What Is Going On in Sunday School?

IN MANY church organizations around the world millions of people attend what is called Sunday school.

It has been reported that in the United States alone about 20,000,000 boys and girls between the ages of three and twelve attend the Sunday schools of 223 Protestant denominations. There are also Sunday-school classes for all adult age-groups.

The potential of Sunday school for doing good is high, since so many are said to attend. If such a large segment of people, young and old, could be properly taught sound Bible principles, backed up by a wholesome family life, the moral tone of any nation could be lifted. But are Sunday schools bearing such good fruitage?

Problems

Clergymen and parents alike agree that the Sunday school faces many problems. High on the list is disappointment with results.

Disappointment with the results, or end product, is traceable in part to the motives that influence parents to send their children to Sunday school. Many parents feel that Sunday school is an easy and popular shortcut to religious education for the young, relieving themselves of the responsibility.

There are those who say that this motive is even outweighed by parental desire for social status. Redbook magazine stated: “In suburban areas, particularly, parents tend to join churches and send children to Sunday school to fit in with community mores. These parents have little interest in what is being taught​—and why and by whom—​or taking part themselves.”

With such limited interest in the spiritual condition of the young, the end product is not hard to predict. In an enrollment that numbers millions of youngsters, it is found that their moral atmosphere is not any better than that of an equal number of neighborhood youngsters who have never seen the inside of a Sunday school.

The main reason singled out for such a disappointing result is the unwillingness of the parents to participate with their children in religious training or back them up with a Christian atmosphere at home. So sooner or later the young conclude that, since the parents do not have any real interest in religious training, why should they?

Who Will Teach?

One of the problems that has led to such disappointing results is the qualification of those who teach Sunday schools. The National Sunday School Association’s Donald Reeder said: “The training of leaders and teachers is the greatest single unresolved task of the Sunday schools.”

A survey of five denominations, conducted by the National Council of Churches, concluded that the church school’s “greatest weakness” is its teachers’ lack of knowledge of their own faith and their lack of commitment to learning about it well enough to teach it.

Thus, even though modernization programs have been instituted, with new textbooks outlining programs, and with visual aids being provided, still the Sunday-school structure stands upon a foundation of quicksand. It is no stronger than the knowledge of the teachers. And since most churches are in no position to hire professional Sunday-school teachers, they must depend upon volunteers, often parents who are already busy.

It is hoped that such parents will have the knowledge and determination to impart good religious training because they come from families that are tight religious groups. They presume that such parents regularly pursue religious instruction and set good examples in their homes.

However, the assumption that tight-knit religious families with good knowledge can supply adequate volunteer teachers is not a reality. Indeed, deterioration of family religious life is a basic weakness upon which the entire Sunday-school program falters. As one volunteer Sunday-school teacher lamented: “Many youngsters come from homes, so-called religious homes, where God or love or faith is seldom, if ever, mentioned.” Teachers are drawn from such families where parents often do not have sufficient knowledge even to instruct their own young properly, much less others.

Nor are Protestants alone in this dilemma. A survey noted the reluctance of Catholic and Jewish parents as well to “consider religious training part of their job at home.” Thus, a joint study by the Carnegie Corporation and the Federal Office of Education found that Catholic-school religious education is “virtually wasted” on the large majority of the students.

What to Teach?

Another critical problem of Sunday schools today revolves around what the youngsters should be taught. Some adults ask: “What is being taught? the Bible? denominational dogma? Christian morals? social and political ethics? or what?”

Some parents, and some educators, such as Professor Marcus Barth of the University of Chicago, have defended teaching the Bible as “not just the best tool for Sunday school, but the only one that is reliable.”

However, the architects of many Sunday-school courses have had serious problems with teaching the Bible. They have discovered that the Bible’s teachings often undermine church dogma. Another problem is that many of the teachers, indeed most of them, do not really know how to use the Bible. They are not familiar with its teachings, even with its teachings as explained by their church. Hence, many give the Bible only lip service in teaching Sunday school.

This reflects the fact that religious leaders have lost touch with God’s Word, the Bible. It is like a closed book to them. Their hesitancy in using the Bible, their inability really to teach its truths to others, their failure to apply its laws, principles and prophecies to modern life, have resulted in gross confusion.

This reminded a Bible student of the burning sarcasm of the prophet Isaiah, who declared: “And for you men the vision of everything becomes like the words of the book that has been sealed up, which they give to someone knowing the writing, saying: ‘Read this out loud, please,’ and he has to say: ‘I am unable, for it is sealed up.’”​—Isa. 29:11.

