The Sunday school; an evangelistic opportunity

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

Introduction 7

I. The Pastor's Opportunity 11

Introduction

There is a widespread feeling to-day that the church has lost its hold upon the masses, and therefore it no longer has the evangelistic opportunity that it once had The time was when a large number of unconverted people, both old and young, would attend the Sunday evening service. That service, therefore, often took an evangelistic form, and frequent conversions, especially during the winter season, were the common order of the day. Very often a successful evening service would be followed by several weeks of revival meetings. But those conditions no longer obtain in large sections of the country. In many places evangelistic meetings are not attempted at all on the ground that the unconverted no longer come to church. The serious thing is that there seems no likelihood of the unconverted changing their present attitude. If they do not 7

INTRODUCTION

change their attitude, the church must change its methods. If they will not come to the church, the church will have to go to them if the two ever come together. It will take the church some time to make the readjustment of its methods, and train a new group of evangelistic workers who can successfully carry the message of the church to the masses. In the meantime the church must not let up on its evangelistic effort, and about the only available field which is always ready for evangelistic effort, is the Sunday school. The Sunday school as an evangelistic field has been taken for granted rather than taken seriously.

The value of this opportunity has not been clearly sensed by the church; but now as a sequel to the centenary and other like great financial movements, there is a campaign on in the churches generally, to increase their membership in some way commensurate with the increased resources. If that is done in the near future, the Sunday school as an evangelistic field must be worked with a thoroughness and persistence with which 8

INTRODUCTION

it has not been worked hitherto. The greater part of the increase in church members in the next four or five years will come from the Sunday school. If the present waste in the Sunday school could be stopped and all its forces capitalized for the church, the increase in membership and general prosperity would be so great that even the most sanguine would be surprised and the most despairing would take new heart and hope. There are many difficulties in the way, such as lack of vision, poor physical equipment, such as improper buildings, inadequate training of the teaching force, want of leadership, etc.; but hard work, consecration, and a passion for the spiritual well-being of the young life of the church will overcome them.

The object of this little book is to state the evangelistic opportunity of the Sunday school as clearly as it may, and to offer some practical suggestions as to how that opportunity may be utilized. It is with the earnest hope that these suggestions may be helpful to pastors, superintendents, teachers, and parents, to 9

INTRODUCTION

whom they are offered, that this little

book is sent forth.

Drew Theological Seminary,

Madison, New Jersey.

February, 1920.

Chapter I The Pastor's Opportunity

It is a very grave error to consider the Sunday school and the church as two separate and independent organizations, where the pastor is the leader of one, and the superintendent the leader of the other, and neither leaders nor organizations having much to do with each other. That is a condition which prevails in some quarters; the pastor has no vital interest in the Sunday school and seldom attends it. The superintendent has only an indifferent interest in the church and seldom attends it. His whole time and strength are expended in the Sunday school, as the pastor's are in the church. There is no team work done. The children and young people of Sundayschool age consider the Sunday school their church and the superintendent or teacher their leader and adviser. This condition ought not to be. It is not 11 the Sunday school and the church, but the Sunday school in the church. The Sunday school bears the same relation to the church that the children do to the home. The church is a family. In that family the pastor has the place of father, and the superintendent, who comes into a closer and more direct contact with the children, holds the place of mother. Just as in the home the father and mother should work in the closest sympathy and cooperation for the happiness of the home and the well-being of the children, so should the pastor and superintendent cooperate in the work of the church family. If the pastor does\ not look after the Sunday school of/y to-day, he will have no church to-morrow ? and if the superintendent does not lool after the church of to-day, he will hav< no Sunday school to-morrow. Neithei can be neglected without working detri; ment to the other. The church creates the Sunday school, and the Sunday school re-creates the church. They are inter- ' dependent.

In this chapter we are chiefly concerned 12 with the pastor and his opportunity. A pastor is sometimes asked, "How much time do you give to your Sunday school?"

He replies: "The work of the church is so heavy and taxing that I can give no time to the Sunday school. I have a good superintendent and good teachers* and I leave the Sunday school to them. With the heavy work of the week two sermons on Sunday is all the service I am able to render. If the Sunday school is in the morning, I cannot attend because I need to prepare for my pulpit; and if it comes in the afternoon, I cannot attend, for I must rest up for my evening service."

