Where have all of the Sunday schools gone?

I read a very thought provoking editorial in the Wall Street Journal today. The editorial Why Sunday School are closing looks at the decline of Sunday schools in local churches and ponders why this is happening. I think the writer, Charlotte Hays, makes some interesting points but ultimately the decline in Sunday school is not because of high rates of divorce or kids raised on video games. I do think she hit on some of the issues without even realizing it. For example, I think this is very telling :

Dubbed in Protestant circles "the greatest lay movement since Pentecost," Sunday school traveled across the pond in the 1790s, eventually becoming the Protestant norm here. By my own childhood, Sunday school was taken for granted. Catholics relied on parochial schools and special weekday classes to teach the faith, but Protestants had Sunday school.

The key is right there. Sunday school was taken for granted with nary a thought as to why or even if we should have it and parents became reliant on Sunday school to pass the faith on to their kids. Any wonder we lose most kids after high school? An hour or two at church is not going to offset years of parental neglect and secular humanism coming from the school system.

That is all too true as I have railed about before. The problem is multifold, but I think at its core it is an issue of mission creep. What is the point of Sunday school and other church programs directed at youth ( I am lumping them all together here)? Is it and should it be the place of the Sunday School to teach children the faith? We have become reliant on the local church body to do what we should be doing as parents, raising our kids in the faith. That is not the job of a local church organization, it is the responsibility of the parent. The local church can help but it cannot replace, but by and large that is what has happened.

These issue go way beyond just Sunday school. The problem is rampant in virtually all of the programs for kids (not least of which because the Gospel is not a program). Sunday school and VBS and youth groups try to do two things simultaneously, evangelize unbelieving children and disciple believing kids. In trying to do two things at once, they have failed at both because they don’t do either one very well.

VBS/Sunday School/Youth (hereafter SS/VBS/YG) has degenerated into fun and games with a very watered down “Gospel” presentation and a bunch of thinly veiled moralizing (this is not the case universally but it is the case in the vast majority of Protestantism). The more kids show up, the more “decisions” from kids who will never come to church, the more frivolous and silly the events, the better. Read the New Testament and show me an example of the Gospel message being presented in a frivolous, silly way to make it more fun for kids? Veggietales are OK for teaching kids to be nice to one another but not to hear the Gospel. Where do we get off, how dare we trivialize the Gospel that has the power to save souls from hell by turning it into a lowest common denominator summer time activity? Believing kids are not being discipled in SS/VBS/YG, they are being entertained. Entertainment is fine, but not when it is supposed to be discipleship. Youth activities are perhaps the worst offenders with stuff going on that would be inappropriate in a secular setting much less when led by adults who should know better or who have abdicated authority to the children. Even Sunday school aimed at teaching believing kids is often trite and moralistic instead of Gospel driven and Scripture saturated.

On the other hand, kids who are not believers are given a message that doesn’t challenge them in their sins. The local church provides free babysitting for a couple of days or one night a week and the parents are unlikely to ever bring them back. Even kids who “make a decision”, which Eric Carpenter pointed out is one of the main benchmarks for success, are unlikely to come again. Wonder why you get 100 kids at VBS and not one shows up later? We aren't losing the kids who "got saved" at VBS because they never were saved in the first place. They made a "decision" as an emotional response but their hearts were not changed. The Gospel is tough, it has some sharp edges but filing those edges down to make it easier to swallow isn't doing anyone a favor. It is preaching "another Gospel" and is anathema. It is also all to often business as usual in local evangelical churches.

Something else I found interesting about this editorial was this comment:

The decline in Sunday schools appears to be gradual but steady… And the future does not look bright: Only 15% of ministers regarded Sunday school as a leading concern. The younger the pastor, the study showed, the less emphasis he placed on Sunday school.

Think that perhaps has something to do with younger pastors having a fresher memory of their own experiences in SS/VBS/YG? If you are a young pastor with vivid memories of how little you got out of Sunday school, why would you want to encourage it?

If we want to evangelize kids, then lets evangelize them. Not by a backdoor, slip them the Gospel when they aren’t looking approach but by lovingly and boldly preaching Christ and Him crucified. We aren't being faithful to the Great Commission by getting kids to sign cards only to have them never show any signs of regeneration.

If we want to disciple our kids, let’s call on parents to do just that. It is my job to raise my kids in the fear and admonition of the Lord. Not Carriage Hill Bible Chapel where we go every Sunday. Not the Lutheran church down the road holding VBS next week. It is my job and I will not be able to blame someone else if I fail in that responsibility. The local church should equip parents and help them and encourage them, absolutely yes. Replace them with Sunday school and youth groups, no. Sunday school and VBS and youth groups can have a place but they cannot be all things to all people crammed into one hour a week. They cannot effectively evangelize without the Evangel. They can supplement but never replace Christian education in the home. It is not the job of the church to raise our kids and teach them. That is the job of Christian parents, no matter what our church traditions say. That is never the stated intent of SS/YG/VBS, but in reality that is what has happened. This is one of those cases where the church needs to step aside and call people out instead of trying to fill in the gap. In trying to help, for the best of motivations, the church has actually done great harm.

Caution: Danger Zone Ahead

The greatest danger zone for Christian children?

The world is full of dangers to children, we get warnings about this and that is a choking hazard. We have become hyper-sensitive to every danger and threat, perceived and otherwise. Every time a kid gets a speck of dust we douse them in hand sanitizer.

But what is the biggest threat to our children?

