The school in the modern church

Preface

*' Sunday School'' is the title to which four generations have been accustomed ; no one who knows the field of religious education can doubt that the next generation will use a new title. The change to the name ''Church School" is significant, however, only because it indicates developments in the scope and functions of the school. These developments seem to call for a practical exposition which will aid any school to enter into the fulness of its opportunities.

These chapters on the ideals and the practical problems of the new type of school are not written so much for the schools consciously marching in the vanguard, and those schools which know they are *'new" and up-to-date as for those which, while accepting and f olloT\dng the newer methods, still must struggle ^vith inadequacy of equipment, meagre support, and ignorance and indifference, resulting in a lack of team-play on the part of their churches. I have tried to keep in mind schools which I have kno^vn in suburban areas, in the country-side and in villages, the kind of schools that would include probably between eighty and ninety per cent of all the Sunday schools in North America.

The larger schools can often find expert leadership; but the smaller schools — ^which constitute the larger aggregate number of pupils and vi PEEFACE

churches — must be aided and encouraged. Therefore, instead of endeavoring to describe, as the title might lead some to expect, an ideal school, a paper organization prophetic of the school-tobe, I have thought it more profitable to look at actual situations, to bring together a number of answers which have been given to actual, specific questions and to suggest practical plans for schools seeking better and wider work.

''The School in the Modem Church'' is not an essay in religious pedagogy, nor does it maintain any special thesis. It is simply a series of discussions of those problems which have developed in actual practice as certain schools, distinctly of the ** average" type, have sought to apply modem methods. It is designed to direct those schools that desire to go forward, to encourage and aid the schools that are conscious of new ways and new days and to help them to enter into both.

Chicago: May, 1919.

Contents

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I. Why Make New Ventukes? .... 13 Changes in purpose determining work. Changed conditions in modern life. Sole responsibility for religious instruction. Facing the complexity of modern life.

II. What Has Been Accomplished ... 24

Chapter I Why Make New Yentuees?

Why are educational methods, in our day, so constantly subject to revision? To the uninitiated who do not discern what is really happening it seems that every teacher, like the men of Athens, is continually seeking some new pedagogical faith, and every school is simply an experiment station for would-be educational experts. Is this condition simply the result of our appetite for novelty? It affects education wherever it is found in institutions; the school of the church is not exempt; on the contrary we find greater change, by far, there than in any other institution for teaching. Taking this one agency, why should we, apparently with complacency, assume that change is normal, that new methods must be tried and new ventures in the application of revised theories be attempted?

The answer scarce needs to be stated to those who understand what our modem world means by education and who regard the school of the church as an educational agency. They know that education is one of the youngest of the sciences, that, while it has a fairly sound body of knowledge as its basis, that body of knowledge is growing fast; discoveries of the greatest importance are being made — ^not as one discovers a new star or a new element, but slowly, dimly at first and with clearness step after step. The scientific principles of education deal with materials so varied, in many respects so subject to change, that we cannot expect rigidity in them. Educational methods always will change because education itself changes these materials. If it effects its work it will have to deal constantly with a changing and improving society. It works on the world of living beings and these are never the same today that they were yesterday.

But there is a reason for new ventures which stands out even stronger than the law of growth and consequent change following the adoption of scientific method; it is the fact that the school is in a new world. It must either venture new things or die. It is called to new tasks, the tasks of a new day.

Why should the church school for the twentieth century differ from the school for the nineteenth century? For precisely the same reason that the Sunday school of the nineteenth was entirely different from that of the eighteenth century? The school must change for the same reason that the school came into being, because of the demands of a developing civilization. Seventeenth-century society neglected the child ; eighteenth-century society put the child in the factory; nineteenthcentury society put the child to school; in the twentieth we recognize the child as a person living a real life and acquiring the abilities of social living. The Sunday school is society at work real-

WHY MAKE NEW VENTURES 1

izing its ideals ; it is one of the institutions in the mechanism of modern life. The Sunday school is the means by which the church discharges its social responsibility, for it is designed to prepare the child for complete living.

