July 18, 2024
Co-missioners,
Carol Braun, a long-time member of our Thursday Theology editorial team, reflects today on a question that likely weighs on countless others who are getting ready for another season of Christian education this fall. Parents and teachers will appreciate her insights. So will thoughtful pastors.
Peace and Joy,
The Crossings Community
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Why Sunday School in 2024?
by Carol Braun
As the head of children’s Christian education in my small congregation, I get occasional e-mails from church publishing houses. One of these caught my attention recently because it poked at a worry that’s been lurking in the back of my mind for some years.
The e-mail was illustrated with three images: on the left, a black-and-white photograph of a Sunday school class from the 1920s; in the middle, a girl’s mid-century offering purse; on the right, a collection of Sunday school attendance pins from the 1970s and ‘80s. The message below the pictures was thoughtfully crafted and forward-looking: in short, faith formation takes on different looks in different generations and will keep evolving into the future. But the flavor left in my mouth by the triptych itself was a familiar blend of nostalgia, duty, and dread.
I have a similar collection of artifacts from the German Lutheran branch of my own family. Many of these objects migrated to a filing cabinet in my basement in New York after my grandparents died. The rest are at my parents’ house, and I expect they’ll end up here with me someday too.
To look at those artifacts today is, in part, to feel a kinship with the past and gratitude for an intergenerational gift. Loving hands brought up my great-great-grandparents in the faith. They passed the gift to their children, who passed it to theirs, and so on down the line to me. And now here I am, passing it along to my own children and any other kids I manage to snag into Vacation Bible School this summer—a Lutheran Sunday school teacher like my grandparents before me.
Along with these feelings comes a sense of filial duty—a yen to be the good daughter and granddaughter who preserves these ties to the past and raises the next generation as the elders would want their descendants to be raised, even as the pews empty out around us. “Faith of our Fathers,” and all that.
I know to be wary of this impulse. Where my treasure is, there my heart will be also, and I don’t want my heart stuck in a metaphorical filing cabinet full of old ways—especially not when those ways serve to set me and mine apart from other people. I balk against the emotional manipulation of the chain letter: keep the line unbroken or else. And the content of my faith warns me away from any story that raises me up into—and burdens me with—the role of savior and preserver, rather than driving me to cling to Jesus as the source of our salvation, already accomplished.
And yet. Especially as someone raised in the Chrisitan faith from birth at this moment in American cultural history, I feel myself tugged at times into seeing my faith or at least my church as an essentially conservative project. Many a sermon I’ve heard recently sets up a wall between those of us here in the church and the “modern, secular world” swirling around us, full of distractions from the truth.
In his 2020 book of American cultural commentary, The Decadent Society, the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat describes a split between two sides of our society which he sees as having come to a deadlock:
“On the one side, a defense of the West’s historical Christian and European character that reduces that civilization to a #MAGA bunker; a preservationist project steeped in nostalgia for the dynamism of the past. On the other side, a vision of a civilization with no common memory, no religious roots, no distinctives beyond its political procedures, and no self-awareness about its establishment’s vaunting arrogance and historical illiteracy.”
The #MAGA-bunker mentality feels a world away from the polite, liberal sensibilities of my church life. But it’s hard to live through a progression from full, multigenerational congregations to dwindling, aging ones without catching a whiff of a “preservationist project steeped in nostalgia for the dynamism of the past.” And while I usually think of my children’s Christian education in more vital terms, it can be tempting to classify that education mentally as a step taken against cultural trends toward rootlessness and disconnection from ancient wisdom. From that perspective, raising my children in the faith can feel like an inward-looking exercise in cultural identity-building, setting us apart from the other sorts of people who seek meaning from more ephemeral sources.
Of course, being Christian is an identity, in an utterly powerful sense of that word. It calls us to see ourselves in an entirely new way, having new life from the day of our baptism onward. This identity has nothing to do with ancestral bloodlines or a return to the past. “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” (2 Cor. 5:17) The old identities are obliterated in the face of the new one we take on in Christ: “As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:27-28).
Even more radically, we have a new identity not just “in Christ” but also as Christ—embodying him in the world to continue his mission here, so that we and the rest of his church are “the fullness of him who fills all in all” (Eph. 1:23)—so much so that, though him, all things are ours (1 Cor 3:21-23). And that mission of Christ’s is the opposite of inward-looking or parochial. It thrusts us out of the doors of the church and into that “modern, secular world” around us, aiming God’s love at the outermost outsiders as much as to anyone.
No doubt I owe a debt of gratitude to the generations before me who passed the Gospel message along through the ages and taught me to trust its promises. No doubt, if he uses anything at all, God uses heritage and tradition and loving parents and grandparents to carry out great and wonderful swaths of his grand project to draw all people to himself in Christ crucified. But when the time comes to lead my boys in our Sunday school lessons each week, the inspiration and joy come much more easily when I set aside thoughts of slotting myself into a cultural tradition and instead focus on trusting those promises to do their thing: to enter new ears and bear new fruit and make everything new all over again.
