The children's challenge to the church; a study in religious nurture for rectors and teachers

Front matter

Classi c t> S Sim

Book ■ -.-y r;

Gop>Tight]^^ :

Preface

There are two parts to this book. The first part is a challenge to the clergy and Sunday School teachers, who under the guidance of the Holy Spirit have the future of the Church in their hands.

The Christian Nurture Course which forms the second part, is not another "system of lessons." It is the accumulated results of the experiments, discussions, and correspondence of many rectors, who, years ago, became dissatisfied with the conception of the Sunday School as a place where lessons only are taught. These men sought for the nurturing powers of the Church, confident that when found they would give joy to the child. They were rewarded. By the Christian Nurture Course the Sunday School has become to many rectors and teachers the Church organization, giving the highest joys in service.

The Christian Nurture Course seeks to show methods by which the Standard Curriculum may be applied. While in the main, the Course follows the Standard Curriculum of the General Board of Religious Education, it departs in some detail. The improvement of the Standard Curriculum can only be brought about by a careful testing of its recommendations and an experimentation which will lead to its improvement.

In parishes where the adoption of this Course is contemplated, every teacher should be provided with a copy of this book, and after careful reading the material should be discussed and plans made according to the directions given in "Requisites for Success," page 19.

If this book can become the basis for a better understanding between rectors, teachers, parents, and scholars, it will accomplish the supreme end for which it has been prepared.

The writer is indebted to a host of Sunday School teachers throughout the Church, who by correspondence and in conferences have given him suggestions and helps. He is particularly indebted to the Rev. Chas. H. Boynton, Ph.D., Professor of Religious Pedagogy in the General Theological Seminary, for many valuable suggestions; and to Rev. Carlton P. Mills, Educational Secretary of the Diocese of Massachusetts, Rev. Malcolm Taylor, Rector of St. Thomas' Church, Taunton, Mass., Rev. Phillips E. Osgood, Rector of the Church of Our Saviour, Roslindale, Mass., Rev. Herman Page, D.D., Rector of St. Paul's Church, Chicago, 111., Rev. Chas. H. Young, Rector of Christ Church, Chicago, Rev. Llewellyn N. Caley, Rector of St. Jude and Nativity, Philadelphia, Very Rev. Chas. S. Lewis, Dean of All Saints' Cathedral, Indianapolis, Ind., Rev. Wm. W. Smith, M.D., Secretary of the New York Sunday School Commission, Rev. Lester Bradner, Ph.D., Chairman of the Teacher Training Committee, and many others who have made contributions to the experiment which has been known as "The Christian Nurture Course."

VI

PART I. The Children's Challenge to the Church

"Religious experience is seeing more and more in our Lord's definition of greatness in the kingdom of heaven, when by a living parable He set a little child in the midst of His disciples. It is difficult to keep from thinking that this implies that at the heart of the universe there is the spirit of eternal childlikeness." — Slattery, The Authority of Religious Experience, page 278.

". . . the Christian Faith demands a mental habit diff'erent from that now popular ... its sincere profession sets us free . . . and permits us to look at God's universe with the eyes of . . . the child." — Figgis, Civilization at the Cross Roads, page 172.

"in the childlikeness of God, religious experience has discovered what we may term a necessary idea, which theology may some day develop into a stately doctrine." — Slatteey, The Authority of Religious Experience, page 280.

During the French Kevoliition in one of the demonstrations, a company of children paraded with banners on which were printed the words, "Tremble, tyrants, for we shall grow np." Something of value might happen if through the staid and prosaic Diocesan Conventions and Councils, yes, and even through the General Convention, children of the Church could be marched with banners entitled "Tremble, Church fathers, for we shall grow up." Truly the Church fathers should tremble when they confront the fact of the child life of the Church; tremble because of the inadequate way in which the Church is meeting the problem ; tremble because of the increasing diminution in interest which the child is taking in the Church.

