Efficiency in the Sunday school

Foreword

This is not a liandbook of ^Hricks and devices'' warranted to speedily insure Sunday school success. It is an attempt to consider the Sunday school seriously as an educational institution, having in mind the needs of intelligent teachers and officers who are earnestly seeking to make their schools more efficient. Several of the chapters appeared in Sunday school journals, as The Pilgrim Teacher J The Baptist Teacher , The Westminster Teacher, The Sunday School Journal, The Sunday School Executive, The Sunday School Magazine, and in Church papers, as The Standard and The Interior. To the editors of these journals the author renders grateful acknowledgment for permission to reprint. However, all the articles have been enlarged and rewritten since their first publication.

August, 1912, E. F. C.

Contents

Chaptkr. P^^'

I. The Efficient Sunday School, - - 3

II. Delusive Definitions, - - - 11

Chapter I The Efficient Sunday School

Efficiency involves three elements: intelligence, ability, and energy, so related and organized as most economically to produce the largest desired effects.

An efficient Sunday school is one in which the working forces understand its purpose or aim, its conditions and materials of operation, and its methods of procedure ; one in which duties are so assigned and responsibilities so clearly divided that its operations proceed with economy of effort and without waste or friction; one in which there is the application of all possible working forces and the enlistment of every aid available to secure desired results; one in which those who believe they work with God will so work that all His work can proceed without hindrance and with certainty of results. An efficient Sunday school is one which succeeds in developing most easily and completely Christian character in its people, both students and workers. An efficient Sunday school develops efficient Christians.

We hear much in these days of *^ efficiency." It is a word to conjure with and it is a word which easily may be worn smooth, and so become meaningless, valueless in our verbal currency. We read of efficiency in business management ; we are told that tlie ultimate aim of general education is *^ social efficiency,'' that the test, like an acid to be applied to all our public and civic operations, is their social or civic efficiency. Now, there is a moral, even a spiritual obligation resting on us to apply to all the activities and organizations of religion like tests. No church has a moral right to cumber the ground and to draw support from men unless it is developing efficiency to do its work. The church that does not give back to the world more than it gets out of it is guilty of being an ^^unprofitable servant'' and in the light of the great test of all the Master's servants is condemned to be **cast out." From all the Lord of all looks for fruitage, for increase, and demands of us efficiency in doing our work so as to produce this increase. This is the law of the universe. That which does not grow and increase is already dying and has no claim on life.

THE ECONOMIC DEMAND

The criticism of the ** world" against the church is directed fully as much against its working ability as against its opinions. The church is in the world to save the world, and the man who stands without complains that she is not doing it. His criticism may not have scientific grounds, but we owe it to ourselves to apply the test and ask,

THE EFFICIENT SUNDAY SCHOOL

**Is the Sunday school doing the work which it is designed to dof

When we think of the Sunday school it ought to bring to mind the immense human investment for which it stands. Thousands of lives are sinking their best energies into it year after year. For over a century it has been increasingly demanding the very best people of the churches and the very best of their thought, energy, and affection. It costs human treasure and human blood to run a Sunday school. On the ground of social obligation alone, when society stands and sees people pouring themselves into this institution, society has a clear right to ask whether the returns justify the investment. Do our Sunday schools pay? Do they give back to this world more than the world of men and women who love them and work in them give? Do they give back to child life more than child life gives to them? The school asks for at least an hour out of every week in the child's life; does it pay the child back?

But how shall it pay back? What can the school give to the child, and what must the school give to society that shall be in any adequate degree a return for all the investment made in it? It must give back, just as the farm gives back for seed and tilling and toil, its own product. The product of this institution, that for which all the investment is made, is just this: lives guided to know and motived to live the Christian life, and trained to serve Christian ideals and to cause the conditions of Christian living to prevail in society. A Sunday school bas to train lives to Christian living and to make them effective agencies for causing the condition of the Kingdom to come, to so educate youth that it may become increasingly easy for each new generation to live the right life and increasingly hard to walk the wrong way. The test of th6 efficiency of a Sunday school is just here : are the people who have come out of it, who constitute now the society in which it exists, primarily motived by Christian ideals; are those whom it has trained turning to the service of the Kingdom and giving to it trained lives? Does the school really make Kingdom men and Kingdom conditions?

THE TEST OF THE SCHOOL

The test of education will be educated persons and educated communities. The test is not in institutions, but in their products; not in school buildings nor in university halls, but in people. No matter what the machinery of education may have to exhibit, if it cannot show people who have learned how to live and who do live right, who do live nobly and in harmony, who by their living and service make a better and a finer social order, it has failed. So is it with the Sunday school : the test of efficiency is not in organization, architecture, or curricula — all of these must be studied and must be ordered aright — but the ultimate test is whether in this specific agency of re-

THE EFFICIENT SUNDAY SCHOOL

ligious education people have learned to live religiously, to live in the terms of the great Teacher, to take life as the sublime chance to love and serve, whether people have been moved to make the new world of which they learned, whether the community is really more heavenly, a place where it is easier for all to go right and harder for any to go wrong.

