Some of you may have seen an article ‘Killing the Church with Sunday School‘.
It’s written by Jonathan Aigner, an organist and former primary school teacher. He argues that by segregating children and adults, we fail both children and the church.
‘Once [children] graduated from [Sunday School],’ he writes, ‘there was no connection to the greater life of the church, especially the strange thing the church does together on Sunday mornings that it calls “worship”. Though much effort and expense had been expended to making them into little Christians, nobody had taught them how to be grown-up, churched Christians.’
There’s much I agree:
Children should experience the worship patterns of the church at large – walking into any Anglican church around the world, the pattern of Gathering/Hearing and Responding to the Word/Prayer/Communion/Dismissal should not be a foreign country to them.
Children should learn the prayers and music of the church at large – they should say the Lord’s Prayer with the real words, sing hymns and Taize chants as well as modern songs.
The Body of Christ should worship with all ages together – even if I disagree that we need to do this for the whole service, every week.
But I worry, as David Mitchell wrote, that we’re in danger of ‘staring so hard at the bathwater that the baby is getting nervous’.
There are significant benefits to Sunday School, which Aigner doesn’t address:
Sunday School gives us the opportunity to tell the whole story of the Bible, in order, from start to finish. Many churches follow the lectionary, built around the cycle of the church year, but it’s difficult to follow for someone who doesn’t know the story of the Bible. By bringing children into Sunday School, we can give them this basic understanding, making it easier for them to put the stories they hear in church into a broader context.
Sunday School also allows us to focus on the Old Testament. The ancient stories and prophecies have a huge amount of imaginative power for children, and take up about two thirds of the Bible – and yet while we hear them every week, they’re not often the main focus. The Sunday service just kind of assumes that you know them. So if children don’t hear and explore those stories in Sunday School, they risk missing out.
Finally, Sunday School gives us the chance to repeat ourselves. With four or five different hymns every week in church, children may rarely learn any one of them well. But if you have one or two songs that you do regularly – or over a season, or term – children get to know them. Building up a mental library of hymns and songs is important to feel at home in church. So while I agree with Aigner that children should be learning the real music of the church, I disagree that corporate worship is the only place to do this.
So what should we do? How can we strike a balance? I don’t have a perfect answer, but I’ve hit on a few ideas:
- Don’t make Sunday School the whole service. Start and finish the service together, and send the children to their groups for part of it.
- Make Sunday School at least partly liturgical. Sing the music of the church, light candles, say responsorial sentences, pray together, hear and respond to stories. Hold Sunday School in a space that feels like church and not like a secular classroom.
- Do all-age worship at least three or four times a year, and make it recognisable to those who only know your regular worship. If all-age worship is different from a normal Sunday, you’re falling into the trap Aigner talks about – making normal worship a foreign country. Consider all-age worship a halfway house from Sunday School to church, not something totally different.
- Have children’s services at other times – child-friendly versions of services that are part of the traditions of your church. These can be more interactive, shortened versions of what the adults will be doing at a different time.
There are benefits both to Sunday School and to including children in corporate worship. And figuring out how to do both is a crazy balancing act. You will get it wrong sometimes. You will miss opportunities, and you will try stuff that doesn’t work. Never mind. Keep trying. It’s worth it.
Margaret Pritchard Houston is Families Worker at St George’s Campden Hill and runs Mustard Seed Kids, offering resources and training in children’s work.