Eight Great Purposes of Sunday School

 The Sunday School Teacher 6

If you aim at nothing, you will hit it every time. Put another way round, if your church is having Sunday School to have Sunday School, you will accomplish practically nothing. Without objectives, an army, no matter how well trained, equipped, and led, is useless. With objectives, however, you can protect yourself from the hamster wheel of meaningless activity. Objectives also function as guardrails, disciplining your curriculum and staffing choices.

What then are these objectives? What should you seek to accomplish with Sunday School? In this chapter, I am going to offer you eight categories or concepts, though it is not wrong to have additional ones directly related to your specific context.

Any Sunday School class's first objective should be to lead people to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ. Before the teaching aspect of the Great Commission can be applied, the reaching aspect must be accomplished. The new birth is where everything begins. Absent such a foundation, it is pointless to construct anything on top. A good teacher will make sure he has personal knowledge of the state of the soul of each one of his students. He will not take others' word for it. He will ascertain this directly via an individual conversation with each person in his class.

Second, an effective Sunday School aims to guide each Christian into a continuing and committed relationship with the local church. As a lifelong Christian and pastor for nigh on three decades, I have met numerous genuine Christians who have little to no attachment to a particular local church. Not a single one of them has been a strong Christian. Wandering alone apart from the flock, and the watchcare of a shepherd, an isolated sheep is easy prey. A Sunday School class is not the only answer to this problem, but it is a good one. Like Legos built one upon another, connected at numerous points, a student inserted solidly into a Sunday School class should automatically become an integral part of the larger structure of the church. If your class is not doing that, you need to rework some things to achieve that.

Third, a good Sunday School class seeks to develop in each Christian a solid practice of personal devotions. So much of the Christian's life revolves around their relationship with God's Word. Some years ago, I undertook a study of Psalm 119, and that was my major takeaway. Absent regular time in the Word of God, the Christian will remain stunted, a pygmy where he could have been a giant, a hollowed-out, shambling concentration camp victim where he could have been the very specimen of health. Yet our flesh fights us every step of the way between here and Home. We need constant reminders, constant emphasis, constant discipline. You will do your students a great turn if you show them how to interact privately every day with God's Word and then help them build the steady practice of it.

Fourth, one of the primary tasks of a Sunday School class is to deeply embed age-appropriate basic stories and doctrines of the Bible into the mind of each student. It is not that we are not to aim at the heart, for that is always appropriate and necessary. It is that Sunday School should also equip the mind, furnishing it with the mental props necessary to fill out sermons decades yet in that child's future.

Think of a green screen, if you will. Increasingly, movies and even television series are filmed on an otherwise empty set in front of a green background. That background is then digitally filled in with whatever setting is necessary for the scene. What is placed onto that green screen can vary widely, but it becomes the context required to understand the dialogue taking place between the actors properly.

If you do it right, for the rest of his life, a child will be able to listen to almost any sermon, and instantly furnish the green screen necessary to interpret and apply the sermon he is hearing correctly. David and Goliath. The Trinity. The Rapture. Stephen being stoned. The Tabernacle. Each one of those short sentences fills the mind of the lifelong Bible student with immediate visual and or mental information. Children soak up information like a sponge. The wise teacher takes advantage of that fact and the time given him to cram his student's head full to bursting with biblical information.

Allow me to take a moment to expand on the doctrinal side of this. There are some people who object to any formalized theological system. "Just preach the Bible!" they holler, as if explaining sanctification in depth is somehow damaging. But it is neither sinful nor unwise to organize biblical information and convey those truths to children systematically. Indeed, I would argue it is eminently necessary.

As independent Baptists, we do not catechize our children at home. (Perhaps we should, but let us set that to the side for the moment.) How then is that child supposed to hold to, let alone defend, the faith in which he has never been grounded? Is it any wonder that they grow up independent Baptist but have no apparent problem switching to a jelloish evangelical non-denominational worship center as they hit adulthood? And I could furnish similar illustrations ad nauseum, world without end. A ten-year-old child in the Junior Boys' Sunday School class can and should learn theology. If he does not, we have no call to fault the Jehovah's Witnesses when they snatch him up in later years.