The child life of the Church of to-day makes four distinct challenges to the Church :

1. Children challenge the Church to hear and heed the message of childhood.

It is the Church's primary duty to hear this challenge of the child and to break down the conception that the chief value of the child is in the fact that some day he will grow up. Too long has the Church aimed simply to enfold the child with an encircling care; too long has she looked down on the child as something merely to be guided, instructed, and taught. In reality some of the divinely ordained teachers of the Church's life are among the Church's children. The cry of the children to-day is that the Church will come and play with them, in order that she may learn from their play how to teach them to pray. Kauschenbusch, in his Christianity and the Social Crisis, has this very illuminating paragraph:

"A man was walking through the streets of the city, pondering the problems of wealth and material well-being. He saw a child sitting on the curb-stone crying. He saw a young mother with her child, and an old man with his grandchild. But it never occurred to him that little children are the foundation of society, a chief motive power in economic effort, the most influential teachers, the source of the finest pleasures, the embodiment of form, color, and grace. The man had never had a child, and his eyes were not open. . . . Jesus knew human nature when He reiterated, *He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.' "

"Suffer the little children to come," was the Lord's method of taking the child's part, and when He took them in His arms and blessed them and said, "Of such is the Kingdom," He tried to visualize before the Church their teaching power; and when He said, "It were better for him that a mill-stone were hanged about his neck and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea," He warned of the results that must come when the Church takes a supercilious look-down-upon rather than a look-up-to attitude toward the child.

Just as the child has never had a fair chance in the State, so he has never had a fair chance in the Church. The past situation has been excusable in the State, it has not been excusable in the Church, for had the Incarnation, as revealed by the Master's life, been truly comprehended, the childhood of the Church would have been estimated at its true value.

The child challenges the Church to study and know childhood, not so much because the child needs appreciation for his own sake but rather because the Church cannot come to a complete knowledge of God without that study. Dr. Slattery in "The Authority of Religious Experience" warns the pastor that he must have the "daring to expect commanding things of God" which he alone can turn over to the theologian for "testing and experimentation." The Church has yet to learn that "commanding things" will be found in abundance when the pastor develops the ability for careful and intelligent association with the child life of his flock.

The child is calling the Church to establish opportunities in her theological seminaries for studying the religious message that can be found in childhood. Fellowships, lecture courses, and laboratories should be founded by the wealth of the Church that she may lead in that study, which by force of necessity must command the attention and energy of men with clear minds and loving hearts. It is in this wonderful laboratory waiting for the Church that many of the future glories of the ministry of souls are to be discovered. The day should be hastened by the Church when the right to exercise the "cure of souls" will be more carefully guarded and more accurately prepared for than the right to cure the bodies.*

* "The expensiveness of laboratories and of trained teachers, and the apparent cheapness of piety have led in

2. The second challenge is: Childhood challenges Churchmen to he spiritual parents, not merely teachers.

One of the underlying principles which must govern the study of the methods and the material of Religious Nurture in the Church, is that the point of view from which Churchmen approach the problem of Religious Education must be the point of view of the parent and not that of the teacher.

This is hard for us to understand because the only educational method which we depend upon is based on a teacher. We are creatures of the methods of the Public School and the University. The former has aimed to prepare its scholars for the University examination, and the latter has tended to teach with too much emphasis on the search for brilliant scholarship. Today there is rather the growing desire to lead the scholar into life's experience and to value him in so far as he is trained to be courageous, noble, true, sympathetic and able to see visions. In this tendency the Church should lead. Already in secular education there has come the change of emphasis from the intellectual to the vocational, from making the child a scholar to making the child a productive unit in society. This is only one step in a great process and in this process the Church should strike the real keynot a few cases to what amounts to a fraud upon the young. This is not too severe a characterization of an institution that seeks power over the young, without first qualifying itself to exercise that power." — CoE, Education in Religion and Morals, page 326.

note and place before the world the highest educational vision.

The Church should hear the challenge of the child and turn the attention of society to the child, because only in and through the child can the world learn the one lesson that it needs most of all, the one lesson that it hesitates to face, the only lesson in which it can find its salvatio7i — the lesson of parenthood. In the development of democracy the ideal has been brotherhood, but those who have read their New Testament and have gone to the basis of the Incarnation, know that the ideal of brotherhood is impossible unless it is founded upon the ideal of parenthood. If democracy has had its era of brotherhood, if public education has gone through the process of first accepting an intellectual ideal and then a vocational ideal, both now have their faces toward the higher aim which they have hardly dared to formulate and that is the aim of training parents.

Today is the Church's supreme opportunity. Her life depends upon her capacity to so present the gospel that she will show the world what a father is like, and this she cannot do until she sets the children in her midst and calls the State and the home, as well as the members in her own. body, to face the fact that the most important element in life — parenthood — cannot be obtained without close and humble contact with childhood.

