Getting passionate about the bible

Sunday school has been approached differently by different people. At times, the church has taken a defensive posture: It’s scary out there and we’re going to shelter you and teach you what’s right so you can stand fast. In this approach, the goal is to present answers, remove ambiguity and convince others to think along the same lines. I don’t think this is a very helpful stance—and it tends to be hard to find teachers if this is the model.

Other people treat Sunday school or faith formation like getting a vaccination (and for kids, sometimes it may feel like going to the dentist). If you take your kids to church once or twice a month, they will meet nice people, and hopefully good values will rub off on them.

Some of these people have largely given up on the tradition, and for them Bible study has been eclipsed by a focus on core values. The challenge is that values within the Christian tradition are linked to a certain understanding of the tradition. The more you try to distill and encapsulate values, the less you have a sense of where they came from or how they relate to one another.

By the time kids are in high school, Sunday school often moves into discussing hot button issues or current events. I have no problem with this, but it gives youth the assumption that you outgrow Sunday school or the Bible. They tend to move on to seemingly more rigorous subjects like science and math. I regularly challenge undergraduate students on their assumption that they have outgrown the Bible.

I’m struck by how often children and youth become painfully aware that while the world is increasingly complex, their understanding of the Bible or engagement with the tradition hasn’t kept pace. To understand the Bible and engage the Christian tradition well takes all the intellectual ability we can muster.

Too often we treat the Bible in Sunday school kind of like Aesop’s fables—there is one key point to get across. If we’re not careful, the “moral” replaces the story or the account itself. Over time, a moralizing approach can get simplistic.

What I find fascinating is how often in the Bible there’s a teaching like “love your neighbour,” followed by long discussions about what it actually means. I think the Pharisees’ question to Jesus—“Who is my neighbour?”—in Luke 10:29 is an important one.

It’s not just: open the Bible and out comes the one-line moral of the story. It’s important to sit with a text and to get into some of the complexity that makes it worthwhile.

What’s Sunday school about?

We are bombarded with hundreds of explicit and implicit messages a day, from what to eat and wear to which topics are vitally important. If we in the church get caught in a kind of a purity mentality where we don’t talk with kids about certain topics, kids will get information and opinions elsewhere.

One of the most countercultural things Mennonites can do today—children and adults—is to deeply engage with documents that few others think or care about: the Bible. I have come to think of studying the Bible, in part, as a form of intellectual self-defence. The Bible is a document that emerges from a time, place and culture far from our own. I think this is its special power and gift. Studying the Bible provides a window into a different way of thinking and operating, which in turn provides a mirror for reconsidering elements of our own situation.

Where we have often thought we and our children should care deeply about an issue, we often neglect to ask: Why should we be interested? What distinctive voice or insight might we contribute to the larger conversation?

This is all a big part of what Sunday school is about.

What’s the teacher’s job?

We need to move past the idea that it’s the Sunday school teacher’s job—or the curriculum writer’s job—to answer all our questions. Or that the primary goal is to provide right answers. Instead, you can ask children what they know or what they think a character might feel like when something is happening. There are ways of engaging people at all ages in the story. Over time, that can be expanded and made more complex.

We tend to want to be certain, and that moves into the question-and-answer mode. But the wheels can come off in various ways. What happens if the Sunday school teacher doesn’t know how to answer a question? What happens if you get an authoritarian teacher who knows exactly what everything means and how it should be understood? What happens by the time someone’s 12 or 13, and starting to say, “Well, I don’t really buy that,” but there’s no room to engage in a deeper conversation?

The irony about the search for certainty is that once people are certain about something, they’re no longer curious about it, and learning stops. The Bible becomes something to defend rather than a companion and conversation partner on life’s journey.

An approach that favours curiosity over answers helps children recognize and get used to the idea that people don’t always agree. To learn to disagree and continue to engage on relatively minor issues develops our ability to better engage on more challenging questions.

We need to move from the idea that children are to be consumers of someone else’s views to one where children are participants in interpretation. With young kids, you can find ways of having them be participants in understanding in a way that can grow over time, but it’s different than them simply receiving the right answers.

One of the challenges for Sunday school teachers is to help kids have a sense of the larger story. At the same time, the nature of church attendance has changed so much that it’s increasingly difficult to have ongoing conversations. Over time, that weakens the ability of kids to grasp the larger story.

What do teachers need to know? 

I think we don’t spend enough time helping to inspire and train teachers.

When it comes to recruitment, often churches ask who’s “good with kids,” but those people may have little interest or background. Sunday school can become merely childcare with a craft and snack. We need to inspire adults to be interested in this stuff and then to teach and pass their passion on.

Coaching offers an interesting analogy. A common selling point in Sunday school teacher recruitment is to say “the curriculum does everything for you.” You wouldn’t hire a sports coach and tell them they only need to show a video. Coaches are often former players who now pass on something they’re passionate and knowledgeable about.