Such a statement leaves out for the present the consideration of the divine co-operation, because we may be assured that if we will do our work rightly and submit it to the great tests of life, the tests which the Master Himself set, there will be no question as to the co-operation that is from above.

OUR NEW OPPORTUNITrES

But efficiency must be tested in the light of opportunity. Do we realize that this very day offers the largest opportunity the Sunday school has ever had? Our right to live is to be tested by whether we have entered into and possessed in any worthy way the vast realm of present-day opportunities. To-day is the Sunday school's educational opportunity. Sometimes reviewing the striking changes that have taken place in the Sunday schools in the last decade, we say to ourselves, with graded lessons and teacher-training in mind, *'What strides this school has made!'' But when we apply a test and measure Sunday school progress by comparison, the advance of the church in her educational agencies with the advance of the general agencies of education, we stand dumb, ashamed, obliged to confess that relatively we have almost stood still. And the saddest thing of all is the fact that we have stood still in the veryhour of our most splendid opportunity. Instead of the Sunday school having become obsolete or unnecessary, she has now come within sight of her true social mission. Stop to think of certain things concerning which we are all pretty well agreed. First, that there can be no formal teaching of religion, of the Bible, or of theology, in the public schools ; second, that the public school has the mission of preparing lives for social sufficiency, that is, preparing them for rendering full service to society; third, that no one can possibly be sufficient for modem social living without the religious motive, that education can never accomplish her perfect work without religion. Are we not now generally agreed on these things'? To what agency, then, shall we turn for this absolutely indispensable element in education since the public schools cannot formally teach religion? True, there may be much religious education without the formal teaching of religious subjects. We must not think of public schools as irreligious; there is nowhere in any country a finer body of religious teachers than our public school educators. The lessons in the public school class room, the influence, discipline, and training all count for the training of the life of the spirit. We need

THE EFFICIENT SUNDAY SCHOOL

to magnify the spiritual values of what we call secular education.

Yet the growing lives of youth in the school days need more than influence, atmosphere, and ideals ; they need specific instruction. They need education designed for directed religious growth. The boy needs that which the Bible has for the purposes of life, a heritage of ideals expressed in the eloquence of the soul and enshrined in great and glowing lives. If he would follow the most glorious of all lives he must know that life, and he needs some vision of the ideals that shone before that life. He needs, too, that this social institution of the church shall have a special educational significance for him, that it shall minister to his needs as truly as do the other institutions, the school and the home. Here is the great opportunity of the school of the church, the Sunday school, to do what no other school may or can do, to impart to the life, directly, intentionally, and with all the freedom of a clear purpose and the force of personal authority, tradition, custom, and affection, the impulses, ideals, and motives of the true social life. If education is for purposes of social efiiciency, the church has the specific mission of furnishing to every life the only sufficient motive, the religious motive, the motive of self-giving love and service, the motive that has moved every great soul through all the ages, that stands out above all the blood and lust of ancient Hebrew legends, above all the intricacies of Jewish. ritual, above all the controversies of Christian speculation and metaphysics, that the most glorious thing in the world is to give up life for the world, to live for others, that the finer, fuller, and more efficient the life so lived, the greater the sacrifice and glory of living.

The greatest need in education to-day is such a vision of life's purposes as will furnish a clear program for the training of lives and a compelling passion for its realization. We need motives most of all, motives high enough for all to move in with perfect freedom, large enough to satisfy all the soul of man, deep enough to stir us to our depths and to lead us out to our best. The business of the Sunday school is to impart to lives the sufficient motives and the methods of the right life.

Definitely, specifically, and not uncertainly the Sunday school has an educational mission.

CHAPTEE II

DELUSIVE DEFINITIONS

The hearing annually of literally hundreds of public addresses on the subject of the Sunday school is in itself a surprising revelation of the forces acting to retard the development of the school. One is at first interested, then surprised, and later depressed by the reiteration of three sadly misleading conceptions of the school; the conviction grows that these three current misconceptions, prevailing often in the minds of those who are called to leadership and by them held blindly and even enthusiastically, constitute the most serious obstacles to the efficiency of the school in its work of religious education.

When a speaker incidentally defines an institution he unconsciously gives expression to his own working principles regarding that institution. Your definition of a man determines very largely how you will order your life as a man. The most serious question in the Sunday school world is this, What is the Sunday school for? We never shall be able to direct or organize the school until we know what we would do with it. If you are organizing a factory, it makes all the difference in the world whether a factory is an institution to make things or to cause things to grow; and then, granted the former, it makes a tremendous difference as to the things you would make in that factory, whether it is an automobile factory or a shirt factory. It makes no less difference whether you think of the Sunday school aright. The three misconceptions one hears most frequently are the more dangerous because each one has a rather important element of truth.