A further question may be asked: "How much of an evangelistic opportunity does the evening service offer? How many of the Sunday school young people are in the congregation in the evening?"

He may reply: "There is very little evangelistic opportunity in the evening; only church people attend, and few of them. It is only the most faithful people I have who attend twice a day. The 13 young people have had their church in the Sunday school and Epworth League or Christian Endeavor Society, so they do not come out to the evening service."

That state of affairs is not only widely true, but too true to be comfortable. The pastor is saying, whether he senses the seriousness of it or not, that he does not come into close personal contact with his young people at all; and his most hopeful and fertile field for evangelism is not worked at all. That is the serious part of it.

The reply to such a position as the pastor takes is, that his church ought to be so organized that much of the detail work that takes his time and strength through the week would be done, and better done, by laymen, many of whom have little interest in the church because they have nothing to do; and the pastor ought to be so relieved of the burdens which he ought not to bear that he could give sufficient time and personal attention to his Sunday school and young people, in order that he could make the most of his evangelistic oppor- 14 tunity. The best way to get Sunday school and Epworth League young people to the evening service is for the pastor to attend their service and show such a friendly interest in them that he will be indispensable to them. It is just at that age that young people respond with all the joy of their exuberant enthusiasm to a real friendly and sympathetic interest in them. Too often they are misunderstood by older people, and they greatly appreciate one who does understand them. If the pastor has not time for his young people, they will not have time for him.

A pastor may not be able to attend every session of the Sunday school. Funerals, sickness, and other emergency calls may prevent it, but nothing will excuse him from his general attendance on his Sunday school. If he has little sympathy for the young people, they will have little confidence in him. It can be taken for granted that the pastor is interested in the Sunday school because it is a part of his church; but it will not be taken for granted in the most 15 important place, namely, in the Sunday school itself, if he does not attend it. That is one institution that does not thrive on absent treatment. If the pastor is not wise, he may find that he has two churches, instead of one — an old people's church of which he is pastor, and a young people's church with no pastor. The young people will have their church, Sunday school and Epworth League, and the pastor will not be there. The pastor will have his old people's church, and the young people will not be there. If this condition prevails, the pastor has fallen upon a tragedy. If a pastor once loses his young people by misunderstanding them or f ailing to appreciate them, or if by neglect he fails to win them in the early part of his pastorate, it is almost impossible for him to win these young people to any sort of enthusiastic cooperation. Whoever may have to be neglected in the church, let it not be the young people, for they are the church of to-morrow. Some ministers have suggested to the writer that they thought of abolishing both Sunday school 16 and Epworth League, so as to force the young people to attend church service. That method would not do it.

Two things are essential to get young people to church. The first is to show a constant friendly interest in them and their meetings, and, second, to make the church service worth while; bright, sane, wholesome, challenging. Young people will not be made to want what older people want by taking from them what they do want. Young people can be successfully led, but not successfully driven.

If the pastor says it is not a lack of interest, but a lack of strength that keeps him away, the reply is, that if the main business of the church is to get people to God, or to keep them from leaving God, the Sunday school is the most natural, ready, and hopeful field he has for exactly that work. It is far better if it needs be to let many other forms of work alone than to neglect this most important work. About the only field of raw material that he has to work on evangelistically is the field right in his 17 church. He does not have to go after it; it comes to him, offers itself to him, and he is the best fitted person in the church to do that piece of work. If he wisely organizes his church, he will find many men and women who can do much that he does better than he, or at least as well, who could not begin to do the work of evangelizing the Sunday school as he can. So the school is not worked as it should be for want of pastoral leadership. If he gets his young people to church, he will not preach the worse, but the better. Nothing inspires or vitalizes preaching like having conversions in one's ministry. If he succeeds in building his own young people into the church and the Kingdom, and inspiring them with ideals of usefulness, and sending them to college to get ready for some life work that is really worth while, he will have a ministry of unspeakable blessedness; a ministry far beyond that of merely marking time or running a treadmill sort of work which is marked only by a dead mediocrity.

