In a world of suicide bombings, text messaging and living wills, Christian education is complicated stuff.
The kindergarteners and some of the adults need to learn the basics. In many Presbyterian congregations, new member classes are full of former Baptists and Catholics and Methodists and people who haven’t gone to any church in many, many years.
Many congregations want a Sunday school curriculum that’s straightforward and easy to use. They have to choose between material produced by the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and what’s available from other sources — on the Internet and in catalogs and Christian bookstores. Some have trained Christian educators; others rely on volunteers and a gut instinct for what will work.
But picking the right curriculum is just one step for churches to take. They also need to pay attention, Christian educators argue, to the connections between the curriculum and the rest of life. Increasingly, Christian educators are challenging churches to think about broader questions — about the importance, for example, of intergenerational learning experiences in congregations. It’s not always a great idea, some contend, to separate the children from the teenagers and the teenagers from the senior citizens.
And in a hectic world, families need support that goes beyond teaching children the Bible basics, some educators contend.
Parents aren’t always sure how to talk to their children about the Bible or how to teach them to pray — to carry the lessons they may learn in Sunday school beyond the walls of the church.
Karen-Marie Yust, author of the book Real Kids, Real Faith: Practices for Nurturing Children’s Spiritual Lives, said during a recent conference at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary that many children and teenagers are at church an hour a week, maybe two — so what they learn in that time can’t begin to compete with all other influences in their lives, including hours each week online and watching television.
So families and congregations need to understand other ways — outside of worship and Sunday school — to communicate to young people about God. For example, when “we live our lives with a sense of gratitude for God’s gracious love,” rather than a sense of entitlement, that sends a message, Yust said. Children learn about God when they’re invited to ask questions–(“I’d like to know how many of you fully understand the Eucharist,”–she told the adult audience) and to share their gifts for ministry with others, instead of being reminded of all the things they’re not old enough to do.
They need space to talk about the world’s difficult issues and to look for hope despite the violence and chaos said Yust, a professor who will begin teaching Christian education next fall at Union Theological Seminary-Presbyterian School of Christian Education in Richmond. (See article by Yust on page 9.)
And children need to learn that the Bible isn’t just a book written long ago — they need to understand that its stories can connect with the stories and realities of their own lives, Yust said. By doing that, they begin to see themselves as part of the community of faith and to draw parallels between the Bible and their own lives and experiences.
Young people also can resonate, Yust said, with the stories of God calling people to do things in the Bible — flawed people, ordinary people, who are called to discipleship all through the Bible. Through that, she said, they can begin to consider questions such as “What do I want to be when I grow up?” in the context of faith.
American teenagers today often lead frantic lives — booked wall-to-wall with school and jobs and sports and extracurricular activities, so much so that their lives can feel fragmented, constantly stressed. Some researchers talk of how children and teenagers often are missing a sense of connectedness to a greater whole — and how religious institutions, at their best, can provide a sense of “authoritative community” that transcends generations and involves teaching about values, religion and service to others, said Martha Bettis Gee, a Christian educator with Fairlawn Church in Columbus, Ind.
“The number of activities out there that kids have to choose from is mind-boggling,” Gee said. “It causes kids’ lives to get fragmented into these little boxes.”
For many young people, religion is just one force in their complicated lives, but research is showing that it can be a potent and significant one.
“Religious interests and values in teens’ lives typically compete against those of school, homework, television, other media, sports, romantic relationships, paid work, and more,” the sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton write in their new study of adolescents and religion, called “Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers.”
“Indeed, in many adolescents’ lives, religion occupies a weak and quite often losing position among these competing influences,” the authors write. But those teenagers who do consider religion and faith to be important often have the religious aspects of their lives intersecting with other parts of their lives — their faith is not seen as isolated or something they just do for an hour on Sunday morning.
Maybe their scouting troop leader is someone from church. Maybe they play basketball in a church league. Maybe they work on a Habitat house or tutor children along with friends from school or bring some friends along to church camp.
And while teenagers often are not particularly articulate about their faith, “it remains true nevertheless that parents and other adults exert huge influences in the lives of American adolescents — whether for good or ill, and whether adults can perceive it or not — when it comes to religious faith and most other areas of teens’ lives,” Smith and Denton write.
In other words, what parents and other adults say to teenagers about religion really does matter.
The PC(USA) is trying to navigate all this territory by providing curriculum that clearly teaches congregations about the Reformed tradition — and does so in a way that churches will support (meaning, they’ll buy enough of it to make production cost-effective for the denomination) and which acknowledges some of the changing dynamics that congregations face.
“I think we’re really living in changing times in terms of how churches pick the curriculum they use,” said Sandra Moak, publisher for the PC(USA)’s Congregational Ministries Publishing.
The PC(USA), for example, produces less curriculum for use in the summer than for the rest of the year, because “a lot of churches don’t have Sunday school in the summer, which amazes me,”
Moak said. “But I would say more than half of our churches don’t have Sunday school in the summer.” Moak said most churches are eclectic in selecting curriculum — “they don’t choose one line of curriculum to use from cradle to grave.” And the curriculum itself is changing — the Present Word line, for example, is beginning to talk more about spiritual practices, and an audio tape version sells not just to the visually impaired, but to folks who want to listen to it in their cars or while they exercise.
The “We Believe” curriculum stresses Bible study, but also is adding a rotation workshop version of the curriculum, which will be available only online, starting in September. Sunday school teachers like the rotation model — which reinforces the same biblical ideas through different mediums, through reading and art and drama and music — because “it engages all of the educational intelligences and it’s very creative,” Moak said. “It gives children options of learning with their hands and their heads and their hearts — that’s a good thing. It offers a chance to really learn the story, learning it literally, illustrating it, then knowing about the food that people might be eating at those times . . . coming at it from a different point of view.”
Other resources aren’t full lines of weekly curriculum, but other materials to help churches and families.
For example, Gee is working with Martha Miller, with the PC(USA)’s Office of Family and Intergenerational Ministries, to produce a resource — tentatively called “Family: A Child’s Small Group Ministry,” and expected to be completed later this year — that will try to help parents see themselves as their children’s primary faith educators and give them some ideas of how to approach that.
“Many of the things they’re doing already are important for the spiritual development of their kids,” but could be strengthened if parents were more intentional and consistent about trying to reinforce their children’s faith development, Gee said.
For example, parents can develop small rituals — saying grace before every meal (including one that Gee calls “the fast-food blessing”), sharing family stories, having short bedtime rituals (reading a story or saying prayers) or offering a simple, steady word of blessing when a child goes out the door. One pastor, for example, has said that every time his teenage sons left at night, he and his wife made a point of saying: “Be safe. We’ll leave the light on for you.”
One of the toughest challenges has been to develop the right kind of curriculum for young adults — some resources the PC(USA) has produced haven’t proved all that popular. “We’re not sure print is the right medium,” Moak said. “On the other hand, we’re not sure any medium is the right medium.”
And there’s a certain demand for language- specific resources, to serve immigrant congregations and changing populations. Last year, in a budget-cutting move, the PC(USA) eliminated inhouse development of the Spanish-language curriculum for adults, ceding that work to the United Methodists — a decision that was somewhat controversial. Striking the right balance in providing materials in languages other than English is an issue to which the PC(USA) will need to continue to pay attention, Moak said.