I. THE PURPOSE WILL DETERMINE THE CHAEACTER OF THE SCHOOL

Any advance that we have made in the Sunday schools in the last two decades has been due to the clearer conception of the function of this institution. Robert Raikes organized the schools to take children off the street. The American church of one hundred years ago organized to teach the catechism to children or to fill up the period between the two long sermons. The early schools in England paved the way for popular education there. We have come to a closer division as to the functions of social institutions. We see the home existing to propagate, nurture and train lives for Society, the schools existing to train for efficient citizenship and social living, the churches to elevate an ideal and to motivate all our life with the religious spirit. Then the Sunday school, as a part of the church, uses the educational method to train youth in life in a religious society. There is precisely the function of this institution. It is a school of Christian social living for the young. As surely as the factory exists to produce goods and the bank to facilitate exchange this school exists to produce an efficient religious society. Its product will be boys and girls growing into manhood and womanhood in a society competent for the life of the future. This purpose, the production of Christian character, will determine the details of methods and organization. The great immediate need is to get the church to realize the real purpose of the school.

n. THE CONDITION'S OF MODEEN LITE, THAT IS, LIFE

IN THE TWENTIETH CENTUEY, WILL DETEEMINE

THE CHAEACTEE OF THIS SCHOOL

Its efficiency vnll be measured, not by whether it makes the hojs acquainted with the life of the first century, nor fit to enjoy the asceticism of the third century nor fit to live in heaven, but whether it makes them fit to live and able to live right in their own century.

Three conditions are determining the character of the Sunday school of our day:

(1) The Svmday school must take up those duties which the home now neglects. Whatever our regrets may be, we face the fact that the home has almost given up family worship and entirely given up any systematic religious instruction. The Saturday afternoon catechism is gone and almost the only religious discussion is the criticism of the preacher's sermon, served as a side-dish at the Sunday dinner, or general lamentations over the Sunday school the parents know so well because they never see it. Perhaps more important than all this, however, is the general fact that the home has been so caught up in

WHY MAKE NEW VENTUEES?

the whirl of modern life as to appear to be able to do nothing more for the child than to give it clothes and meals, while in the modem city apartment where the child lives in a pigeon-hole, no one seems to think that children were made to grow at all, still less to grow as religious persons.

(2) The modern school of the church must adapt itself to larger requirements rising out of its civil responsihility. Because the public schools cannot teach religion these private schools, conducted by religious people, have this sole responsibility of formal instruction in religion. The church school must face this situation with the utmost seriousness and ask, what is required of us in order to meet all the child's religious needs! Those needs are not being met ; no other institution can meet them. At present the church school endeavors to meet the situation with a single period of instruction conducted in a most inefficient manner; that is, it holds that the relative importance of religion to all other subjects in the child's curriculum is as one hour to twenty-seven. Surely some change will have to be made here, not because the all-important consideration is that children shall know more about religion, but because this formal religious teaching is also the only teaching designed and directed toward developing religious character. If, in order to meet the need, the church must enlarge the time for teaching, must use other days than Sunday and must provide more proficient teachers, then that development must come speedily.

But the fact that tliis school is solely responsible for a department of instruction also sets it into comparison with general education. We rejoice in the religious freedom that prohibits the public agency from affairs so personal. But our liberty lays on us all a large responsibility, no less than that of making the work of teaching religion fully as efficient as the work of general instruction.

Now the point is not only that practically all teaching about religion and all formal training in the life of a religious society which any child can expect will come from this school of the church, it is that the standards of public education are laid upon this school. "We are accustomed to insist that religion is the most important interest of our lives ; it is time to be consistent with our insistence. If it is ever to become the foremost power in the life of society it must take the foremost place early in lives. It must be foremost in time, foremost amongst impressions, foremost in its impressiveness at the time that feeling-judgments are being formed. Religion always will be negligible in the lives of many when it has been neglected in their early lives. The secondary issues in life rise from secondary impressions in youth.

