Will Braun has recently written an opinion piece called Sunday is not a Day for School for Canadian Mennonite. He is a Winnipeg writer and used to work as editor of Geez Magazine. He often writes about faith and culture from a refreshing and sometimes confronting angle. Now, I’ll confess – I sometimes write for Geez myself, so this response is a bit over the coffee table, as it were. And I do heartily agree with and appreciate some of the things Will has to say. But I also want to offer some disagreement.
And, as I’m confessing, I should also say that I work in a congregation, and I work with the Sunday School. My church has only recently started developing a children’s program. There has been a lot of discussion about what it should look like, and we are currently in the experimenting stage, collectively imagining how best to include our kids in our worshipping congregation.
But first, Will’s opinion. He highlights the three things he personally learned in Sunday School.
1) That there are fine, caring people in church.
2) That Christianity is trite – offering “simplistic questions with predictable answers.”
3) That faith is closely related to school – an exercise in indoors intellectualism that is bound up with the concepts of authority and good behaviour
For the first – great. That’s happy news, isn’t it? As Christians, we should be marked by our love. Will, I’m glad that, as a kid, you found love in church, and so glad that you put that point first.
But Number Two is troublesome. And sadly easy to understand. We often do opt for simplicity. It is easier to ask kids easy comprehension questions about a story than to open the kettle of fish. We choose to assign meanings rather than seek meaningfulness. Maybe, when talking with kids, we’re scared to say “I don’t know,” or “I don’t get this part.” Or “I find this part frightening.” We talk about being age-appropriate, but I’m not sure it isn’t just dumbing things down for the kids, and for ourselves, too.
As for Number Three, I grieve for all the kids who’ve come to associate church with sitting up straight and acting unnaturally. Faith doesn’t look well-behaved. God doesn’t even look all that well behaved, come to think of it. When did good and well-behaved become synonymous?
I think that “good Sunday clothes” might have a lot to answer for. I know one family who worked through this by describing Sundays as celebration days. Everyone in their family was to wear something special for church – but what that special might be was up to the individual. Enter colourful goodness galore.
When Sunday School is experienced as a school equivalent, we might all miss the joy of this kind of celebration. That is sad.
Will, you’ve clearly set some challenges before anyone spends time with children in church. Thank you for that.
But, I’m not sure that I can run with you on the next bit.
“Last March, Christian leaders from around the world met in Kenya for a theological conference on children. In a statement about the event, the World Council of Churches – one of the participants – emphasized the importance of the “Sunday school movement” and the need to expand ‘theological curriculum from a holistic child development point of view.’
Count me and my boys out… When Jesus put a child in the midst of the disciples, he did not say, ‘If you impart sound theology into this child’s undeveloped brain, you receive me. ‘”
Wait a minute, Will. Thinking things through at this Ph.D.-laden level doesn’t mean imparting heavy theology on kids’ brains. It can mean getting the adults to think things through in an adult manner of wondering, so that we don’t let the texts we find life-giving be reduced to trite and simplistic answers. You want to throw away Sunday School because it is a flawed expression of faith. So is sanctuary-based worship. So is much of what we do. Should that negate any effort? We want to receive children – let’s spend some time thinking through how children can be faithfully received. Let’s do some adult thinking.
Firstly, what’s with all the stories we tell in Sunday School? They can be a bit weird. Are they moral lessons? They are often quite ambiguous unless we edit out the nasty bits. Are they history? I’m not sure the bit about the whale works that way. Fables? Poetry? We need to ask ourselves why we are bothering to tell the kids these stories. Are we just filling time and keeping them quiet until their parents can collect them?
Personally, I think the stories are wonderful – quite literally. I think we have a wealth of stories that help us to wonder.
Jesus was great about teaching wonder. Read the early bits of Matthew: the kingdom of heaven is like yeast, is like a seed, is like treasure hidden in a field. That’s a different kind of authority – a kind of upside-down, inside-out, wonder-based teaching.
What if church was a place for wondering together? What would that be like?
David Harris, editor of this magazine, recently wrote about moving past Sunday School understandings.
What if we showed our children what that meant? What does active wonder and wondering look like in our lives? What if we didn’t hide our wondering from our kids? What if we didn’t hide it from each other?
If we only put on display a faith that looks like school and knows the “right“ answers, how is anyone going to have any idea about being faith-filled adults?
Will, you finish your opinion piece with the image of your boys in church, celebrating communion together. You mentioned incense and music, a blessing and a sense of holiness.
You are right. Children should be in the pews. Children should be included in the mystery and beauty of worship. Children should get to wonder with us as church families, in singing and prayer and confession and celebration, and all the rest. We all need beautiful rituals. My own kids get antsy when they haven’t been singing in the sanctuary on Sunday. Particularly Blue, now aged three. He gets downright cranky. But he also needs space for running and a good supply of crayons. So he sits with Daddy in the sanctuary for some bits, and then goes out to find some space and paper, too.
Some people wonder best sitting quietly – and some people wonder by creating things with their hands. Most of us are a bit of both, and we need balance. What if we made space for that balance in our churches?
What if we made space for different kinds of wondering together? Craft time with adults as well as children? Children’s sermons and adults’ storytime? Intergenerational bread baking for communion?
I wonder what that might look like. And I wonder what else we might dream up together.
