Part 1: How NOT To Teach Sunday School

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

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We are commanded in the Bible to "test everything", to be discerning, to "contend earnestly for the faith". Yet out of fear of causing division or sowing discord, we fail to carry out that order. We do background checks on nursery workers but never ask questions about the beliefs of those who would teach the next generation of Christians. Instead of digging into the meat of the Word, we barely scratch the surface and nibble on the crumbs. We sit around and ask each other "what this verse means to me" instead of asking ourselves "what God is telling us in this passage". We have made no progress at all since A. W. Tozer wrote these words decades ago:

"Many tender-minded Christians fear to sin against love by daring to inquire into anything that comes wearing the cloak of Christianity and breathing the name of Jesus. They dare not examine the credentials of the latest prophet to hit their town lest they be guilty of rejecting something which may be of God. They timidly remember how the Pharisees refused to accept Christ when He came, and they do not want to be caught in the same snare, so they either reserve judgment or shut their eyes and accept everything without question. This is supposed to indicate a high degree of spirituality. But in sober fact it indicates no such thing. It may indeed be evidence of the absence of the Holy Spirit.

Gullibility is not synonymous with spirituality. Faith is not a mental habit leading its possessor to open his mouth and swallow everything that has about it the color of the supernatural. Faith keeps its heart open to whatever is of God, and rejects everything that is not of God, however wonderful it may be. Try the spirits is a command of the Holy Spirit to the Church. We may sin as certainly by approving the spurious as by rejecting the genuine. And the current habit of refusing to take sides is not the way to avoid the question. To appraise things with a heart of love and then to act on the results is an obligation resting upon every Christian in the world. And the more as we see the day approaching."

I want to just take a minute here to assure you that these things are being drawn from many years of experience, and not just my own. When I was young there was a sense of disillusionment even then, where people knew something was wrong but just couldn't put their finger on it. They seemed to have forgotten the reasons for doing what they were doing, but they could never bring themselves to stop because this was, after all, church tradition, and you don't mess with that. But we must face the problems in order to solve them. I've seen too many "band-aids" applied to gaping wounds, and it's time to do something about it. The first step is to admit there really is a wound to heal, and the next is to know what happens when you just keep replacing the band-aids.