The Church is to train parents, not only parents who base their parenthood on physical relationships, but more important and more in accord with her commission, spiritual parents, who base their parenthood on a spiritual relationship. The child's inalienable right today is to find in every man he meets and in every woman he meets, the spirit of fatherhood and motherhood. It is this that the Church has preserved when she has insistently claimed in her Baptismal office that there shall be present at the spiritual birth of the child not only those who are responsible for its physical well-being, but godfathers and godmothers whose relationship to the child is based from that moment on spiritual realities. In that precious moment in the Baptismal Service the Church has said in actions which speak louder than words, that the most important element in Religious Education, the one that can be neglected only with great peril, is the parental element. "Neglected with great peril" we have said. Do we mean peril to the child? Not at all, we mean peril to the Church.

In the tendency to escape the responsibilities to childhood, is found the greatest menace to Church and State. The most precious instincts, those upon which the physical and spiritual development of society depend, are the instincts of parenthood. God has not only endowed us with these instincts, but He has also endowed us with the capacity to attain the highest joys of life in the cultivation of these instincts. So when the Church shall give her attention to developing the instincts of spiritual parenthood, she will make her greatest contribution to the world. She will do this only by connecting the adult life of the Church very closely to the child life, for only in that fellowship can there be developed the spiritual life of the Church that will become the saving power in the world.

3. Thus childhood makes its third challenge to the Church:

It calls upon her to stop approving of childhood from a distance and hy cooperation to lead childhood into the joy of making choices and sacrifices for the Kingdom of God.

A situation in which there are many dangers is that which resides in those circumstances where Church people spell cooperation a-p-p-r-o-v-a-1. It is pathetic to hold conferences of clergy, parents and Sunday School teachers today and hear them politely and often enthusiastically approve of what has been said, but not have them raise a hand to help. This unfortunate course is not so much due to a bad will as it is due to a sense of incompetency which reigns in the minds of people today as they face child life. Separation from the child, lack of an effort to comprehend the child, have become so wide spread that the call to a parish to give up certain things in order that its child life may make its real contribution to the parish, is beyond the comprehension of those to whom the call is made.

Along with the incomplete idea of cooperation, is another idea that has grave dangers. There is prevalent the thought that Eeligious Education is something that can be carried on apart from the Church. The life of society today needs leaders who will boldly stand up and in the educational propaganda put the emphasis on the Church. There can never be complete and adequate Religious Education outside of the Church. Men and women may do the best that religious pedagogy may direct, they may fulfil all the obligations of the home and of the State, mothers and fathers may be ideal in the examples set of prayer and helpfulness and selfsacrifice, but in the end all state training and all home training will be inadequate if separated from the training that must emanate from those dominating influences which can only come with saving power from an authorized religious organization. Just as no home can be a real home unless it finds its life in the State and in the Church, so there can be no proper development of the parental instincts unless they find their development in Church and State parents.

When Churclnnen ^vill see that cooperation in Religious Nurture means sacrifice and when they will see that that sacrifice must be made in conjunction with a clearly defined Church life, they will be led to understand this third challenge of the child.

Our child life today is not asking to be trained for something by and by, it is continually looking up into the faces of those who should be parents and is asking to be admitted into their life and have a share now in winning the world for Christ,

We believe that the Kingdom is brought by deliberate choices, and personal sacrifices in order that those choices may be obtained. Then the most important element in Religious Nurture is the training of the power to choose and the power to sacrifice. This like any other capacity of human life, does not spring into existence full blown as the result of studied convictions, it is rather the result of a process in life the development of which must begin in childhood. The weakness of men and women in the Church today is not primarily due to the lack of conviction; there is conviction enough in the world to save the world, if onlymen and women had been trained to live up to their convictions. If years ago the Church had given its emphasis in its educational methods to exercising the ability to make choices and the ability to sacrifice, there would be more choosing according to convictions and more willingness to sacrifice in accordance with choices.

Those who are close to child life know that its greatest joys grow out of the exercise of its powers of choice, and its progress in development is in ratio to the joy that it discovers in sacrificing.