As for teaching church dogma, this too has reached a dead end. Many consider that teaching dogma is “narrow” and “separatist,” while the ecumenical movement calls for casting off religious differences. In noting that such teaching would be outmoded, Gerald H. Slusser, professor of theology at Missouri’s Eden Theological Seminary, stated: “In the average family Aunt Millie might have become a Christian Scientist; Brother Bill has been to college and become an agnostic; Father does not say so, but he has adopted the American free-enterprise religion of ‘get rich quick.’”

Hence, fashioners of “modern” Sunday-school teaching programs compromise, trying to please everybody and offend no one. But a father complained: “My son, who is seven, has been taught that God is everywhere. I think my son is getting a tremendously confused idea of things.”

Posing Problems​—Offering No Solutions

One popular device in “modern” Sunday schools is to pose “real-life problems” to students, but offer no solutions.

A text used by the Lutheran Church of America entitled “Is It Christian?” raises such problems as this: A sixteen-year-old tries to reconcile his sense of right and wrong with his desire to ‘go along with the gang.’ Instead of getting home from a school dance by midnight as ordered by his parents, he “wonders if a good solution might be to wait till after 1 A.M. and then call home with an excuse for getting in later.”

Each class member is required to work out his answer as to what he would do. The text gives no direction because, according to Dr. W. Kent Gilbert, chairman of the Parish Education Board of the Lutheran Church in America, “a religious person responds to a situation in what he believes is the way nearest to God’s will. But there are no all-right or all-wrong answers.”

How the students learned what God’s will is in the first place is not explained. Yet without direction, they are supposed to answer such questions based on their knowledge of God’s will. What do you think would happen if these youngsters were switched to a mechanics class where the instructor has never explained how to put a motor together, but who then gives them one already taken apart and says: “Now, students, put the motor back together again and tell me why you did it that way”?

Failure

Already many of the operators of Sunday schools consider them spiritually bankrupt. In July 1967 a conference of Catholic and Protestant teachers and pastors met to wrestle with the problem of what to do about religious education. They concluded that the church school in its present form is beyond saving!

According to The Christian Century, the conference “seemed to agree that the denominational approach to Christian education is dead.” Out of the conference came a proposal that the traditional Sunday school be replaced, or at least supplemented by community schools. These community schools would be staffed and operated on a volunteer basis by members of the community and would supplement the public school system.

All of this amounts to an admission that the churches discredit themselves as sources of spiritual knowledge, training and strength. They would resign the task of religious education to the community, to the same people who already confess to being unwilling and unable to teach Sunday school.

Perhaps you may feel that the situation is not all that bad. Yet, if you or your children have attended Sunday school, it would be well to ask yourself what you have learned. So let us take a deeper look at this aspect of the matter.

What Is Being Taught in Sunday School?

ARE your children among the many millions who attend Sunday school? Do you yourself attend an adult Sunday school? Over the months and years, what has your family learned?

Have you learned who God is, what his purposes and requirements are? Have you learned why man dies, where the dead are, why God permits wickedness, how he will rid the earth of the horrible conditions existing today? Have you learned what the destiny of man and the earth is? Have you learned what the hope is for those who love God and want to serve him? Have you learned what God requires of you?

Study Courses

The course of study you and your children follow in Sunday school may have been prepared by your own religious denomination. Or it may be provided by sources that specialize in publishing Sunday-school courses for many denominations. Among Sunday schools in the United States, many study the Uniform Series of International Sunday School Lessons. The 1970 International Lesson Annual provides a full year’s course of study.

Yet, just what have such courses taught you or your children about God and his purposes? It might startle you to look in this Sunday-school Annual and examine it carefully only to discover that many vital subjects such as noted above are not seriously treated. But surely such doctrines regarding God and his purposes belong in any course that is designed to give accurate knowledge of the Bible. Such matters bear on your eternal destiny, involving life and death.

Had the Bible not contained so much material explaining vital doctrines, we would need only a fraction of its 66 books, its 1,189 chapters or its 31,173 verses as found in the King James Version. Or do modern critics know better than God what man needs? If much of his Word was unnecessary, would God have inspired its writing? The truth is: “All Scripture is inspired of God and beneficial for teaching, for reproving, for setting things straight, for disciplining in righteousness, that the man of God may be fully competent, completely equipped for every good work.”​—2 Tim. 3:16, 17.

The doctrines that are touched upon in the Annual are treated delicately, open-endedly, or only in part. Apparently the editors have taken great care not to offend any denomination. But in doing so they water down the Bible’s forceful message and offend the Author of the Bible, Jehovah God.​—Isa. 29:13, 14.

Trinity Teaching

One of the central teachings of the churches that is included in the popular Annual has to do with the relationship of God, Jesus Christ and the holy spirit.

