Here we are, into Holy Week, hopefully ready to endure all the delights it has to offer. To kick off the week, I wanted to pick up the thread so well articulated over at Ponder Anew about children in church. The title has the words Sunday School in it, along with Killing the Church, and as I am am morbidly embroiled in Good Shepherd’s Sunday School and have been for over a decade now, I was rather intrigued. Am I contributing to the downfall of western Christianity? So of course I clicked the link. And phew, what he is describing, is not Anything Like what I am doing. He writes,
“Usually, this model advertises a one-hour commitment, sending the adults to a worship service with contemporary music and a self-help, teaching-style sermon, and corralling the kids in Sunday School, where they sing hyperactive “kid-friendly” music to a recorded track, do hands-on activities, and listen to a quick lesson on their own learning level. After an hour of separation, everyone goes home and gets on with their lives.”
I’ve seen this, when we’ve been on our long, much needed vacations, going from church to church to sample the delights of American Protestantism. Usually we can’t find anything Anglican and so have gone to what looked most interesting. And believe me, talking to the kids afterwards is always most enlightening. But let me not dwell upon that. What I really want to do is talk about what we have done and are doing at Good Shepherd, because we have children’s ministry, and a big portion of it is called “Sunday School” and other portions of it include some of the children leaving for part of the service.
When we first got here, everybody expected that the children would need catechetical instruction. That is most obvious. You haul your kids to church, they don’t know the first thing, you want them to learn something, anything really. What many people didn’t expect was that we were really also equally, if not slightly more, concerned with the level of biblical literacy in, as children like to say, the grow ups. Within 30 seconds of getting here, we instituted Education for Everyone, for a whole hour. Everyone would be learning about the bible and important points of theology. (Good place to start for adults: the Ten Commandments, followed by the 39 articles.)
Everyone was going to learn, but not everyone was going to learn in the same way. In the face of the trend of “intergenerational ministry” picking up steam, we ran heartily the other way. The little children and adults are not the same. Their needs are different. How they hear is different. What they can say with their lips is very very very different. Providentially, there is a program for children that Anglicans often make use of, that other kinds of Protestants don’t really know about, and if they did, they would be appalled. However, it is the best program ever, and it is the very antithesis of the kind of Sunday School described above.
It is called Catechesis of the Good Shepherd, and it can be understood by reading The Religious Potential of the Child by Sofia Cavalletti. Why don’t Protestants know about this program? Well, in its first and most used form, it is Catholic. But Wait! Don’t throw your tablet across the room. Sofia was asked to Catechize some children, long ago, and she didn’t really know where to begin. So she gathered them around her, and she opened the bible. And as she read the bible with these young children, she discovered that 1. Children can endure the greatest and most profound truths about Jesus, and that these truths are a great satisfaction to them. 2. Nothing needs to be withheld from the child, but the way that the child hears the gospel is particular to his age and abilities. 3. The child can enter fully, with his whole being, into the heart of the gospel. 4. The child desires what is most essential.
She worked with children around the scripture and developed a method called Catechesis of the Good Shepherd. At the heart of the method is Jesus the Good Shepherd who calls his sheep by name, who lays down his life, who takes it back up again, who gives all of himself for his sheep. Who are the sheep? One by one, as little children come close and hear the proclamation of the gospel, they say, I am a sheep.
In other words, we have one hour on Sunday for education, and one and a half for worship, and only maybe one more hour after that for standing next to the food table eating crackers and cauliflower and talking, or playing ping pong, or running crazy back and forth and back and forth. That isn’t very long. In that very short time, what will we be saying? What will be the substance of our time? For me, I am given an incredible meal in the preaching and the liturgy of this church. For the children, I expend myself to give them the same meal. The gospel is for them. The liturgy is for them. But they need entry points, they need accommodations for the weakness of their state. Nothing in the “big church” is in their size. But everything in their Sunday School room is. There, they can touch, pour, speak, see, and understand the greatest and most precious mysteries that God has revealed to us. They can come, they are not hindered in anyway from knowing Jesus and hearing his gospel.
The sticking point, for many, is that working with children is work. It’s not easy for the adult. You have to really know the gospel yourself. You have to grapple with what is most essential, most weighty. You have to speak to those who do not wheel and deal very well, yet, in words. You have to control yourself and control the behavior of those who cannot control, very well, their own bodies. You have to struggle to speak but not speak too much. Most of the time, it means missing the adult class yourself. It means working more than just on Sunday morning. It is a sacrifice. And if your church only requires an hour of you that is about you, there isn’t going to be room for the very uphill work of being with the children.
We are commanded not to hinder the children, which means letting them come in and giving them room to hear for themselves. Instead of doing that, more often we try to satisfy them with everything but the one thing that brings the greatest satisfaction. We don’t give them room for silence, for prayer. We dumb down the gospel to be about them being good. We rush them along from one thing to another so that the mind never has time to fix on Jesus himself. Shouldn’t, I always mutter to the tireless women who work along side me with the children, shouldn’t this be The Most Important Thing? If you worked really hard on your awesome sermon series and the quality of your band, but your children were given nothing of substance and beauty, what will remain of all your work? Incidentally, I take a dim view of having a band, but that is a topic for another day.
My children have each come to hear the voice of the Good Shepherd, calling their names, in Sunday School. Nothing I have done at home (and don’t fret, I have done plenty) has equaled the richness of that single hour, week by week, where they had time to hear, to attend, and to be with God. That is worth more to me than any other single moment I endure for the whole rest of the week.
And, given that this week is a long one, I will get going and doing all the things. Pip pip.
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