Sunday School (was Re: Is Jesus honored when people make a lie in His honor?)

In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Kanga Mum) writes:

<snipped music>
>> Is there such a thing as serious Sunday School? Please someone
>> tell me that somewhere there is.
>
>There is.  Somewhere.=)  Seriously, I do believe you would thoroughly
>enjoy sitting in one of the Sunday School classes taught by my
>brother, who is a preacher.  I do not mean to insult you by saying you
>couldn't help but agree with him.  I mean that you would find his
>lessons far from silly and certainly not anti-intellectual. Familial
>favoritism aside, he is, I think, one of the best teachers I've ever
>heard speak.  He does not trivialize, and he would never be guilty of
>suggesting that we disregard the allegory in Narnia.
>
> My father, before his stroke, was a mean man at home, but he was also
>a mean speaker in the pulpit, in a very different sense of the word. 
>Before his stroke he was a brilliant man.  Since the stroke, he's been
>a much nicer man, but his intellect has betrayed him.  He was so
>brilliant that people who did not know him before his stroke are not
>aware of how handicapped he is.  As somebody who knew him before said,
>"Floyd with half his marbles is still ahead of the rest of us."  I
>think you would have enjoyed debating with him in his pre-stroke
>years, and would have found his Sunday School classes serious and
>interesting.  He taught my high school class back in the day, and we
>went through Jeremiah and Lamentations, and we read the text first and
>foremost.
>
>
>As for children's classes- that's an interesting thing.  I wonder how
>much it has to do with who writes the Sunday School curriculum.  I
>used to teach Sunday School (and we did open our text and read the
>Bible in my class, and then I had my students narrate back to me.  We
>colored the craft page or whatever at the very end of class, or while
>listening to the Bible reading, and this was mainly for the benefit of
>the parents).  Anyway, when I taught, I noticed that the material was
>more and more frequently written by people who had degrees in
>Education, usually Early Childhood Education.
>
>All Sunday School material that I have seen, including what I would
>teach my own children, would set aside the story of Lot impregnating
>his daughters, the story of the concubine cut into twelve pieces, and
>probably the story of Hosea marrying a prostitute would be set aside
>for older children, perhaps teens (although our family did cover his
>when Bear was about 9 and Doodlebug 10).
>
>OTOH, I am remembering once that you said something about how so few
>Christians knew the story of Elijah and the priests of Baal.  This is
>a common Sunday School story in my experience, so I am guessing that
>perhaps I have always attended Sunday Schools that were more serious
>than those you have seen.
<snipped wonderful list of resources <g>>


Well, our *children's* church you might consider "twaddly" - we *do* use
coloring pages for their memory verses <g>, and it resonated with me that what
I seriously want is a *serious* bible study, but my problem is that nobody
would *attend* it, but I might do it anyway <wg>. But what I was going to say
was that a few years back, our church *completely* scrapped the Adult Sunday
School programs, and started over <g>, because nobody was going. Our main
*adult* training is a quarterly seminars, that has evolved into a sort of
3-year "curriculum", but there has slowly been a resurgance of a few Bible
studies on Sunday. Our *main* Bible studies are, however, in the small Care
Groups, which meet on weekdays (usually, nights that is). 

There is definitely a lack of *foresight* sometimes though in the Children's
area - we sort of have a miniature "baby boom" thing going on - we had a bumper
crop a few years back, and *their* needs don't really get addressed 'til *they*
hit that age - the stress right now is going to be in the "middle school"
years, and the high schoolers are feeling pretty blatantly ignored (they get
*money* thrown at them, but no actual *caring*, as one of my college friends
put it "it's almost like their *scared* of high schoolers"), they were just
recently asked if they were going to be using what used to be exclusively
*their* room "*every* Sunday?" :-(. Also recognized this year was the lack of
*anything* for single young adults (college-aged, and those just beyond
college), but the things that have been tried so far have been a litte
"twaddly" <wg>, and one of the current leader is discouraged that nobody comes
to it! (But that's on Wednesday nights, so never mind <g>). I don't think
there's *anything* for them on *Sundays* though. But even if they were, they
wouldn't be considered "Sunday School" but as part of the Care Group structure
<g>, and I can't find my catalog of all the small groups at the moment :-(,
seems like there was one specifically, called ABF - Adult Basic(?) Something
<g>, but it's not in the bulletin I found (but it was from Sep).





Stainless Steel Streetrat
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"Living is the best revenge"  - Conan the Barbarian