Who Needs Sunday School, Anyway?
In a national survey in the early 1950’s, elementary school teachers from across the United States were asked to list the top five problems in their schools. Here’s what they listed:
- talking out of turn
- chewing gum
- making noise
- running in the hall
- cutting in line
In the early 1990’s, the same question was asked of elementary teachers across the country. Their list had changed a bit. (Remember now, these were elementary teachers.) They now cited:
- drug and alcohol abuse
- guns and knives in school
- pregnancy
- suicide
- rape
(quoted in Wayne Dosick, Golden Rules:Ten Ethical Values Parents Need to Teach Their Children. HarperSanFrancisco, 1995. p.2)
It is a different world today. It is a much more complex and complicated society in which to raise children today. “No one is immune,” writes one teacher,
“Bewilderment and fear cut deeply into every racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic group. Crime and violence, poverty and despair have robbed an entire generation of inner-city children of the innocence and security of childhood.
Mistrust and alienation, ennui and nihilism have seeped into suburbia, so that even children of wealth and privilege drift without purpose or direction.
Like Alice who fell down the rabbit hole, many of our children live in a world turned upside-down. They swirl, topsy-turvy, in a chaotic abyss, and we who are to be their guides and protectors ache to save them, but we do not always seem to know how….It seems that the very soul of contemporary society weeps in confusion and pain…” (Dosick, p.3)
It’s a different world – it is more difficult, more challenging, sometimes more frightening and less protective world in which to raise children to become good, decent, honorable human beings, with strength of character and depth of moral commitment. That comes as no surprise to anyone looking around at the world today.
But while the world has changed, while the circumstances and the elements of our society have changed greatly over this last speeded-up generation, the nature and tasks of child-rearing have not changed in any fundamental way. Parenthood has never been an easy task. Nurturing children, teaching children sound moral and ethical religious values, helping them find their way to moral maturity, helping them find their place in the world as loving, responsible, happy and productive people has never been easy.
The primary teaching tools of parenthood (common sense, logic, experience, love, and patience and commitment) these have not changed. And while they may seem paltry, these human tools of ours, they remain as ever they were in generations past – as trhey were for your parents and mine, as they were for Gandhi’s parents and Martin Luther King’s parents, as they were for Cain and Abel’s parents. Ultimately all parents must work with the same fallible human tools, within the same limitations of human relationship, to provide children with what they need to make their way through a perilous and wounding world.
And so it is with good reason that families today need all the reinforcement they can find to participate with them in the moral development and guidance and nurturance of children for the few precious formative years that they have with their children. Church is one place where families come in hope and in expectation that their children will be embraced in a safe, loving community, dedicated in part to their well-being and religious education.
Most of us take for granted that our church will have a Sunday school for the children, but you may be surprised to learn that the idea for separate Sunday school programs for children is a relatively modern development in American church history. For the first two hundred years or so in American Protestant church life, there were no formal separate Sunday schools for children at all. It was not until the 1820’s that the modern Sunday school concept evolved in New England Protestant churches, including the earliest Unitarian parishes.
Those early New England meeting houses had no place for children at all. And church sanctuaries today are still decidedly designed as purely adult spaces, with fixed pews designed for adult people sitting in adult posture. (How are your backs feeling right now?) There was really no notion that such rooms as this one would be designed to include or accommodate young people along with their elders sitting together.
Eventually those old New England meeting houses (I preached in one for a dozen years) came to have separate classrooms added on. Clearly, children now have special place and priority reserved in our modern idea of religious community. But least we take it for granted that Sunday school has always been with us, the fact is that the earliest churches in this country had no such thing as Sunday schools for almost two full centuries. As of 1820 there were only some dozen Sunday schools in all of New England, and not a one outside of New England.
Throughout the 1600’s and 1700’s, religious education for children in America consisted mainly of teaching them their prayers, the memorized lessons and verses of the Primer and Bible readings, the Ten Commandments, total and unquestioning obedience to parents and teachers and all other authorities in the community. Given the basic agrarian subsistence society of the time, that curriculum was thought to provide children with all they needed for moral instruction. It was a different world.
In God-fearing Calvinist households, such teachings were primarily received at home, and were underlined by public schoolmasters and ministers on occasion. Older children were expected to attend church with their parents and be seen and not heard as they sat through endless sermons addressed far over their heads and beyond their experience. Small children were not brought to church as a rule, religion and sitting in pews like these being considered a uniquely adult discipline.
There was a long time there in the 1800’s when ministers did pretty much all the teaching in Sunday school classes. The ministers would preach to the adults on Sunday morning, and then teach the children as a whole group on Sunday afternoon. Sunday evening all-church bean suppers were a practical ending for a long day at church for All involved. That’s the reason, incidentally, that church architecture evolved yet another way by the late 1800’s. To the Meeting House and the church school additions were now added kitchens for the first time.