NOT A RECRUITING STATION

Did you ever hear the Sunday school described as the recruiting agency of the church? Doubtless. The important truth involved in that statement lay in the fact that it is through the Sunday school, more largely, more naturally and properly, that the personal strength, the membership of the church is maintained. But the figure of a recruiting station contradicts the essential under which the Sunday school maintains the personal life of the church. A recruiting station has to do only with those not yet enlisted; its only concern is with the numbers to be enrolled; it has no responsibility to train, drill, educate the soldiery. Like limitations are evidently in the minds of the speakers who seem to love this figure, for they go on to emphasize the importance of enrollment; they fairly revel in the book of numbers; they insist that the success of the Sunday school is to be measured by its size. They are under the spell of the damaging, deterrent delu-

DELUSIVE DEFINITIONS

sion of bigness. Here is the most serious fault with organized Sunday school forces; they care more for numerical effect than for efficiency ; they urge on all Sunday school workers the "boom'* propaganda. The great thing desired seems to be to work up enthusiasm sufficient to draw in every child in the neighbourhood; beyond that they have no definite program. Like recruiting sergeants, they are after names only. It is true that every child ought to be in Sunday school, just as it is true that every one ought to be in the public school, but either school has a right to make that demand, either morally or legally, only in the measure that it makes it worth more to the child to attend than to stay away. Children ought not to attend a "school" that does not really teach, or one that by its disorder and inefficiency is teaching lawlessness and disrespect. It is wrong even to persuade children to go to your school until you have seriously provided for its efficiency. A mob is not a school. To put all your emphasis on gathering the raw material without a thought of organizing the institution which is to handle that material is not only folly, it is a positive wickedness toward that raw material of life.

KOT THE children's CHURCH

Then, have you never heard it said that the Sunday school is the children's church? The important underlying truth is that what the church is to the adult, that in a large measure the school ought to be to the child. But the capital error lies in making the figure go on all fours. We carelessly suppose that the children's church must be no other than the adult's church trimmed down to fit the child. The prevalence of this notion accounts for the fact that we have the hour of Sunday school modeled precisely on the period of church worship. First come the * ^ opening exercises," usually the baldest imitation of the opening numbers of the order of worship in the church, even to the *4ong prayer," and the reading of the Scriptures ; this is followed by the substitute for the sermon in at least many cases, the teachers each preaching, from a somewhat lengthy text called the lesson, to their several small congregations. To complete the imitation, the superintendent preaches another small sermon at the close, and the school is duly dismissed with the benediction, usually after being invited to go through the same program again in the church service proper. Such a state of affairs exists in part because the officers yield to the inclination to play the preacher, but more because no one has stopped to think of the folly of it all. The religious life of a child is not the same as that of a man. A boy's religion is not a man's cut down. If the school is the children's church, then its life and activities must be those normal to a child. The school should stand for the child's normal, developing relation to the

DELUSIVE DEFINITIONS

church; it should extend its functions and sphere through the week to maintain that relation continuously and should devote the Sunday period much more exclusively to the work of teaching. As it is, heedlessly imitating the church service and feeling a freedom not found therein, we usually excite the children to the top notch of fervid restlessness, or at least we try to do so by urging them to sing more and more heartily, etc., and then suddenly demand the impossible, that they shall immediately subside into the quiet, receptive mood for teaching. In an important sense the Sunday school is at least a part of the children's church, but it should never be an imitation church for children.

NOT A THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY

Then, have you heard this school described as ''a miniature theological seminary F^^ That ridiculous phrase is before me in print, given currency by a denominational Sunday school official. The hidden truth is that the school does teach the systematized knowledge of the Christian life, but the misleading and damaging conception is that this school exists to impart to the young, in condensed form, in miniature, precisely that body of knowledge which experience iudges to be neci'ssary to the preacher's professional preparpiion. It has in mind a ''body of kiiowledge," as it used to be called, which the preacher mu-^t Kive unabridged, which the people must have m the vestpocket size, the school as the one agency to give this to the people, and youth the one period to get it. Hence the school exists for the sake of the knowledge and not for the sake of character, for the curriculum and not for the child. The ghosts of educational traditions have always insisted there were certain things we ought to know, nobody knew why. The curriculum of this school is still largely determined by the theological ideal. Wise men have said. Here are the things that religious people ought to know ; the next question is-, In what order shall we teach them? But this school does not exist for the professional, philosophical, philological, archaBological, nor literary ends ; it exists for life purposes. The only reason these children should know any of these things is that they will vitally contribute to their spiritual heritage, that they will quicken their spiritual development, and will lead them to efficiency in religious living and service. This is the one agency in our life to-day which can be properly regarded as specifically the school of the religious life. Its business is to lead youth to competency for rich, full, efficient Christian living.

For a change, suppose we were to try to work out a conception of the school based on thisi. definition: the Sunday school as the school of the chui-fh in the Christian life. Then ask, What workers, type of organization, and equipment wu^ild tiuai involve? IVhat materials of instruction, what kinds of stimuli, and what forms of

DELUSIVE DEFINITIONS

work would developing Christian lives need at their respective stages of development and in view of the demands made upon life to-day? And, what motives for support, co-operation, and enlistment or study would such a school be able to offer?