Here we will be met by the objection that it is unfair to lay on the voluntary workers of the church school demands parallel to those proper to the professional workers of public education. That is to confuse an incident of our method of conducting religious education with the essential

WHY MAKE NEW VENTUEES?

issue of its importance. If our system of voluntary workers is an insuperable obstacle to efficiency, if it stands in the way of the school being sufficient for the task before it, then either the school will go, or the voluntary system. The problem we face is not that of doing the best we can with things as they are ; it is that of making things fit to do that which has to be done. If the tools we have cannot be made fit we must get new ones. The present system of a one-hour-a-week school with voluntary, amateur teachers is an inheritance from other days ; it is not an organization designed for these days. The one-room, oneteacher ungraded schoolhouse was an inheritance that our fathers revered ; but it had to go. There can scarcely be a doubt but that, if the churches really intend to train the young so that we may have a society governed by religious ideals the present type of Sunday school will have to give place to another and much more efficient organization. Either slow decay, indiif erence, disheartening disappointment and oblivion await, or we will open our minds — and our purses — ^to plan a system of religious education for the young which shall stand on a level of competency with the public school system and shall soar far above it in its aims and purposes.

New ventures we cannot escape, if we would; new ventures we must make if we would not fail utterly. This is true, not alone because the school leaves us the field of religion, but because life calls for more religion.

(3) The School must face the complexity of our modern life. We have passed from the quiet ways of yesterday because modem commerce and transportation have woven our lives into a new intricacy and, life pressing on life, crowding, and competing, accelerates the pace more and more. Life is crowded and complicated, and, since this school of religion trains for life it mnst change in order to meet changing conditions. It must adapt itself to meet the needs of contemporaneous life, or die.

Often schedules and plans must be changed to fit into our crowded programs. The school has to meet the present-day competition for the mind and energy of youth. The strenuous life is the normal life. Not only has the adult adopted the schedule of social engagements and business duties which often postpones aU interviews with the Almighty until just before death — or after, but the child seems likely to be equally pr^e-occupied. The public school pre-empts thirty hours per week; music-teacher, dancing-class, parties and all the other penalties of a superficial generation tend to make the child a mechanical doll never intended to play nor to grow as a person.

Another condition of our modem complexity which the schools must face is the variation in the types of our life, as for example, suburban, mral, industrial and leisure. The primary needs may not vary but, if the school is to equip for life, it is evident that there are differences in the life of the mral child and the child in the factory district; that we will not only need the graded

WHY MAKE NEW VENTURES?

Sunday school, but we will need the adapted Sunday school.

Above all, for our consideration, must stand out the fact that the Sunday school exists for spiritual purposes in the generation having the most highly efficient organization for material purposes. The wonder of our day is not in libraries, museums, poems and prophets ; but we make our boasts in the concrete things of industry and trade, in the efficiency with which we build bridges and factories, turn out goods, hurl ribbons of steel across a continent and do the work of a giant's hands. We care not whether we have the soul of a giant or not. We accordingly demand that our public schools shall turn out workmen sufficient for this day of material miracles. We demand vocational training that there may be enough giants to handle our engines and to do it competently. We spend about $37.00 per capita or considerably over four hundred million dollars on public schools annually, and have no hesitation in increasing the expenditures that they may be made more efficient in agricultural and industrial training while, as yet, no voice speaks to us warning us of the fools who build bigger bams and starve themselves. The Sunday school is the one institution organized in recognition of the fact that the children even of our day are more than bread-winning machines, wage-earners and slaves of the modem rage for material greatness. If the higher life is greater than the lower, if the person is to be master of his possessions, there rests on this school no less than the demand to meet the

THE SCHOOL IX THE MODERN CHURCH

needs of the soul in an age engrossed with the body.

All these needs mean that the boys and girls in Sunday schools are going up into a life that will make greater demands on them than our own times have made. This is not a reason for despair. It is a challenge to greatness. We do not lament the easier days gone by, but we do rejoice in the advantage of a higher task than has ever yet fallen to human hands. Whatever may have been the methods of the past we must discover methods competent to the present. This Sunday school, which we have too often regarded as a sort of appendix to the church, a toy with which a few people may amuse themselves, must be taken seriously. We must see it as the institution in which we are making the men and women of the coming Kingdom. The church fails to make progress for lack of a program. Let our immediate program be to get people ready to live the life of the Kingdom. The society of tomorrow is in the school of today. We determine today what the coming day shall be and we determine this in our schools. We have the task of making good men and women, able to do good and to make good, able to bring about a society of good will, efficient for work, informed of the needs, and inspired for the service of their day, capable of solving its social problems and realizing its possibilities.

