Episcopal Church Foundation Vestry Papers - for leading congregations

We’re getting ready to celebrate our Sunday School kids and families and teachers this Sunday. At the later service, the children will get their certificates, the families will get their photo ‘op,’ and the teachers will be honored, as well. Prayers of blessing over our children and prayers for the continued formation of our entire community will ensue. A picnic follows in the churchyard.

The group of teachers and parents who support this ministry has organized another successful year and, joy-filled closing ceremonies. Technically, they’re the ‘Christian Formation Committee’ but they only meet, maybe, three, four times each year and they’re more of a resource group for each other than a ‘Committee,’ per se. They love helping form kids and adults in the Christian faith. That’s their passion and joy. They’re not into oversight or management or policies and procedures or any of the other stuff we know we have to do – which is why we let the paid staff of the parish make sure everyone’s up to date on their Safeguarding God’s Children, for instance. They’re such a great ‘Committee,’ in fact, that they’ve organized everything for this weekend’s celebration. All I have to do is sign my name on the certificates. The members of the Committee already bought the ice cream gift cards for the kids and they’re already planning the picnic, not to mention this summer’s dynamic Vacation Bible School!

I’m doing all of this at the same time I read on social media and blogs about the “death of Sunday School” and why this old-fashioned institution needs to go away. We don’t have huge numbers, mind you: this year, 29 kids enrolled in our Sunday School and attended (a few more were enrolled but didn’t attend); there was an average of 15 students divided between four classes on a given Sunday, and our work was pulled off by 9 wonderful teachers and 2 happy helpers / aides. Gone are the days in which there was a Sunday School of twelve classes and ten kids per class! I agree. That’s true.

But there’s something about Sunday School. There’s just something about time set aside on Sunday morning in a parish church for intentional Christian formation; ideally, for adults and youth and every child, too. There’s something about Sunday School, and the church would be impoverished if it went away completely.

Or maybe what needs to die is the idea that we’ve essentially pushed our kids and youth into dark corners and undercrofts and asked them to stop pestering our cherished ‘adult’ church. Maybe what needs to go away is a stuffy, self-centered institution called ‘church’ which is deathly afraid of and, therefore, pushes away such raw, creative energy as can often be found in young adults and youth and young children. Maybe, in fact, that’s the very thing, the only thing which is dying – not Sunday School, per se, but that impenetrable dividing line between what is adult and what is childlike, between conventional Christianity, on the one hand, and real, lived spiritually-grounded lives of God’s children, on the other.

As ironic as it may sound, then, if you want your church to grow and make the shift from what is passing away to what is becoming, you need a vibrant and exciting, a creative and engaging Sunday School. I’m not saying this because, in so many words, “the children are our future.” No, I’m actually saying the opposite: because the children are our only way forward, right now; the children are our present. Stop talking about why Sunday School needs to die, or is dying, and maybe start talking about how Sunday School can change your congregation from within, from the inside out.

At St. George’s, Valley Lee, that’s the conversation we’re having, now, and which we’re going to continue to have until a way forward is revealed through and to this community. Starting officially later this summer as a pilot project and conversation, and running through the spring of next year, we’re preparing to ask how and in what ways we can bring the creative energy and unharnessed excitement around possibility that is cause and consequence of our growing formation ministries into the arena we once thought impenetrable, fixed, unchanging: worship, liturgy, Sunday morning ‘adult’ church. We’re going to ask big questions and put (nearly) everything on the table.

We’re going to do exactly what Jesus did, after all. Recently, I’ve been taken with what I’m coming to realize is the very point Jesus was making when he brought a little child into their midst (among others, Mt. 18:1ff), say, or what God is telling us through Isaiah’s foretelling of a beatific vision, saying that, after all, “a little child shall lead them.” (Isa. 11) I think we really do need to learn what kind of creativity is in childhood and youth and young adulthood. I think the church, itself, needs to become much younger in spirit – not to mention in actual age! I think we need to bring the experience that is childhood and youth into the very center of our common Christian life, and let that spiritual state be the determining factor and litmus test of (nearly) everything we do. The ‘why,’ that is, we do anything in the first place.

Turns out, Sunday School isn’t dying after all. It’s just inviting the church to be re-born from the inside out.

There’s just something about Sunday School!

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