Religion: Look, Dad, I’m Leaving

The motto of an old-fashioned Sunday-school teacher, recalls A. V. Washburn of the Southern Baptist Sunday School Board, was: “You sit still while I instill.” The modern version might be: “In God we trust that you’ll adjust.” Sunday schools still struggle, with varying success, to form religious people in a doggedly secular world, but the setting and philosophy are changing fast.

In many Protestant churches, even the name has changed; extension into weeknights makes “church school” a more accurate term. The oldtime room in the church basement has been replaced, in many cases, by a bright new building.

Modern Sunday school has attempted to adjust to modern students, whose minds have been honed on improved public schooling. “You can’t sit them on a chair and pour it in any more,” warns Mrs.

Harold Luellan, a Sunday-school administrator at Kansas City’s Roanoke Presbyterian Church.

Ethical Education. The new emphasis is on attitudes rather than erudition, on acting like a Christian as well as knowing about Christianity. “I’d much rather my children show kindness than be able to recite ‘Be ye kind, one to another,’ ” says Mrs. Lawton Kiser of Atlanta’s Wieuca Road Baptist Church—and most parents and teachers agree.

To provide this type of ethical education, many Sunday schools attempt to ground their lessons in real-life relevance.

Through elaborate tape-recorded research, the Protestant Episcopal Church’s Department of Christian Education, for example, has found that the issue most confusing to fourth-graders is the difference between right and wrong—and in that grade, one-half of U.S. Episcopal Sunday-school pupils now discuss morals as well as Bible stories. The new program, says Department Director David Hunter, is based on a “vigorous attempt to do something in the children’s lives.” Magic Tricks. In teaching methods, a new ingenuity is visible everywhere. The Massachusetts Council of Churches is studying a plan to tie in Sunday-school lessons with subjects being taught in public schools at the same time, so that a study of Paul’s travels, for example, could draw on the familiarity of a world geography course. Personal relations are often studied through “role-playing” typical situations, and Maryland eighth-graders use modern language to act out Biblical stories such as the Prodigal Son (“Look, Dad, I’m leaving home”). Teachers regularly use film strips, cartoons, flannel boards, charades—even magic tricks. The Methodists are featuring Patty Duke in a new film series that will be shown in Sunday schools.

The machinery that supports these innovations has all the trappings of modern education: school boards, superintendents, team teaching, study groups. No longer does a teacher go into class armed only with the Good Book and a supply of patience built up over the previous six days.

He is likely to have a skeleton text, a book of suggested activities, a visual-aid kit, and the advice of a child psychologist.

What’s Existentialism? But content often lags behind the methodology. For one thing, says one minister, modern texts “require teachers with training and imagination, and we haven’t got many of those.” Children may ask: “What is Christian existentialism?”, and many teachers, afraid to admit that they do not know, continue to pull answers out of the air.

“We have to try to avoid teaching them things they’ll have to unlearn later,” says an Austin minister.

As a result, almost every Protestant denomination has a growing program of teacher training. Some Manhattan churches, their ranks of volunteers hopelessly depleted by the race to the suburbs, have been forced to hire teachers. Still, says the National Sunday School Association’s Donald Reeder, “the training of teachers and leaders is the greatest single unresolved task of the Sunday schools.” Also unresolved is the problem of Sunday schools being a floating one-hour “Peace and Brotherhood” poster unrelated to the rest of a child’s experience.

Children sent to Sunday school by parents “to make them good” often find the teacher’s message irrelevant or contradictory.

“For one hour a week we tell them to love one another,” says the Rev. Marideen Visscher of the Cleveland Church Federation, “and the rest of the week they hear, ‘You’ve got to fight to get anywhere.’ ” In many urban areas, where children can see the fight firsthand all week, Sunday schools are empty and crumbling —and many churchmen believe that the funds required to rebuild them would be better spent on the adult community.

Pleasanter Play-Doh? When Sunday school does become a form of institutionalized baby-sitting for the younger children, and hollow moralizing for the teenagers, the students are the first to discover it. In Berkeley, Calif., during a typical Sunday morning of how people should “relate” to people, an Episcopal teacher was startled to hear an eighth-grader ask, “Why can’t we study something interesting, like the Egyptian Copts; I’m solving all my own problems.” A woman in Atlanta was equally disturbed by the Sunday-school valuation of her visiting grandson: “I like your church better than mine, Grandma, because their Play-Doh is softer.” But most parents feel that even in the most lighthearted Sunday-morning hour, some feeling for religion and morality rubs off with the Play-Doh—and they are often drawn to church themselves by their children’s Sunday-school attendance. Enrollment in Protestant church schools now stands at 36,429,269. Noting that 85% of the baptisms in his denomination come by way of Sunday school, one Southern Baptist concludes that “the greatest technique of evangelism in the 20th century is not revivalism but Sunday school.”