The pastor's enthusiasm for Sunday 18 school evangelism should be a sustained enthusiasm. That kind of enthusiasm is contagious. The superintendent and teachers and pupils will get it, and conversions in the Sunday school will be looked upon as a part of the normal work of the school. If the pastor comes in only on Decision Day, he is almost a stranger, and may be suspected of having some sort of a religious trick to spring upon the school. But if deciding for Christ is made so beautiful, simple, natural and wholesome that young people will be won to it by its beauty and power, then when that work climaxes in Decision Day he will have a sort of modern Pentecost every now and then in the Sunday school. This sustained evangelism does not do away with a special well-prepared effort like Decision Day. It makes such a day inevitable. But the pastor's interest in the Sunday school not only gives him an evangelistic opportunity, but it will do more than anything else to bring the school as an evangelistic challenge into his church services. It is difficult for the pastor to stimulate 19 an interest in the Sunday school among his people if he is out of the school himself. The men of the church, through the example of the pastor, can do a great deal toward getting out of the mind of young men the false notion that the Sunday school is a child's institution. If the men are in the school, boys and young men will be there too. The Sunday school boy problem is the man problem. Solve the man problem and you solve the boy problem. There is no boy problem by itself; it is the under side of the man problem. If men are won to God in the Sunday school, the boys and youth will be. It will be hard work for the pastor, but it will be the work that will make the largest practical returns. The returns will not be in terms of dollars, but of lives, and they in their turn will see to it that the dollars come. It is an entirely mistaken notion that any work which keeps the pastor regularly out of the Sunday school is more important than the work in the Sunday school which he neglects. It is much better for the pastor to come to the evening service tired, and 20

AN EVANGELISTIC OPPOETUNITY

face a crowd of eager young people, than to come to it fresh, and face sections of yawning empty pews. If his object is to keep the wheels of church services in motion, that is one thing, and not a very important thing. But if his object is to get people to God, that is another and a most important thing. To do that he will either have to go where the people are, or do the thing which will bring the people where he is. And surely nothing is to be left undone which would bring his own young people to him.

It is a trite thing to say that the church of to-morrow is in the Sunday school of to-day; but many pastors act as if they did not more than half believe it, and some act as if they did not believe it at all. The best way for the pastor to get his trained workers, namely, Sunday school superintendent and teachers, to cooperate with him in the work of the church is to cooperate with them in the work of the school. What an evangelistic asset a pastor would have in his Sunday school Board if they would en- 21 thusiastically engage in the service of getting the Sunday school to attend evening service, especially from the intermediate age up!

But the pastor who attends his Sunday school with an evangelistic motive can render the school an invaluable service by moving quietly about the school and finding out what the teachers are teaching, where the misfits are, etc. He will sometimes find that certain teachers will make evangelistic work, especially in their classes, impossible. He will find some teachers who in a short time can succeed in driving out, or cause to stay out, some of the best pupils in the school; and when they have emptied one class they are given another. Some superintendents know this, but they do not know how to get rid of the teachers without uprooting the wheat with the tares. Those teachers may be good people, but wholly unfitted for teachers, and the pastor may find some other work about the church which they can do well and which will take so much of their time that they will have to give up teaching, 22

AN EVANGELISTIC OPPOETUNITY

which is the best thing that could happen to the school. He will then eliminate by substitution without hurting anybody, and will succeed in helping everybody. These teachers will be helped, the Sunday school will be helped and the church will be helped; but the pastor cannot do that if he knows nothing about it. The pastor thus becomes an indispensable aid to the superintendent. The rearrangement or reorganization of classes and teachers can far better be done by the pastor and superintendent together than by either of them alone, especially when both are familiar with all the circumstances.