It comes as no secret that different churches and different traditions approach the task of religious education for children in different ways, just as they often teach different truths. What they share in common is the effort to inculcate decent human values in their young people. Christian religious education, Jewish religious education, Muslim religious education, Hindu religious education, and Unitarian Universalist religious education would all claim the same ends. On one level, Fundamentalists, Mormons, and UU’s all want the same things for their children. It is, of course, in the definition of those concepts and the manner of their measurement that the world is made diverse and interesting.
Here in the Unitarian Universalist tradition, we are clear and unapologetic in declaring that the end-goal of of our religious education program is mature religious autonomy for our children. And what does such mature religious autonomy look like?
What we hope to bring forth in our children is the ability to make independent human value choices for themselves. It is the capacity to make sound moral decisions for themselves. We are less interested in creating cookie-cutter versions of future Unitarian Universalist institutionalists than we are in helping our children embrace life with joy and compassion and tolerance and hope.
Our process with children in our Sunday School is not about rote memorization of dogmatic beliefs and creeds, but rather the encouragement of young minds in the discovery of those values that make the world worth living in, worth saving, worthy caring about. We consider ourselves “successful” (as religious educators, as parents, as a church community) if our children learn how to love themselves and others; how to love the earth that is their home; how to carry themselves with a sense of honor and personal integrity; how to respect others without prejudice or prejudgment; how to resist that which is degrading and desecrating to the human spirit.
We accept that we cannot protect our children indefinitely from a world which is often unfair and unjust and full of struggle and pain. But we can prepare them to move through this world with a firm sense of who they are and who they come from. We can show them through our conscious example that fairness and justice are still cared about, that courage is possible, that there is beauty and dignity and meaning to be found and celebrated in this life. And when their time comes to leave us, we can let them go in love and we can bless them on their way. We can give them roots, and we can give them wings.
The Unitarian Universalist way in religious education is to point our children towards religious autonomy, and our curricula emphasize those elements that lead to personal autonomy. We promote and teach a positive view of human nature. We promote and teach a positive self-image for each and every child. We promote and teach respect and love for others. We promote and teach the discovery and exploration and respect for truth as it is expressed in all the great religions of the world. We promote and teach religious literacy for our children, and we trust in their ability to make good decisions – with our help when they are young, and on their own as they mature. We hope and pray that they will not be exactly like us: we hope they will be a bit better, more at peace with themselves, more successful than ever we have been at building a peaceful world.
Self-worth and ethics; an appreciation of right and wrong; a sense of the Good and the True and the Holy; the saving grace of justice and empathy and equity; a sense of the sacred center in their souls and in all creation. These are what we hope to foster in our children in these few precious years they are ours to influence. This why we have A Sunday school in the first place.
But we are wrong, we are profoundly mistaken, if we think or assume that Sunday school exists only for what we can give to our children. We need Sunday school, all of us, for what our children in our midst each week give to us. We need our children in our midst for what they teach us!
Childhood, Harvard psychologist Robert Coles reminds us in his wonderful study, The Spiritual Life of Children, (Houghten Mifflin Company, Boston, 1990) involves among other things time for tinkering with the meaning of things. What children teach us over abd over again if we are paying attention, is that a true spiritual life is a life of musing speculation. One cannot even enter the realms of theology and philosophy unless, like a child, one is willing to wonder. In their spiritual lives, children dare to wonder about all manner of things – even about such things as “heaven,” “God,” and “eternity.” How does Scripture say it? When Jesus gathered the children around him, he cautioned, “Unless you become as one of these, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.”
By adulthood, of course, many of us claim to have put aside such notions, or claim to have figured them out once and for all, or claim that such notions haqve no meaning at all. We claim that even though many of us have simply stopped wondering altogether, or just given up such notions by default. Such wondering, such musing is not something that is honored much in our concept of maturity – unless one is a full-time artist or poet or clergyperson. Such lucky people are given extra permission to be childlike in these matters.
Children’s minds are full of wonder, and in their spiritual lives they visit the heights and depths of human experience; they soar to heaven and descend into hell; they converse with saints and villains; they talk of God, they talk to God, they talk as if God were speaking to them. In time and in experience, says Robert Coles, in their encounters with the world and what people teach them, this magical sense of wonder and openness will lessen; and good and evil will seem less like fantastic forces of magic and more like confused results of all too human behavior.
Robert Coles says that children teach us that wonder and openness are the natural gifts of our humanity, not something we should rush to put aside in our maturity, but something to be nourished and claimed throughout life. And they teach us that the holy and the ineffable are matters of personal and cultural interpretation, to be measured and respected in personal experience.
“They teach us,” says Coles, “that whatever divinity can be conceived in the human imagination takes many forms, lives in the wind perhaps, or shines in the rainbow, or covers us like the sky – children dismiss our mature theological gropings with a wave.”
You see, we need Sunday school, as it turns out – we need the children in our midst – for what they teach us, every bit as much as we teach them. They teach us to touch the joy of life, to heal the wounds of life, to make safe the hard places, to make claim on life’s amazing blessings all around us. In this, our children may be prophets and messengers. In this they may be our teachers.
If by chance you see one of our volunteer Sunday school teachers in coffee hour this morning, give them a hug. They deserve it.
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