Many youngsters come from homes, so-called religious homes, where God or love or faith is seldom, if ever, mentioned.” Teachers are drawn from such families where parents often do not have sufficient knowledge even to instruct their own young properly, much less others.

Nor are Protestants alone in this dilemma. A survey noted the reluctance of Catholic and Jewish parents as well to “consider religious training part of their job at home.” Thus, a joint study by the Carnegie Corporation and the Federal Office of Education found that Catholic-school religious education is “virtually wasted” on the large majority of the students.

What to Teach?

Another critical problem of Sunday schools today revolves around what the youngsters should be taught. Some adults ask: “What is being taught? the Bible? denominational dogma? Christian morals? social and political ethics? or what?”

Some parents, and some educators, such as Professor Marcus Barth of the University of Chicago, have defended teaching the Bible as “not just the best tool for Sunday school, but the only one that is reliable.”

However, the architects of many Sunday-school courses have had serious problems with teaching the Bible. They have discovered that the Bible’s teachings often undermine church dogma. Another problem is that many of the teachers, indeed most of them, do not really know how to use the Bible. They are not familiar with its teachings, even with its teachings as explained by their church. Hence, many give the Bible only lip service in teaching Sunday school.

This reflects the fact that religious leaders have lost touch with God’s Word, the Bible. It is like a closed book to them. Their hesitancy in using the Bible, their inability really to teach its truths to others, their failure to apply its laws, principles and prophecies to modern life, have resulted in gross confusion.

This reminded a Bible student of the burning sarcasm of the prophet Isaiah, who declared: “And for you men the vision of everything becomes like the words of the book that has been sealed up, which they give to someone knowing the writing, saying: ‘Read this out loud, please,’ and he has to say: ‘I am unable, for it is sealed up.’”​—Isa. 29:11.

As for teaching church dogma, this too has reached a dead end. Many consider that teaching dogma is “narrow” and “separatist,” while the ecumenical movement calls for casting off religious differences. In noting that such teaching would be outmoded, Gerald H. Slusser, professor of theology at Missouri’s Eden Theological Seminary, stated: “In the average family Aunt Millie might have become a Christian Scientist; Brother Bill has been to college and become an agnostic; Father does not say so, but he has adopted the American free-enterprise religion of ‘get rich quick.’”

Hence, fashioners of “modern” Sunday-school teaching programs compromise, trying to please everybody and offend no one. But a father complained: “My son, who is seven, has been taught that God is everywhere. I think my son is getting a tremendously confused idea of things.”

Posing Problems​—Offering No Solutions

One popular device in “modern” Sunday schools is to pose “real-life problems” to students, but offer no solutions.

A text used by the Lutheran Church of America entitled “Is It Christian?” raises such problems as this: A sixteen-year-old tries to reconcile his sense of right and wrong with his desire to ‘go along with the gang.’ Instead of getting home from a school dance by midnight as ordered by his parents, he “wonders if a good solution might be to wait till after 1 A.M. and then call home with an excuse for getting in later.”

Each class member is required to work out his answer as to what he would do. The text gives no direction because, according to Dr. W. Kent Gilbert, chairman of the Parish Education Board of the Lutheran Church in America, “a religious person responds to a situation in what he believes is the way nearest to God’s will. But there are no all-right or all-wrong answers.”

How the students learned what God’s will is in the first place is not explained. Yet without direction, they are supposed to answer such questions based on their knowledge of God’s will. What do you think would happen if these youngsters were switched to a mechanics class where the instructor has never explained how to put a motor together, but who then gives them one already taken apart and says: “Now, students, put the motor back together again and tell me why you did it that way”?

Failure

Already many of the operators of Sunday schools consider them spiritually bankrupt. In July 1967 a conference of Catholic and Protestant teachers and pastors met to wrestle with the problem of what to do about religious education. They concluded that the church school in its present form is beyond saving!

According to The Christian Century, the conference “seemed to agree that the denominational approach to Christian education is dead.” Out of the conference came a proposal that the traditional Sunday school be replaced, or at least supplemented by community schools. These community schools would be staffed and operated on a volunteer basis by members of the community and would supplement the public school system.

All of this amounts to an admission that the churches discredit themselves as sources of spiritual knowledge, training and strength. They would resign the task of religious education to the community, to the same people who already confess to being unwilling and unable to teach Sunday school.

Perhaps you may feel that the situation is not all that bad. Yet, if you or your children have attended Sunday school, it would be well to ask yourself what you have learned. So let us take a deeper look at this aspect of the matter.