Archive: Whither Sunday School?
By Riley B. Case
The United Methodist Publishing House recently released results of a study in an attempt to explain why UM Sunday school curriculum sales have decreased by 67 percent over a 30-year period. Sales have plummeted from 31 million units per year in the early 1960s to 11 million units in 1992. For those of us who have invested prayers and efforts over those thirty years, desiring to bridge the gap between the UM Sunday school materials and the evangelical constituency of the UM Church, there is a sense of sadness.
The reasons given for the decline sound all too familiar. Indeed, they are a classic church bureaucratic response. There is no admission that there is a problem with the product. Nor is there any suggestion that the people producing the curriculum are out of touch with people in the pews. Even while reporting on the disastrous decline, the news release claims that grass-roots complaints about biblical biases in the material have been addressed.
According to the study and the ensuing discussion, the problem has to do with factors like the economy (the economy?), television, photocopying machines (can we believe this?), membership decline (perhaps the result as well as the cause for curriculum decline), staff reductions leaving fewer persons to promote the material, and the scuttling of the old United Methodist Council on Youth Ministries (a radical group that was openly critical of the Sunday school as an institution).
These are poor answers to a serious problem. The Curriculum Resources Committee is one of the few agencies in the church that has its effectiveness measured by a bottom line. Unfortunately, the Board of Global Ministries and the seminaries do not have to be judged by the same bottom line. Sales are market-driven. Either the product is not meeting needs, or someone else is doing it better. It’s that simple.
Declining curriculum sales are indicative of the problem of the denomination. Methodism is an evangelical movement gone awry. The crisis is not of recent origin. The Boards of Education of both the northern and southern Methodist Churches were among the first agencies to commit themselves in the 1920s to “modernism,” an approach that indicated a willingness to make adaptations in the faith in order to communicate to the modem world. Any approach to faith that was not swept up by modernism was labeled “fundamentalism,” an ideology which, according to one of my seminary professors in the 1950s, “was an anachronism, and would be gone in another generation.”
Many of us wondered why traditional Methodism, as we had always known it, was now labeled “fundamentalism.” By whatever name, there was a lot of it around and it was not going away. By the 1960s, traditional Methodism was on the increase; and its adherents were puzzled, confused, and sometimes angered by the approach of Sunday school material that seemed more interested in life situations, the modern world, and becoming well-adjusted, than in communicating the faith.
Curriculum sales during this period were propped up by a constant pushing of the denominational loyalty button. “True Methodists” used only Methodist materials, which were theologically liberal, educationally fashionable, and supposedly suited for every church and situation; large or small, urban or rural, of whatever cultural, theological, racial, or educational background. If churches did not like the material, it was not the material’s fault. The problem, according to the institutionalists, was a lack of training, poor attitude, or a misguided understanding of the true purpose of Christian education on the part of churches and teachers.
In 1967, Good News was organized as a voice for the evangelical constituency of the Methodist Church. In one respect, it might be said that pain over curriculum matters did more to launch Good News than any other factor. There was a widespread sense among evangelicals that the church, which had nurtured them in so many ways and through which they wished to minister for Jesus Christ, dogmatically insisted on the use of curriculum materials which did not reflect, and was sometimes openly scornful, of their own understanding of the faith. Still, the “Good News types,” being fairly traditional, remained among the strongest supporters of the Sunday school as an institution, at a time of social ferment when criticism from other factions dismissed the Sunday school as outmoded and irrelevant.
On April 18, 1969, at O’Hare Inn, Chicago, the first of a number of “dialogue” meetings were held between curriculum editors and representatives of Good News. The Good News group argued that the UM materials represented a theology that had long-since deviated from the church’s doctrinal standards, and that Sunday schools were in trouble.
In the July-September 1969 issue of Good News, twenty-three pages were devoted to “Our Curriculum Crisis.” There was a sense of desperation in the articles, particularly in regard to youth. Arguments were made that the church was in danger of losing a whole generation who were being denied a clear, compelling presentation of Christian truth. Today, the words sound prophetic.
