Rethinking Sunday School--Part 1

One of the great things about starting a new church is that you can start a new church! You can do things a new way. You also have the chance, before things become too ingrained, to experiment, reflect, and experiment some more.

One of the challenging things about starting a new church is that there are so many areas where you have the chance to do something new and you can't get to them all at once. On top of that, you bring into the new certain ways of doing things from the past that may or may not be helpful and when you're over-stressed, it's easy to revert back to prior conditioning.

In starting Grace we have been trying to move from a program-driven model to a missional community model--one built around groups and groups doing mission. Over all, I'm pleased with where we are in this process and look forward to taking things to the next level as we begin to implement some intentional discipleship groups.

Sunday School, however, has been an interesting challenge. On the one hand, most parents want a great program for their kids. After all, this is what most of us who were raised in the church experienced--a one hour program. And this is what many of the great churches in the area are doing--huge, dynamic, highly energized programs from first class worship bands to video games to Sesame Street type productions. And these churches are doing them well! And let's face it, if the kids want to go to Sunday school on Sunday, then parents will attend any church that creates that kind of excitement for their kids.

So, on the one hand, in starting a new church you want to provide a good, quality Sunday School program to reach kids and their parents.

On the other hand, there's the problem of statistics. Statistics tell us again and again that children who attend Sunday School, no matter how great the program, but who never attend worship with adults, will more likely not attend worship as adults. Children who never attend Sunday School but do worship with their parents will more likely attend worship as adults.

In our setting we had the additional challenge of inadequate space. We have a closet for nursery and two locker rooms for Sunday School. While I'm convinced that in the end its relationships, not space, that transform the lives of our kids (I'll come back to that later), young parents aren't all that crazy about putting their precious little ones in a closet or locker room!

So, we made the decision from the beginning that our kids would worship with their parents. We want the kids to see themselves as a part of the larger family of faith and to get used to worshipping in "big people" church. We also decided that we would dismiss the kids during the message for an experience more geared to them.

That, of course, creates its own problems. Some parents want don't want their kids in worship and they have left to join churches that offer Sunday School during worship. I get that. The other challenge is that you get about 15-20 minutes with the kids vs. 60 minutes. What can you accomplish in that time? What do you do with that time? (Of course, what do you do for 60 minutes to hold the attention of kids!)

We've tried a few different really good ideas. To reflect those good ideas we changed the name from Sunday School to the Grace Adventure Club. The last thing kids want to do is go to school on Sunday! We wanted to focus on the adventure of following Jesus and tried to do so through stories, art, activities, and so on.

And while what we were doing was good, in a small corner of my brain I sensed something wasn't quite right. It had nothing to do with the quality of our Grace Adventure Club, the teachers or the program. Just a sense that we weren't really doing what we wanted to do. Part of the problem was not being sure of what we wanted to do.

It took 4 years, but over the last few weeks some things have happened that have started to tease out the dis-ease in my brain. Much of it had to do with continuing to do a program/informational model vs a truly discipling/formation model.