In God’s Word, the Bible, it is simply and clearly stated that Jesus Christ is God’s Son. Never did Jesus claim to be God. He always showed that God is his Father. And the Bible teaches that the holy spirit is God’s active force.

When Jesus was baptized in the river Jordan, God said from heaven: “This is my Son, the beloved, whom I have approved.” (Matt. 3:17) Jesus said: “I seek, not my own will, but the will of him that sent me.” (John 5:30) He also said: “The Father is greater than I am.” (John 14:28) The apostle Paul stated: “The head of the Christ is God.” (1 Cor. 11:3) The apostle Peter said to Jesus: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” (Matt. 16:16) And Acts 2:1-4 shows that God’s spirit is not a person, but a force, because people were “filled with holy spirit.” If it were a person, as Trinitarians claim, could it be ‘poured out’? Could others be “filled” with it? No, you cannot ‘pour out’ or be “filled” with another person.

However, the Annual says, in reference to Peter’s words at Matthew 16:16: “As we use those words today, we tend to read into them the familiar trinitarian formula of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit that developed later.” Yet, the Annual admits: “Actually, this may be sound theologically; but in that day, among the Christians, the title ‘Son’ referred not to the second person of the Trinity, but to the Jewish Messiah.”

This admits that the men whom Jesus taught had nothing to do with any Trinity teaching. That teaching was “developed later” by those who fell away from the Christian faith. But the Annual prefers to set aside the plain Biblical teaching that Jesus is not God, and that the holy spirit is a force, not a person. It accepts the false doctrine of the Trinity.

Satan the Devil

The Bible also clearly teaches that wickedness originated with a mighty spirit creature who rebelled against God. He is called Satan and Devil. (Rev. 12:9) Jesus believed in the existence of Satan. When tempted by Satan, he replied: “Go away, Satan! For it is written, ‘It is Jehovah your God you must worship.’”​—Matt. 4:10.

However, the Sunday-school Annual states: “In New Testament times Satan was thought of as head of a host of demons who helped him in his evil work.” But rather than believe what Jesus and those first-century Christians personally believed and taught, and what God’s own Word the Bible says, the Annual comments: “It is difficult to think of Jesus being tempted by such a figure in actual form. . . . In attempting to describe a spiritual experience one often must use concrete symbols.”

Hence, Satan is reduced to a mere figure of speech, someone that did not really exist. But who should know best whether he exists or not? Does not God know? Did not Jesus also know? And does not God’s own inspired Word tell us better than today’s critics who want to water down the Bible?

Making You Part of a Doomed World

The International Sunday School Lessons Annual for 1970 also says: “God reconciles the world to himself, not just the church or the individual believer. . . . we believe that there is one God and that all the world is his. . . . Jesus never wavered from his conviction that this is essentially a good world. He never taught that men should withdraw from it.”

But what if it is not God’s purpose to convert this wicked world, but to destroy it instead? If this is so, then those who attend Sunday school are not being taught the truth. They are being asked to become part of a world that is doomed to destruction by God himself.

Who rules this world of mankind that is not doing God’s will? Is it Jehovah God? No, it is ruled by Satan the Devil. Remember, the apostle John declared: “The whole world is lying in the power of the wicked one.” (1 John 5:19) Jesus called the Devil “the ruler of the world.”​—John 14:30.

The Bible clearly says that God’s kingdom, his heavenly government, “will crush and put an end to all these kingdoms, and it itself will stand to times indefinite.” (Dan. 2:44) If the kingdoms of this world were God’s, why would he destroy them and replace them with his heavenly kingdom for which Jesus taught Christians to pray?​—Matt. 6:9, 10.

Jesus said of himself and his followers: “They are no part of the world, just as I am no part of the world.” (John 17:16) So he did not love the wicked world. He set the example for his followers by not getting involved in its affairs. Why, at one time when some people wanted to make him a political ruler, “Jesus, knowing they were about to come and seize him to make him king, withdrew again into the mountain all alone.”​—John 6:15.

Hence, the attempts of churches and their Sunday-school courses to involve people in the affairs of this doomed world are really apostasy in God’s sight.

Do you want your children to learn to be part of a world that God will destroy soon? Or do you want your family to learn about God’s purpose to establish a new order, a Paradise here on earth where God-fearing persons will live forever in peace and happiness, where sickness, sorrow and even death will be things of the past? As the Bible says: “God himself will be with them. And he will wipe out every tear from their eyes, and death will be no more, neither will mourning nor outcry nor pain be any more. The former things have passed away.”​—Rev. 21:3, 4.

Can the Truth Be Found?

This article has reviewed only three of many Sunday-school teachings that are outright contradictions of God’s Word. Other important Bible teachings are also left in confusion. That is why if you ask those who go to Sunday school to answer questions such as those raised earlier in this article, you will usually find they cannot answer or cannot back up their answers from the Bible.