These are amongst the considerations that force us, not alone to new ventures in the school, but to regard the school itself as a new venture. It

WHY MAKE XEW VEXTUEES?

passes from being a weekly affair in the chiircli to teach something abont the Bible to children and it becomes the agency throngh which the church carries forward a program of religions edncation, a program determined by two factors : the purpose, that the next generation shall be trained in the life of a society governed by religions ideals, so organized as to realize the democracy of the family of God — actnally to realize it and not alone to dream abont it, sing abont it and pray abont it: and the plan, determined by the laws according to which hves develop their powers and are trained to a common social life, the life of the spirit

Chapter II

Lest the program sketched seem so novel and so large as to produce only entire discouragement it is well to remember, first, that it leads in an easier path than the old one because it is the path of life; it follows the laws that life lays down and it has both the experience of education in the past and the cooperation of all its forces today to aid in its realization. Second, some of the most important steps toward its realization have already been taken. We are far from the ideal, far from competency for the task that belongs to the churches ; but competency is not to come in a single hour ; no united, Herculean effort will bring it about. But it is coming; it is already on the way. And the signs of its promise we may see, for our heartening, and our direction, by a glance at the changes that have taken place within the past two decades.

A new Sunday school is an accomplished fact; even to the remotest regions the old type has passed away. New life has brought forth the new type. The facetious have lost one of the butts for their ridicule, the serious one of the bases of their despair. In fifteen years we have ceased to regard the school that seriously endeavored to follow educational methods as an exception;

it has become a commonplace. No longer does the platform orator deride the ^'faddists and theorists'' who established the first insurgent schools, who demanded real teaching and better lessons. Now the echoing orator, the convention spellbinder seeks to work his incantations with educational phraseology. The new school, as an educational institution, is an accomplished fact.

THE OU) SCHOOL

Before they have all passed from our knowledge some one ought to give us, for historical purposes, a picture, complete in all details, of the old type of Sunday school. ,It originated for excellent purposes: it accomplished a splendid work, but it ceased to develop with its task ; it failed to keep pace with the general advance of its people. Suffice it to say that two decades ago the typical Sunday school was no more than a body of children gathered by adults who assembled them for worship and who divided them into groups to which they tried to teach something out of the Bible. That was about all that could be said, except that one might add it exerted some good influences, it taught something about the Bible to some of its ' ^ scholars, ' ' and it kept them from bothering their parents for at least one hour of the week. On the other side, considered as a school, it was no more than a number of small groups scattered about a church auditorium, destitute of teaching equipment, without trained or expert teaching staff and innocent of teaching consciousness. All the classes, from the primary to the pulpiteers, were studying the same lesson, it made no difference whether it happened to be milk or bare bones that was chanced upon in the course of travel through the Bible ; all must take it as it came. Everyone was satisfied if only the attendance grew in numbers and the order, or '^discipline,'' did not fall greatly below that of the street.

WHAT IS NEWf

Now, superficially, what are the changes that justify the title, *'new school T' Of course, the" really significant changes are not superficial; but to state the most evident ones first: The school now seeks to be a teaching mstitution. 1. It is expected that teachers will be trained for teaching, that they will prepare their lessons and will really teach. 2. The school seeks to place classes under conditions more favorable to teaching, either with each class in a separate room or as near to that ideal as possible. What more definite evidence could one produce than the fact that it is impossible to keep an up-to-date record on the churches that are erecting special buildings for their Sunday schools? 3. The pupils are now grouped according to their stages of development. 4. The school is organized so that study means progress, from grade to grade, advancing through an orderly arranged course of study. 5. The lessons are graded. The school world has thoroughly accepted that principle, even though it loudly declared through its official leaders that it never, no never, would abandon its cherished uniform lesson system. Perhaps this is the most important superficial evidence of the new school, a common following of the educational principle that the materials of study must be determined by the needs and abilities of the pupils. Nothing short of a new spirit of life could have effected a change so profound as this, one accomplished in the face of the stoutest, united opposition of traditionalism, vested interests, publishers' profits and organized Sunday-school forces. 6. The pupils are divided, not only for purposes of class recitation but for all their activities and interests into departments which are simply the broad life-areas of infancy, childhood, boy- and girl-hood, youth, young manhood and womanhood, and adult life. 7. Churches choose persons of educational fitness to guide the schools. Purposely we stop here, even though many other evidences of development might have been cited, because we wish to stand on the level of the average school, to show that the new school is not here and there, an occasional, sporadic affair, a school exceptionally favored, but it is the average school of today.