In the January-March 1970 issue of Good News, Charles Keysor wrote an editorial entitled “Cyanide in the Church School.” The commentary was direct, strident, and confrontational. Erroneous teaching in curriculum materials was infecting and poisoning the entire church, he said. The intensity of the editorial, and a number of articles to follow, reflected the frustrations of United Methodists who could see no improvement in the materials.
One cause for alarm among Good News affiliates was the realization that numbers of United Methodists, including some of the church’s brightest and best, were defecting to more evangelical denominations. While the curriculum materials and the Sunday schools were not the only reason for the exodus, desire for forthright Christian teaching was the main reason given for many of the departures.
Church leaders quoted “studies” and denied that any significant exodus was taking place. One of the first official responses to Good News was offered by the editor of curriculum resources, and was entitled, “How to Quote Some of the Words—and Not Tell the Whole Truth.” This widely-circulated pamphlet from the early 1970s painted Good News people as basically right-wingers and irresponsible fundamentalists. According to the pamphlet, the resources were biblical and responsible. All theological points of view were represented and the church would resist pressure from unofficial groups, the pamphlet stated. Variations on this response were repeated time after time during the years that followed.
Despite these responses, numbers of persons—whether acquainted with Good News or not, whether identified as evangelicals or not—continued to ask questions. Why so very little Scripture memory work? Why were there no pictures of Jesus on the cross for elementary children? Why no mention of original sin or hell or wrath of God? Where was the way of salvation presented? Why were basic church doctrines like the Virgin Birth, or Christ’s Atonement for sin, or the Second Coming always presented with qualifying statements, if at all.
The 1972 doctrinal statement, with its emphasis on pluralism, gave evangelicals a new argument. The Discipline stated that the curriculum materials should be of such nature as to meet the needs of all groups in the church. The question now was: Did evangelicals qualify as a group? If so, what was being done to meet their needs?
The official response to “meeting the needs of all groups” was to incorporate evangelical writers from time to time, and include evangelicals in the planning process. Evangelicals argued that this did not “meet the needs” for literature with consistent quality that could be used without apology. Many former members of the Evangelical United Brethren Church were appalled by the curriculum that was thrust upon them in their merger with Methodism. There was even an argument made for an evangelical “track”—a separate line of materials that would be confessional in nature, consistent with the doctrinal standards, and would interpret the Scriptures from a supernaturalist frame of reference.
An opportunity for an evangelical “track” came with confirmation materials. Good News made specific suggestions as to how additional resources could service the needs of evangelicals. These were summarily rejected. Good News then prepared a text that was submitted for approval as supplemental material. This too was rejected with the explanation that studies showed there was no need either for revision or for additional materials, particularly of the type Good News was proposing. Good News proceeded to publish its popular We Believe confirmation materials, and has subsequently sold more than 200,000 units.
Dr. Frank Warden, then a member of the Good News board, proposed an extensive Bible study based on the Bethel Bible series. Curriculum people indicated they felt the church would not respond to such a serious study. Dr. Warden, on his own, then prepared the Trinity Bible Series for United Methodists that was immensely successful in several thousand UM churches. A decade later, the Curriculum Resources Committee finally responded to the expressed need and produced the Disciple Bible study which has been a bright spot in some otherwise dismal sales figures.
By the 1980s, Good News was involved in a number of other concerns—missions, funding patterns, theological education—and curriculum became a less-pressing issue. The need for materials that could be used in good conscience by evangelicals was still there, but there was the feeling that the official structures of the UM Church were unwilling or unable to address it. It was at that point that United Methodist evangelicals launched Bristol Bible Curriculum. At least there would be a UM-based curriculum alternative for churches.
Sales for the official curriculum materials continue to sag. From the published reports, there is no reason to believe that the committee, in an effort to determine the cause for the sales slump, ever bothered to speak to any of the number of former-United Methodists who have since found homes in Baptist and Nazarene churches. If they had, one assumes they would not have been so quick to blame the extraordinary curriculum decline on secondary issues such as photocopiers, the economy, and need for more staff persons.
Riley B. Case is pastor of St. Luke’s UM Church in Kokomo, Indiana, a Good News board member and a contributing editor.
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