Sunday, December 20, 2015

My Sunday School Class

I'm starting to think I would enjoy leading a Sunday School class, provided anyone else showed up.
Especially after having many good and many terrible experiences with different styles of leadership and facilitation over the years.

Here are a few classroom rules I would put into effect from day 1.

1) No pressure to pray aloud.
Starting with this one because my wife and many of my more spiritually sensitive friends are introverts and or/suffer from social anxiety. Christian churches are notorious for applauding long, eloquent prayers as if prayer is an oration before a crowd instead of an intimate moment with God. Part of my goal in forming a class is to attempt to undo some of the long-term effects of this policy upon the community and upon its perception of Christianity by, insofar as I am able, removing the peer-pressure to pray loud and long and loquaciously. I will not take the go-around-the-circle approach to taking prayer requests, taking the responsibility of praying aloud upon myself and letting those who wish me to address their anxieties or concerns specifically mention them of their own volition.


2) No lectures.
As anyone who has read my blog in the past can attest, I have sufficient struggle dealing with the typical church service's sing-then-lecture format, and thus have no reason to extend that struggle to Sunday School. A Sunday School class is a small, more intimate setting, designed not for a single speaker to stand above everyone else and assume they all agree with him/her, but for everyone present to be able to voice concerns and make contributions to the discussion. Having only one person speak and everyone else just nod or stare at the wall is counterintuitive to the small-group setting, and counterproductive overall.


3) No rhetorical questions.
As an extension of #2, I will take special care to never ask a question without expecting an answer from the class. Rhetorical questions in a small-group setting just fill up the time with unnecessary and awkward silence that could have been filled with discussion and opportunities for growth.

4) No one-word answers.
A step up from #3, I will also take special care to either design my lesson plans to ask deeper questions than can't be answered with "God" or "Jesus" or "faith" or "sin," or push anyone who answers thusly to further elaborate, in order to challenge the class to think more profoundly and delve more deeply into the concepts we discuss.

5) Controversial topics welcome.
I fully expect to have disagreements among and with members of my class. How we handle disagreement among ourselves as Christians demonstrates our Christianity so much more deeply than how we behave sitting in church. Especially since many of the topics which would arise in class discussion are those which directly affect our perception of the world and/or our daily lives. I hope to ask the kind of armor-piercing questions that lead to major, long-term shifts in thought and spiritual perspective.

6) No platitudes. Ever.
This one gets a little gray for the locked-down church-kids in the class, but anyone who has left the church and/or left Christianity can see platitudes coming a mile away. This rule will likely step on more than a few hidebound toes because it will require a change in word choice, in an environment (the church building) which encourages using the same words over and over again until we're saying them in our sleep and are totally numb to them.

7) Cliches will be avoided whenever possible.
I differentiate semantically between platitudes and cliches because platitudes are used in place of genuine sentiments, while cliches can be genuine sentiments expressed in a repetitive manner. As the class leader, I would also differentiate in my approach to pointing out cliches vs. platitudes. Cliches can be addressed without confrontation, because in many cases the person is using an overused phrase or term without realizing that it is overused. Platitudes need to be shot on sight whenever they rear their ugly heads because their use only drives people away from the church and away from Christianity, and reinforces the negative stereotypes associated with American Christianity.

8) All Bible study will involve a holistic approach.
Too often, church Bible studies involve one person spoon-feeding a preselected set of dogma and the scriptural interpretations which support them to a group of blank-faced acolytes who can only sit there and nod.
Expanding one's understanding of the Bible requires its examination from literary, historical, and cultural perspectives, in addition to examining translation conventions and denotation/connotation (for ourselves in this place and time and for those who wrote it at their place and time).



Obviously, it's entirely possible that more items would be added to this list overall, but this seems to be a strong starting point, especially for anyone who has become disillusioned with Sunday School classes in general.