I am writing this as a way of trying to understand why the American church is floundering so much in the area of Sunday School. This is a long epistle so have broken it down into parts. Here are my thoughts for part one:
I am writing this not only to the church but to myself as well…being vulnerable is an important tool of opening oneself up to critical thinking and a reorganized way of seeing our world. This all began as I have been reading through Ezekiel and saw my uncircumcised heart being pricked. I have been attending church for most of my life but have yet to find one that truly encourages study as an ongoing habit and worthwhile “adventure”. They quote 2 Tim 2:15 but I see no evidence of it. If one were to ask the student in that class if they had studied ahead of time to present themselves an approved student to that teacher, they would say wholeheartedly “yes”. Yet the evidence speaks for itself. The student has not prepared nor has the teacher. Why is this so true today? The questions the teachers ask fall into the range of the factual not critical and are what I call “poi”…a pooling of ignorance, a reordering of the gray matter, which may or may not have anything to do with the passage they were assigned. The class then becomes what I term a “wot”; a waste of time. More often than not, application is given by the teacher not the student.
Stay tuned for part two where I explore what I feel are some more of the problems in the American Sunday School system today and why we are seeing so many fall away. We have been lulled into the thinking that Sunday School's focus should be fellowship. And to do that the church has changed it from Sunday "School" to Sunday Bible "Fellowship". Could that be a reason our kids are growing up uneducated to the truths? Could this be a reason we may not be discerning? Stay tuned.....
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