However, many persons will say: “Why bother about doctrines? They only lead to confusion. You could never sift through religious confusion and find the truth even if you tried.”

But does the Creator of our mental faculties and our desire to worship share that attitude? Definitely not. Instead, He says: “‘Come, now, you people, and let us set matters straight between us,’ says Jehovah.” (Isa. 1:18) If it were impossible to “set matters straight,” why would the psalmist pray: “Teach me to do your will, for you are my God”?​—Ps. 143:10.

Then, too, if the truth were beyond men would Jesus have said: “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free”? (John 8:32) Jesus knew the truth. So did his followers. Your having God’s approval depends upon your taking in knowledge of the truth about God!

So do you think it pleases God to have men teach in God’s name, yet teach thing contrary to God’s Word? Is that what you want to learn? Is that what you want your children to learn? If not, how can you learn the truth?

Learn the Truth That Leads to Eternal Life

HAVE you learned in Sunday school about God’s marvelous purpose to make the earth a Paradise? It is not likely, for one of the most glaring proofs of failure is the fact that Sunday-school courses devote very little time to Bible prophecy.

Yet, the Bible contains a great deal about prophecy, about what the future holds. These prophecies were written for the guidance of God’s people. Amos 3:7 says: “For the Lord Jehovah will not do a thing unless he has revealed his confidential matter to his servants the prophets.”

If the leaders in the church systems were God’s true servants, would their Sunday-school textbooks have so little to say about what the future holds and about how God will solve the horrible conditions of today?

If your Sunday school follows the International Sunday School Lesson series, note how the Annual waters down the subject of Bible prophecy in a veiled reference to the work of Jehovah’s witnesses who do study and teach Bible prophecy. It says:

“The second coming of Christ is an important theme in the New Testament. . . . Who among us has not seen the slogan, ‘Millions now living will never die’? These people make such statements because they believe that Christ will come back soon, that time will draw to an end, and that the final judgment will occur in the near future . . . While not denying an ultimate return at the end of time, this writing stresses the truth that in the Holy Spirit, whom God will send into men’s hearts, Jesus himself will once again indwell in the lives of his followers. This too is a coming again.”​—Page 101.

Bible a Book of Prophecy

From such Sunday-school teaching, how would you know whether we are living in the “last days” or not? (2 Tim. 3:1) Jesus himself, and many Bible writers, gave enough details to mark clearly the generation that would see the end of this wicked system. These details fill many chapters in the Bible. See, for instance, the following Bible chapters: Matthew 24, Mark 13, Luke 21, 2 Timothy 3, Revelation 6.

Bible prophecies such as these were recorded under the inspiration of God’s holy spirit. The Creator had this information put into his Word so that Christians would be aware that they were nearing the time of “great tribulation such as has not occurred since the world’s beginning until now, no, nor will occur again.” (Matt. 24:21) If we are nearing such a time, then surely you will want to know about it. Why? Because the life or death of every person on earth hangs in the balance.

However, today’s Sunday schools do not make known such Bible knowledge. Does this mean that nobody is making known these things? Not at all. Throughout the world, in more than 200 lands today, over a million Bible teachers, Jehovah’s witnesses, declare clearly and boldly that mankind is indeed nearing the end of this present wicked system of things. In the most extensive Bible teaching program in history, they call to the attention of all lovers of righteousness that God will soon usher in his new order of peace, happiness and eternal life.

Jehovah’s witnesses see these approaching realities through the abundant fulfillment of Bible prophecy. This knowledge they share with others, freely giving of their time, studying the Bible with people in over a million households world wide.

One of the Bible study aids they use to do this is the 192-page book The Truth That Leads to Eternal Life. This outstanding Bible study aid helps focus attention on the Bible answers to such key questions as these: Who is God? Why do we grow old and die? Where are the dead? Why has God permitted wickedness until our time? How do we know we are living near the end of this system of things? How can we identify the true religion? These, and many other questions you no doubt have wondered about are answered from God’s Word.

Learn Bible’s Truths

You too can take advantage of the opportunity to learn what the Bible teaches. Jehovah’s witnesses will be happy to demonstrate to you how you can get the most out of the Bible. For one hour or so a week, over a period of six months, they will come to your home to assist you free of charge.

If you, or your children, have attended Sunday school, studying the Bible with Jehovah’s witnesses will give you a fine opportunity to make a comparison. You will be able to compare what you have learned at Sunday school with what you learn at your home Bible study with Jehovah’s witnesses. Then you can determine for yourself which method really teaches you the truth about God’s purposes and requirements.