To take a concrete illustration: The children would be in the Church today if there was more reality in worship and preaching; if worship and preaching were the product of an earnest desire for a growing ability to make right choices and find joy in sacrifices. Worship and preaching today are largely a product of custom and habit. The number of people who go to Church on a Sunday morning with real spiritual desires and with aims as clearly defined in their own minds as the aims which dominate them as they go to the grocery store or to the tailors is comparatively small. The number of sermons that are preached today because the preacher is burning with a message for his particular congregation is not large. It is in this artificiality that the child finds nothing for him. For in every sphere of life in which there is a genuine attitude on the part of adults, the child finds joy in cooperation; he has not learned to be artificial, that comes later, and until then he finds the so-called worship of a Sunday morning, irksome.

We cannot train our boys and girls in making choices and in sacrificing for the Kingdom of God, until we are doing that ourselves. The child challenges the Church not only to stop approving of childhood from a distance, but also to more clearly define the corttent of the religious life and to determine how far religious exercises are essential to the individual and the social life, and having reached a conclusion, to lead him by example in choice making and in the making of sacrifices for the bringing in of the Kingdom. The child is asking the Church to mark out a clear path for herself and then to give him the opportunity to cooperate in everything that is real in the religious life.

4. The last challenge here presented is — That the Church make religion enjoyable to the child.

The child challenges the Church to stop taking the mystery out of religion, the mystery that is part of God's revelation, the mystery of the sun and the moon, and the stars and the clouds, and of all of the great unanswered and unanswerable questions of human life. The joy, the facination that arises from mystery and even from fears and terrors, have their legitimate place in the development of the true sense of God. Man stands at his highest when he can face the mysteries with joy and for this end the child is constructed, and this is what he wants to do, and he has no use for the Church that will discredit this natural and valuable capacity of his life.

Today we know that the play instinct has a greater value than merely adjusting the child to his environment. Animals may play for the ability to meet the conditions of their physical environment, but a child does more, he has to meet the eternal and in the unconscious joyful attitude toward life which is given by play properly organized there is the training of the child for eternal ends. There is "joy in heaven" the fullness of which is beyond the comprehension of man. There is joy in sacrifice which the Church has not learned and which therefore she has not taught. The childhood of today challenges the Church to produce its joys. Every other agency in life is opening its treasures of joy for the child. In the Public School, on the athletic field, in the entertainment halls, everyr^'here the child's capacity for pleasure is being recognized and met. Has the Church no word for this situation? Does she lack the ability to give that element to the child's life which will make all his pleasure and all his joys of the highest calibre?

The child asks for the joy of cooperation. We have already touched this point, but it must be mentioned here again. He waits for the pleasure and happiness of doing real things with real men and women. He waits for the joys that come from the rich experiences which rise from the mystical fellowship; he wants to pray, he wants to sing, he wants to serve, but he wants to do them all with someone whom he admires and who is his hero. Can the Church fulfil this desire of the child's life and give him the joy of fellowship with heroes ?

The child calls for the joy that comes from having time to grow into Christ. He does not ask for instruction, he wants nurture; he does not ask for announcements of truth, he wants the joy of living the truth in order that he may gain his freedom and then recognize it. He will turn from the task which is set by teachers who are more interested in attaining intellectual ends than leading him into the experiences of a religious life. He will not care for a creed because of its explanations, but he will find joy and more meaning than we are ready today to allow, in the creed that he says and sings with those whom he admires and loves. He asks to become a part of a process in order that he may grow and in the process he asks for time in order that he may enjoy his growth.

He asks for the joy that comes from the progressive life. He wants the Church to set him tasks which call for his best desires for achievement. He can estimate the value of the secular program of education with its primary, intermediate, high schools and then the summit of all, college. Who can estimate the indelible impression made by the annual call of graduation with its flowers, addresses, ribboned diplomas and applauding friends ? Quite unconsciously there has been built a process which holds before the child more than a program, it holds a life in which the fulfillment of the best within him depends upon his achievement.

Can the Church equal this appeal? Can she make the process in education appeal to the achieving sense of the child, so that he will consciously face incompleteness if he does not continue with the Church to the end, and more than that, can the Church go beyond secular education, and hold before the child the great program of a world conquest for Christ so tliat

The Children's Challenge io the Church

tlie higher he climbs in his sense of achievement, the more will the vision of possibility attract and hold him? Can she make this program so snffused with joy that he will enter his world with the sense of a Christian knight upon a quest?

