If you talk to certain people, you would get the impression that children were never in church. That church isn’t really for them, anyway. It’s for adults. Kids need to learn about church before they can be in church, they argue.

This certainly is not true. Sunday School was only created at the end of the 18th Century and only became commonplace in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Back then, it wasn’t learning Bible stories and doing craft projects: it was actual school. And it was in churches because there was no public education. These “Sunday Schools” were a ministry to an underserved population of children who could not otherwise learn to read and write and do simple mathematics.

Sunday School stopped being school when we stopped needing it to be school: because we developed a public education system and all children were given the opportunity to receive a basic education. It has since become a global priority to educate our children, making it a basic human right.

Our churches then shifted that missional outreach away from educating the local children to building schools and granting scholarships for children in the poorest parts of the world to get a primary education. This continues that sense of ministry that informed the creation of our Sunday Schools two centuries ago.

At the same time, we’ve repurposed our Sunday Schools to become, not centers of general learning, but specialized instruction in the Christian faith. Sunday School, then became the means by which children could learn Bible stories, study the catechism, and eventually gain access to the tools of leadership in the church. At least that’s how it seems in the most optomistic light. For others it is a way of getting the kids out of the church so the adults can have some peace.

School during church?

For the last half century we’ve been battling about children in church. For many, there is a great pull to instruct children when they are young so that they will know what we are doing. They are to practice and learn and see how to do church at their own rate and in age-appropriate format first. This essentially means, however, that they are never actually in church for a whole service.

For others, the preference is to have the children in church, learning what church is like by experiencing it. They can receive their formal instruction after the service.

The great Sunday School debate of the late 20th Century clearly doesn’t reflect the history of Sunday School, nor does it speak to how children were prepared and grew in their faith for the vast length of church history. It is honestly a modern invention.

It is also a bit of a puzzle with no perfect solution. I am sure that certain teaching methods would surely give our children a better formal preparation in a version of “children’s church” than they are likely to receive in “big church”. I also see little evidence that it has an objectively better effect than having children in “real church”. Similarly, the lack of children in church may reduce ambient noise and make many feel more comfortable, but it may also reduce the sense of humor, joy, and vitality that we would otherwise feel from that sense of the imperfect human presence.

And to be pretty blunt about it, when we are without kids in the room, we are without the group that Jesus claims possess the Kingdom. So there’s that.

More than the debate

I’d like us to move beyond this thinking of Sunday School and approach the broader sense of Sunday learning. As I wrote yesterday, there is a need to make great use of our time together on Sunday. However, we cannot only give Sunday. There has to be a deeper commitment than coming to church for an hour.

After putting a Bible in every home, the most significant innovation of the Great Reformation was to put the center of all faith formation in every home. Many wanted to make the family the basic unit of faith. This means the parent, not the pastor or Sunday School teacher, becomes the child’s primary source of faith education. Praying together, reading scripture together, and speaking about matters of faith openly and honestly can certainly make our families and our discipleship better. It is also a lot of pressure.

There is also a lot of pressure on the church as it is to provide not only instruction, but also the incentive, the enthusiasm, and the support that they may or may not be receiving at home. It is also no surprise that our public schools are facing a similar dilemma.

This needs to be more than the debates: about time or location or responsibility. It should be about our church and our children. It should be what we want for them and what we expect from them. It should be about what they teach us and how we never stop learning.

If the focus is on helping our children best grow in faith, then our focus should be on cultivating the faith. And there are many ways to do that.

Ask Yourself

How much of our faith instruction is caught up in the mind?

• How much is memorization?
• How much is learning stories or church teachings?
• How much is theological arguments for the existence of GOD or expressions of Christian doctrine?

How much of our faith instruction is focused on moral behavior?

• Are we teaching kindness?
• Are we teaching fairness?
• Are we teaching honesty and respect?

How much of our faith instruction is focused on ethics?

• Do we encourage justice?
• Do we help them see global impacts of economics or social decisions?
• Do we help them see beyond black and white thinking and embrace situational complexity?

How much of our faith instruction is focused on Jesus’s teachings, especially the Sermon on the Mount?

• Do our children love?
• Do our children strive for peace and wage peace in the midst of conflict?
• Do our children know Christian hope?

How much of our faith instruction helps our children know the story of their faith?

• Do we tell the whole story of scripture, helping share the big picture?
• Do we share the challenging bits, helping them wrestle with the small picture?
• Do we help them relate our congregation’s story with the church’s story?

How much of our faith instruction is focused on embracing our children’s faith?

• Are we learning from our children as they are?
• Are we sharing in their questions and victories and curiosities?
• Are we focused on their actual needs or those things we assume they need?

Are we actually serving our children through Sunday School or are we just serving our Sunday School (who cares about the children)?

[This is Day 12 of How to start deconstructing church. The next in the series is “Children”. To start from the beginning, read the introduction here.]