SCHOOL AND CHUECH

The evidences of the fact that we have a new Sunday school are perhaps more impressive in the less obvious aspects, and in movements that are not quite so well known as those which have been briefly stated. The first of these is the new denominational consciousness of the Sunday school. The interest of the denomination in the old school was principally that of establishing new schools, increasing attendance at old ones, and, apparently, making as much profit as possible out of school supplies. Those schools with their millions of cheap ^^quarterlies.,'' cheaply edited and poorly printed, were gold mines to denominational boards. But those days are gone. Now the church board consists of men and women, chosen because they know something about religious education, devoted to the realization of educational programs through the schools and leading in educational endeavors. They do not regard the school as a mine to be worked, but as a responsibility. Nearly all the church communions now have their boards of religious education, usually composed of persons selected for educational fitness, sometimes persons of recognized standing in the general educational profession. They are the real directors of the schools of each communion. These boards employ educators, trained men and women, to carry on the educational direction of the schools, to train leaders and to elevate standards. They require not alone enthusiasm, not alone convention oratory, nor alone organization ability; they require educational leadership. Some of the boards establish rules requiring their workers, the travelling and field secretaries, for example, to continue their studies, to read certain books every year. Moreover, in spite of all that the habitual alarmists have said, the schools have prospered under this sort of leadership.

THE AGENCIES OF PROMOTION

The next general, and superficial evidence of the new school lies in the changes in the agencies of general leadership. Old organizations have been completely changed and new ones have been created. Formerly the general promotion of Sunday school interests was in the hands of two associations, both without controlling educational consciousness, one sought to organize new schools, the other endeavored to maintain high-pressure enthusiasm. One must, in fairness, say that both were animated with religious ideals ; both sought the highest good for the child; but neither realized that, in the school, that good must be attained by the educational method. The International Association was, for a long time, frankly hostile to the ideals and method of education. It is not worth while to rehearse its opposition to graded lessons. Eather, we all rejoice in the fact that this Association later committed itself to the educational program. The fruits of conversion are evident in its organization, in the topics of its conventions and in the plans it is promoting. It is now in process of reorganization into close affiliation with the Council which represents the church boards of religious education.

But new organizations have arisen to stand back of the new school. The Sunday School Council of Evangelical Denominations was organized as a syndicate of the larger, evangelical church boards, promoted and guided by their educational leaders to carry forward the new program of the school. It came into being partly in protest and impatience against the unwillingness of the International Association to adopt modern methods. Its power has been used to improve the school as an educational institution, and to carry out a common program of religious training in the vast numbers of churches, of many communions, which it represents ; it has been led by men of vision as to future developments in a wider program for the schools. The Federal Council of Churches has a Commission on Christian Education. The Religious Education Association was organized in 1903, to protest against the neglect of the religious element in education and the neglect of the educational method in religious work, and to develop and promote the right use of these two. It met an immediate response. It had a range of general educational interest, embracing colleges and other schools, but it vigorously criticized the old type of Sunday school, then— sixteen years ago — ^in its almost unbroken slumbers. Its workers established new schools, applied educational methods and began to publish articles, pamphlets, magazines and books calling for the passing of the old and the beginning of the new school. They conceived this as a part of a general program of instruction and training in the religious life which should run through all the experience of the growing person and should have a place in every institution of education and of nurture. Here was the real background of the movement that made the new school not only possible but imperative. This Association organized the great body of general educators who were keenly interested in religion ; it conducted a common propaganda for intellectual integrity in religion, for educational methods in the work of the churches, and for instruction in religion in colleges and higher schools. It organized leaders and specialists into groups studying the specific problems that arose, preparing curricula materials, conducting experiments and determining right methods. There was developed a recognized leadership, which spoke with authority, aroused the opinion of the worlds of religion and education and brought these two together to cooperate for the realization of ^^the educational ideal in religion and the religious ideal in education.'' It was that reciprocal ideal that made the new school possible.

All this means that the school and its working force — ^teachers and officers — ^have back of them large bodies doing two things : stimulating a general recognition of the importance of the school, and applying trained experts to solve its problems. It means that every worker has available a new reserve force especially valuable because of specialized knowledge of the problems with which the school deals.