Here are some of the joys that the child is challenging the Church to put into its life if she would hold the child.

In response to these challenges is the Church doing anything? Indeed she is. Throughout the Church the rectors and teachers are praying and training for the ability to answer the challenge. The following studies of the various methods and material which exist in some parishes today, attempt to show how the Church hears the challenge, and how she is preparing to respond and to so answer the challenge of the child that with joy he will join the Church's crusade for the bringing in of the Kingdom.

1. In what ways is our parish responding to the challenge

of the child.

Is it providing the money to support the Sunday School, thereby leaving the offerings free to be used in training the scholars in stewardship?

Is it providing pews centrally located for the scholars at great festival services, especially when the Bishop comes for Confirmation?

2. How far are the godparents in our parish faithful to

their responsibilities ?

Do we know who they are?

If they are not faithful, do we know why?

Tlie Children's Challenge to the Church

3. Does our school aim to teacli more than history and

doctrine ?

If so, what and how?

4. In what way can we as teachers develop our capacity

for spiritual parenthood?

5. What can we do to train our scholars in the making

of choices?

6. Who in our parish are real students of childhood?

7. In what way do you believe that a Church Organiza-

tion is necessary to complete Christian instruction?

8. Give as many reasons as possible why child life is an

asset to the Church.

9. Is there enough sacrifice on the part of officers, teach-

ers, and parents in our parish to set a stimulating example to the children? 10. Assign to one or more teachers the study of the subject of play and its connection with the religious life.

PART II. The Christian Nurture Course

"To teach religion, as Carlyle has said, the first thing necessary is to find a man who has religion. For most men, their religion is vitalized and sustained by their personal relations with other men. It is only when we come into contact with men whose lives are guided and controlled by the hand of God, and see the power of the faith which makes them strong, that we ourselves become sure of God and His love. 'Soul is kindled only by soul.' " — Foundation, page 31.

"I think all the Churches — all the Nonconformists and other Churches — are beginning to see that while it is possible to have excellent religious teaching in the provided schools, nevertheless the force? behind it all must be the organized forces of the Churches. It cannot be the organized forces of the rate-payers or of the Department, or of the county council. Whatever it may be, it cannot be that. It must be the religious force provided by ecclesiastical organization. The more tolerant those ecclesiastical organizations become, the wider their outlook, the warmer their sympathy, the more they hold in common with their brethren, the more I rejoice. But the idea that because you do not think there is suflficient agreement among the Churches you are going to make up a sort of bastard State religion, and treat that as if it had behind it the authority of an ecclesiastical organization; the more it is considered, the more absurd it will seem." — (Quotation from speech by the Right Hon. A. J. Balfour, reprinted in the School Ouardian of June 7, 1913.)

CHAPTER I. Requisites for Success

The aim of these pages is to outline for a better understanding between rectors and teachers, the methods and material which might

1. Introduction ^ - ^ ^^ - ^ ^

enter into the eighteen years

when the Church should direct the religious life of the child. I do not imply by this that at eighteen the Church is through with the child; I imply rather that the Church should have so directed the work and the life of the child that at the age of eighteen or thereabouts, he will begin to be intelligent about selfdirection and anxious to exercise his capacity for selfdirection. The old method of Eeligious Education tended to announce certain things to children all the way along through the course of instruction, with the hopes that having given the child the truth, he would have the right foundation laid for his manhood. Today we work from the point of view that education is not a process of intellectualism, it is not merely a process of conveying or announcing truth, but it is life and there is no such thing as an end to it this side of the grave. "We are not through with the child at eighteen, but we hope that the child has so attained certain capacities by the time he is eighteen, that he will find, comprehend and joyfully fill his place in the fabric of the Church.

In outlining the teaching of the eighteen years we shall consider the following divisions :

The period of childhood from 1 to 9.

The period of boyhood or girlhood, from about 9 to 11.

The period of the study of the Saviour's life, about 12.

The period when the Church knights the child, about 12 to 14.

The period when the child joins the Church in the World Quest, about 15 and on.

We shall consider the methods and the material of

all the periods under five heads, which should form

- _, _. , ^ ^ the five interests of the teacher. 2. The Five Interests

. . _ . 1. Lesson Material, by which

we mean the Bible stories, nature

stories, etc., which should enter into the instruction of