If the members of the school are not converted, why are they not? The pastor can ask that question in his study, but he cannot answer it in his study. The answer is in the school. If the main object of the Sunday school is not attained, there is a reason for it, and that reason is mostly in the school itself. The Sunday school age is the age of Christian decision, and if decisions are not made then, something is wrong. It is of more importance to the church and to the 23

Kingdom to find out what is wrong and to correct it than it is to raise debts, serve on committees, or coddle a lot of malcontents. If the science of right living is to do first things first, the place for the pastor to begin his church work is in his Sunday school. If he fails there, he is like a farmer who fails to plow and plant in the springtime. He will then be like the sluggard in Proverbs: "The sluggard will not plow by reason of the cold: therefore he shall beg in the harvest and have nothing." A man rarely feels the seriousness of a lost opportunity till it is lost beyond recall; and an evangelistic opportunity in the Sunday school is easily lost, for the young people who go through the Sunday school without becoming Christians rarely go to church afterward, and those who do not become Christians, drop out all too early. If they do not become interested in the Christian life before they reach the adult or even Senior Department, they will not be interested enough to remain long in the school. They may not be hostile to religion, but they will be indifferent 24 to it, and the indifferent are about as hard to reach as the hostile.

The pastor's evangelistic opportunity is not confined to his work in the Sunday school itself, but to his pastoral work as well. He will often find in the homes of the pupils their real problems. They will often tell their parents what they would not tell their superintendent or teacher, and they will talk more freely and frankly with their pastor, in whom they have confidence, outside of the school than in it. He will sometimes discover that young boys and girls long to become Christians and join the church, but their teachers never gave them an opportunity to talk about it or take steps toward it. It may be that the teachers have not discovered it, and for fear of embarrassing the pupils or causing them to stay out of the school they will guard against anything that might lead to immediate decision. If the pastor knows this, he can wisely give an opportunity without reflecting on the teacher or embarrassing the pupil.

Pastoral evangelism in the Sunday school is not only an opportunity, it is 25 also a necessity. It is about the only place that young people of Sunday school age have in which it is easy or natural for them to make decisions for Christ.

The family altar has largely fallen into disuse, in some cases almost of necessity. The industrial conditions which now prevail make it almost impossible to get the family all together at any one time during the day, either week days or Sunday. They go to business or school at different hours, they return at different hours. Some members of the families are home only over week-ends, some only at vacation time, when the home is not under normal conditions. Some have let the habit of family worship die out because of indifference. Others never observed family worship, and so it is, that children get little religious instruction or incentive at home. When family worship is observed, it is both easy and natural to talk religion, and many a New Testament lesson opens the way to emphasize the claims of Christ on the young lives in the home.

Perhaps the most important part of 26 the pastor's evangelistic opportunity is to safeguard what might be called child conversion. A blunder at this point may be followed by very serious consequences in later years, total religious indifference, or even hostility to religion altogether. There are many foolish notions about what constitutes a child's conversion. Many people expect far too much of it. They forget that they are not dealing with an adult. They must not expect the same consciousness of or regret for sin in a child that they do in an adult.

The writer was told by a man who held to the necessity of child repentance and sorrow for sin as a condition of conversion that he himself had a very keen sense of and sorrow for sin when he was six years of age. That was a very unusual, if not an unnatural thing. The child must have been abnormal, or else the home training or atmosphere was very defective and morbid. A child of six ought not to have a mature person's conviction of sin. Here the pastor must use great care and wisdom. He is best 27 fitted to safeguard child conversion, and keep it from perversion. A teacher is sometimes converted at or after middle life. That conversion may have had unusual emotional accompaniments, from great depression to ecstasy, and the teacher may take that as a type to which all conversion must conform. Now, children under sixteen cannot and ought not to have such a conversion. There can be no such contrast in the child's conversion as in the adult conversion, and the child is often prevented from any conversion because the teacher takes his own conversion as the type. Anything less than that would be suspected by the teacher. With a well-reared, normal child, boy or girl up to fifteen or sixteen, or even seventeen or eighteen, there may be little that is unusual about conversion. Many of them come up to their teens taking for granted that they are Christians, unless they have been the victims of some well-meant, but ill-advised teaching. What is needed now is a definite, willing, and intelligent commitment of the life to Christ, and the glad investment 28 of it in Christ's service. The church is coming to more wholesome and normal views on child conversion. There may be here and there children not of more than ten who have a morbid sense of sin, and whose conversion may have many of the features of adult conversion; but they are so rare as to be almost negligible. There are also a few children who are religiously very precocious, whose religious experience is far beyond their years. Almost any pastor will find an easy and successful way of dealing with these exceptional cases. They need special attention and direction. Handling the morbid or precocious as though they were normal would work damage to them, and danger to the normal children. A diagram may illustrate child conversion more clearly than an argument. Here consecration would be a better term than conversion, especially with B— C.

