Kindle Notes & Highlights
One reason why many teachers have not achieved better results is that their teaching aims are too general and often vague. Class members have not seen the relevance to their own experience of what is taught. This has reduced the Sunday School classroom to a place to discuss high Christian ideals. Study too often ends only in discussion without sufficient carry-over into daily life in homes, schools, businesses, recreational activities, and other areas of experience.
Our primary objective in Sunday School teaching is producing Christian living.
Our task is not just to teach people the content of Jesus' message; our job is finished only when learners practice His teachings in their daily lives.
This problem of memorizing verbalized concepts confronts all educators, but Christian educators must guard against verbalization more than others because Christianity is basically an experience—an encounter with Christ that must express itself in experience.
Jesus pointed out this same problem: the Pharisees verbalized the teachings of the prophets without learning the spirit of those teachings in their own experience. How much this is happening in our Sunday Schools today!
Learning words that describe a religious experience is not the same as having the religious experience. Christianity is a personal encounter with God; it is a relationship, an experience!
Many people have unconsciously developed the attitude that all they need to do in Sunday School is to attend, sit, and listen. They discuss the ideals of Jesus and how wonderful they are; they discuss the sins of the world and how terrible they are. But all they do is talk. Rarely do they take any definite action.
They enjoy the lesson. After the session, many in the class may go to the teacher, shake hands, and say, “That was a wonderful lesson this morning. You surely did tell the truth.” But when they leave, they do nothing about what was taught. They repeat the same thing the next Sunday, only to come back the third Sunday to listen, agree, enjoy, and have their emotions stirred again. Thus, the process continues, Sunday after Sunday.
There's the problem! People have their emotions stirred so often without making any overt response that they identify this emotional stirring with having a religious experience. Whether they discuss the need for winning the lost to Christ, or the need for a vigorous worldwide missions program, or helping the homeless in the community, they receive a satisfying experience merely from talking about it.
Emotions play an important and necessary role in religious experience, but experience is complete only when it expresses itself in life and action. An emotional experience that does not lead to response—that is, an emotional experience that ends only in stirring our feelings—is incomplete.
This is unfortunate and even tragic. Christians come to church (this also happens in the preaching service) week after week and have their emotions stirred with no accompanying overt action. Eventually Christians desire and are satisfied with only having their emotions stirred.
Christian teaching is complete when it results in Christian action—only then.
How can the ideals of Jesus that we present in the classroom carry over into the lives of our class members? That is our greatest problem! How can we achieve this carryover?
Christian teachers need to study and understand human personality. We must discover how people learn—how God has ordained that people learn—in order to cooperate more intelligently with God. This is how we can expect better results from teaching.
I must admit that some Sunday School teachers simply try to get their pupils to “be good” without leading them to understand that truly Christian conduct comes from God's working and living in the individual, not from a desire to “please the teacher” or from any other motivation.
The conversion experience is not a superficial or mechanical relationship. Conversion is not a perfunctory acceptance of a religious formula. Paul said, “Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new” (2 Cor. 5:17, KJV).
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