Fifth, a good Sunday School class will help develop in each child both the desire and the ability to serve God actively. We will speak more to this later in the practical section of this book, but a well-organized class provides both opportunity and instruction in such service for the Lord. Students need to sit down and hear the Word taught, certainly, but they need to get up and do something with it just as certainly. The Dead Sea is so named precisely because it is constantly taking in and never giving out. The carnal Christians that stare blankly at me from their pew in the sanctuary on the rare Sunday morning they choose to grace us with their presence are the enfleshed example of this. They attend, erratically, but do not serve. And their Christianity is a clogged-up, useless sort of thing. The best place to defeat such fleshliness is in the child. He is young and impressionable. Teach him to serve the Lord with a happy heart.

Sixth, a good Sunday School class… perhaps I should say teacher here… helps people not only to see the Word of God as relevant, but helps them see how to do so. A good Sunday School class teaches the child how to apply the Word of God to their own lives.

Take Proverbs, for example. The teenage Sunday School class should focus heavily on this book. In the process, students should learn not only what to do and what not to do as they make their daily choices, but they should also learn how to interpret and apply the principles and concepts taught in the wisdom books. If my student only knows what I tell him individually, I have failed him. He must learn how to apply biblical principles to the specifics of his own varied condition as the years roll by.

Seventh, a good Sunday School class will equip the child to answer the great faith questions and objections that inevitably come to each thinking person's mind. In other words, the teaching should include some apologetics at some level, especially as the child ages.

In the now-outdated book, Youth and the Church, Roy Irving nevertheless furnishes us a still relevant passage on precisely this point. "Young people may sense conflicts between their own beliefs and the information they gain in school or hear from teen and adult friends with different beliefs. Teens' increased ability for independent thinking may make them critical of beliefs taught in childhood, especially if those beliefs have been taught in an authoritarian, unnatural, or bigoted manner. Doubting is an indication that one is maturing. Doubting can be healthy, for it can lead youth to come to a personal firsthand acceptance of truths. For most adolescents, the period of doubt does lead to a revision of some of his religious beliefs. The change is often in the direction of a more carefully thought-out and a more tenable faith. ...This aspect of adolescent development challenges youth workers to help guide youth through this turbulent period with an attitude of loving acceptance and understanding. This period of religious muddle suggests that youth be given opportunity to engage in discussion (with individual leaders and groups) in a permissive atmosphere. A dogmatic 'we don't discuss such things' attitude may squelch a teen's honest search for adequate reasons for believing what he does."

I am not here backsliding on my opinion that the Sunday School class should be taught authoritatively. I am, however, balancing that with the necessary understanding that teenagers, especially, should be given a time and place to question what they have been taught. They are going to do it eventually anyway. It is much better if they do it in a guided manner by an intelligent teacher prepared for each objection. It is the shield of faith that quenches the fiery darts of the devil. Faith in what? Not just God's Word generically, but God's Word specifically. Biblical writers were masters at bringing up their opponents' arguments first so they could furnish the proper defense against them. It would be wise for us to do likewise.

Lastly, a good Sunday School class helps the student to develop a biblical worldview. In the proverbial tale of the man looking at the world through rose colored glasses, everything took on a reddish hue. It literally colored everything he saw. In a similar manner, I want the children in my care to look at every single thing in their lives for their entire lives through a biblical lens. Politics. Economics. Sports. Money. Marriage. Parenting. Ethnicity. Crime. Priorities. Amusements. Music. Sexuality. Religion. Social media. The Word of God informs our understanding of all of these and more. The Holy Spirit will find much biblical ammunition to use when he rummages around in the mind of the well-educated Sunday School pupil, regardless of the topic in question.

"Well, Pastor Brennan, that all sounds good, but I'm exhausted just reading this list. How in the world can you possibly expect me to accomplish all of this? I'm just a Sunday School teacher, not a miracle worker."

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. As my college president, Wendall Evans, said so well, "Set your goal, plan your work, work your plan, and don't get sidetracked." If your approach to each week is to casually develop whatever biblical truth comes to mind, you will not come close to accomplishing this. Remember? If you aim at nothing, you will hit it every time. On the other hand, you can take this list and from it develop a plan of attack that covers the entire arc of the years a student spends in your care. You may not get it all done, no, but you will undoubtedly come much closer to accomplishing it if you aim at so doing than you will if you never think beyond this coming week's lesson.

Sunday School is an exceedingly valuable time, not just in the immediate slot this week, but in the aggregate of a twenty-year horizon. If you are wise, you will use it to the fullest possible effect.

Aim at something important. 'Tis the only way to hit it.