Let A B equal the child from infancy to the age of intelligent moral choice, or as some would call it, the age of accountability. During this period the child is saved by his innocency. If the child 29 dies between A and B, most people are agreed to-day that he is saved. There ought never to have been any doubt about it, but large interests have often been sacrificed for small theological positions. The child up to this time is unconsciously Christian, or is being carried in a saved state by the Grace of Jesus Christ, not by the child's choice, for he has been incapable of an intelligent moral choice. But at B, which age is very variable in different children due to temperament, training and environment, moral choice begins and the child makes a decision to remain in the Kingdom or to go out of it. He will either accept Jesus Christ as Saviour or not. If he does not, his life of committing sin begins. Before moral choice the child is saved 30 by the unsought grace of God. After choice begins, the saved state is based on the consent of the child. That intelligent consent to accept Jesus Christ as personal Saviour is child conversion. The decision is as real and definite as with an adult; and Christ accepts the responsibility to give grace and wisdom to culture the child life that is based on an intelligent choice and a glad consent to be a Christian, just as he does to forgive and culture the adult who makes the definite choice and gives the glad consent to be a Christian. The experience will be different, and ought to be, but the experience will exactly fit the personality. It would be unnatural and unreasonable to expect that the same phenomena would attend both cases. The child cannot have an adult's experience. It would be wrong if he did have it because it would be unnatural. One of the most misleading and confusing methods of evangelism is to teach people to seek an experience, for the reason that no one person's experience can be the standard for every other body's experience. That 31 is especially harmful when the seekers are of Sunday school age.

The experience that follows the decision is not religion, but the effect of it on the person who became religious. A person does not get religion, he becomes religious. He comes into a personal relation of harmony with God; comes into right relations with Jesus Christ; in a word, to become a Christian is not to get a thing, but to know, love, and obey a Person, Jesus Christ, and it is that Tightness of relation that is to be sought rather than an experience which for the most part is a more or less rapturous emotion. But neither the decision nor the ensuing Tightness of relation is dependent on the emotion or the lack of it. The decision is a far deeper and more important matter. It is the principle of obedience, love, and loyalty to Jesus Christ.

So at B there may be very little emotional disturbance. Conversion in this case is not so much a matter of turning around as it is of going forward; therefore it is a consecration. It is not a change of direc- 32 tion, it is a change of motive. The child now chooses to be governed by the will of God through devotion to Christ. The child who has been unconsciously following Christ now consciously and willingly follows him. The life, then, by a growth in the grace which Christ supplies, will follow the upward curve, B — C. The accompanying Christian experience will harmonize with the temperament and need of the person. He will likely say that he was always a Christian, but at a certain time definitely accepted and declared Jesus Christ to be his Saviour. That decision is as real and vital as the decision that any person will make in becoming a Christian, but it will not have, of course, the experience of contrast that the one will who has made his decision late in life, or gone deeply into sin.

On the other hand, the child who back at B decides to go out of the Kingdom and either neglects or refuses to follow Christ, follows the curve B — D. That curve may drop quickly or slowly, but the course will be steadily away from the straight line B — E, which might 33 be taken to represent continued innocency if such a course were possible. Much more will its course move steadily away from B — C. The person may plunge early and quickly into sin, or he may maintain a respectable moral level, committing no gross sins, but he will be living a life of sustained rejection of Christ. Now, let us say that he is converted when he reaches the point D, and is lifted by conversion to C. He will be now only where he would have been if he had chosen Christ at B, but he will not be as well off as if he had stayed in the Kingdom. He will have lost the experience B — C. Grace may do much for him, but Grace will not give him back the wasted years B — D, nor will it give him the satisfaction of never having broken with Christ. The only apparent advantage that he would have over the other would be a more dramatic conversion. The sharp contrast before and after his conversion would make his conversion a very striking experience. He could say, "Whereas I was blind, now I see," but the advantage would be more 34 apparent than real, for he would have been better off if he had never been blind. There may be some joy in "making up" after a friendship has been broken, but that is the best friendship which has never been broken.