If you think of the rabbinic model— used by Jesus and his disciples—it’s about apprenticeship, following along and seeing how the master operates in different contexts. But mentorship doesn’t fit neatly into a 45-minute block once a week (or every three weeks). If you’re coaching, you’re leading practices multiple times a week. Again, this is different than recruiting warm bodies who look at Sunday school curriculum in the car on the way to church.

Sometimes adults don’t want to teach Sunday school because they are afraid of the responsibility or getting it wrong. Others want to pass on moral values but no longer buy many of the stories.

Sometimes, they haven’t worked through their own questions and are nervous about being exposed.

But many people simply don’t have a clue where to start and feel intimidated. We’re used to expertise in different areas of life, and we know when we don’t have it.

I don’t want potential Sunday school teachers to feel paralyzed out of worry they’re doing it wrong or are unqualified. With questions, you start wherever you are. You’re not trying to reach a certain level of knowledge before you do anything. This is where there is a role for curriculum—but ultimately the book can’t lead the group, only the teacher can.

The other key piece of this is the conviction that we’re not alone—we need to recognize the role of the Holy Spirit and the living word of God. The responsibility doesn’t rest solely on whoever is facilitating the conversation. That idea is implicit in my belief that Bible study is fundamentally a group activity, because the Spirit comes where two or three are gathered.

But I do wish we spent more time providing opportunities for Sunday school teachers to get inspired and interested themselves, because I think that would have a ripple effect.

One of my hopes is that a church could have rotating groups of Sunday school teachers. One group could study together for a few weeks while the other group is teaching the kids, and then they could switch. For several weeks, the leaders get together and talk together about the Bible, get excited about it, learn to understand it together, and then for the next few weeks they teach the children while the other group gets re-inspired. This way, you’re not building the plane as you’re flying it, but there are people flying it while the others are working on parts. into our life. Increased biblical engagement will increase literacy, but literacy will not necessarily increase engagement.

Value and affirm questions; don’t shut them down.

Recognize we live in a different time and place from when and where the Bible was written. Our task is to figure out what ancient writings from a different culture have to offer us now. This can be is best done together. Communities with different cultural perspectives or socio-economic situations offer diverse perspectives. It’s not just about finding one moral that everyone agrees on. If we made a concerted effort, we would have a good basis for a community of learning because often people in Mennonite churches tend to trust each other. But we need more diverse groups.

A Sunday school wish list

• Think about the Bible more as a library than a book. It includes fascinating perspectives that sometimes agree, sometimes raise questions and are sometimes at odds with each other. Recognizing this can lower the temperature of discussion and generate understanding.
• Move from a literacy framework to an engagement framework, from fill-in-the-blank knowledge to a focus on regular interaction built done even among seven-year-olds. It’s as simple as telling a story such as Jacob and Esau, and saying: “Have you ever felt like this person?” People can put themselves into the story.
• Learn to live with open-endedness, as we do with music. You can try to figure out which boyfriend Taylor Swift is talking about in a song, but generally people identify with it because they can identify with the experience and feelings.
• Recognize that studying the Bible doing this together. I’m concerned about the increasing tendency to only talk about faith and spirituality among people we agree with. We need each other, but we’re not used to thinking that way as we become increasingly polarized. Having a more diverse group enhances your Bible study or your Sunday school class.
• Focus on Jesus, but don’t play off the New Testament and the Old Testament like they are enemies. If you do, you will lose helpful connections.
• Avoid asking yes/no or factual questions and then jumping immediately to questions of application. Don’t jump from how many days Moses was on the mountain to how we apply this to our lives. Take time to look at a passage and wrestle with open-ended questions. This will draw people into the process of interpreting a story or passage, not just applying someone else’s interpretation. It will also generate more interest.

What do kids need from Sunday school?

It’s important to be age-appropriate in terms of the kinds of questions kids can deal with. But we often fundamentally underestimate what kids are capable of. We pre-empt the questions we would like to ask because we don’t think they are capable of engaging. In learning, the key place is always at the edge of what you know. If you stay with what you already know, you stop learning. I’d love to see us introducing more and broader material as people enter high school. Instead of going through the Genesis stories for the eighth time, what if we studied Amos?

Let me close with a story that has application for Sunday school. For many years, my daughter thought history was totally boring. When her elementary class studied the Middle Ages, they filled out worksheets while I wondered why they weren’t making catapults instead. In her final year of high school, she had a history teacher who knew her subject and was passionate about it.

That transformed my daughter’s perspective—we heard more about that class than any other subject. Suddenly my daughter saw connections and contemporary implications all over the place. I can wish she’d had that experience all along, but it reminded me that it’s never too late.