Part 1: How NOT To Teach Sunday School

Why we need not a revival or reformation, but a revolution

Generations of Bad Examples

So, like the ancient Israelites who just couldn't bring themselves to completely eradicate the religious practices of the nations they had conquered, the "reformed" church could not completely divest itself of Rome's errors. The Sunday School was refined and perpetuated. One generation after another, while beginning with good solid teaching in spite of everything, slowly slipped away. Error that at first was so obvious and easy to identify got a little blurrier as the decades passed.

No one, inside or outside of the church, would dispute the fact that doctrine has pretty much become a dirty word. Biblical illiteracy in the churches today is at a level that even the world would never tolerate for the lowest members of society in regards to secular standards. They look at us and compare our lack of devotion to our own authoritative writings as evidence that Christianity is a dying system, and rightly so. If the public schools, as bad as they are, allowed illiterates to teach the children, there would be riots in the streets. Yet that's exactly the situation in the average Sunday School.

We have teachers who can barely force themselves to read a few Psalms or the Beatitudes, let alone plumb the depths of Paul's dissertations on the Law versus Grace. And what sort of results can we expect from this? Exactly what we see today: everything from mild indifference to the Bible, to outright rejection and even hatred of it. When the blind lead the blind, the Bible tells any who read it, both fall into a ditch.

Now that we know how we got to this point, in the next chapter we'll take a closer look at the specific errors being perpetuated by The System.