Drugs? The Internet? Immorality on TV and in movies? Humanism in schools?

The church?

The American church, in my mind, can be one of the most dangerous places for a child growing up in a Christian family. We know the obvious stuff, stuff that we hear from James Dobson and company to be on the lookout for. Strangers, drug dealers, R-rated movies, internet pornography, HARRY POTTER BOOKS! There are tons of things that are obvious dangers. But sometimes the greatest danger is the most subtle, the danger that strikes when and where you least expect it and when you are most vulnerable because you feel the safest.

There are three big dangers for kids growing up in church:

1. The sense of false conversion, brought on by being in church your entire life and putting your reliance in that experience. Adults raised in the church as children often attribute salvation to being in church or an emotion driven experience of “making a decision for Christ” as a child in VBS. That is not to say that children don’t come to Christ in VBS, but it seems to me that far too few adults who profess Christ have ever really been confronted by their sin.

2. A laissez faire attitude towards church and Christian service, making it rote. Talk to a lifelong Christian and then talk to someone who came to Christ much later in life and see the difference in fervor. Fervor needs to be tempered sometimes, but I would rather try to rein in a new convert who is on fire for the Lord than try to encourage a lifelong Christian who is utterly lacking any passion.

3. A shallow knowledge of the Gospel and decades perhaps of never getting beyond the superficial. It is amazing to talk to people who have been in church for their entire lives who lack even a rudimentary knowledge of Gospel basics. I am not talking people discussing the difference between infralapsarianism and supralapsarianism, I am talking about justification by faith alone, why we hold to the inerrancy of the Scripture, where the Bible came from.

So what to do? Well the answer is not to stop going to church! The answer is to make our children’s ministry and our youth programs line up with what we should be seeing in adult ministry, in other words ministry that is focused on Word and prayer to glorify God and lift up Jesus Christ. Children and youth ministry should not be viewed as a safe daycare while adults do church stuff, but as an active and vibrant and absolutely vital ministry opportunity. It gets back to the issue of sending money to missionaries in far away lands, and ignoring the ministry opportunities right under our nose in our church, our neighborhood and our families. We should evangelize our children with the Word of God, teaching them the fear and admonition of the Lord. Catechizing children so they have a foundation in the Word. Providing them with classes that are fun and at the appropriate learning level, but that are also challenging and Scripture saturated, with Scripture that is applied and not just memorized in a vacuum. It does no good at all in my opinion to memorize a Scripture verse and have no idea what it means in context (which may be why so many adults throw a verse out to make a point having given no thought at all to what the context and the big picture really is). Show them that Christ and Him crucified is the theme of the Bible, that the Bible is NOT a collection of stories designed to foster morality but rather a record and revelation of the living God.

The church needs to be an integral component in that education, but not a replacement or a substitute. Parents cannot subcontract out the responsibility for the rearing of their children to the church and certainly not to a school. The process starts and ultimately stops at home, but the church needs to be a partner in that instead of an impediment. I have not met a person in youth or children’s ministry (although I am sure there are some) who are not well meaning and sincere, but the leadership of the church needs to take a far more active hand in those ministries.

If it IS broken, DO fix it

One of the most important mission fields in Christendom is within the four walls of the church building. Mission work, in our minds, involves sending missionaries off to faraway lands, getting the occasional postcard and once in a while a PowerPoint presentation. We give them a check and send them on their way, and feel good about ourselves with no oversight and no accountability to the local church. But at the same time, we have churches full of young people who get nothing meatier than Veggietales in church children and youth programs, and we wonder why they wander off and abandon church when they hit 18 or why they can’t articulate basic Bible truths (or even know that there are basic, fundamental Bible truths!)

I know that for many Christians, VBS, AWANA and Youth Programs are considered untouchable, pillars of the church on par with the greatest of truths, but when you examine a couple of realities, we should really be asking some hard questions:

1. We see an enormous number of children and youth at events, many if not most of whom come from non-Christian homes and never exhibit being truly born-again. I know people get saved through VBS etc (including my son Noah) but is it the exception rather than the rule. The decisional structure of most VBS and Youth groups leads to lots of “decisions” and very few Christians.

2. Our children are leaving the church at an alarming rate when they hit 18 and we also see the ones that are staying in church drifting off in to aberrant systems like the emerging church or entering adulthood with a functional illiteracy in basic Biblical concepts. After years of feel-good, man-centered sermons poorly done, is it any wonder that they seek out the same sort of bubblegum sermons just done with more entertainment value and more comfortable seats?

Given this, where should the church focus our limited resources? I shudder to make this overly pragmatic or make it sound like I am approaching this like a banker, but when faced with tough economic times (I am certain giving is down in most churches) and quite frankly the system is broken as it exists today, it is vital to show good stewardship and put our efforts in the efforts that have most impact on eternity.

Let me suggest this: Christian education for our children should be a primary focus of the church. Let me go a step further: if we are not spending at least as much time and money on discipling Christians in the church as we do on foreign missionary work, we are failing in our responsibility as a church. Why are we so willing to throw ourselves into VBS and foreign missionary work, but utterly disinterested in true, deep discipleship of our children?

This applies equally to adults and the adult Sunday school program. Week after week, month after month of how to live a better this and how to be a better that, and not a lick of actual Bible teaching. Is it any wonder that so few people know how even the most rudimentary truths of the faith?

We spend all of our time looking for the pagan outside of the four walls of the church, and we miss the greatest mission opportunity of the world right before us. That is one of the great tragedies of the modern era.