sunday school

I have been filling in as the teacher in our young adult Sunday School class over the last few weeks. We are going through the book Celebration of Discipline, which is certainly not a bad book, but it is a challenging one to use as a lesson guide. The book can be a very valuable guide to growing your spiritual life and getting closer to God. For someone with limited free time, though, it reads like a series of things that you should do to be more spiritual, but that you can't do because you have other things that take up your time. It is also difficult to turn topics such as fasting or solitude into things that hold people's interest for an entire lesson period.

I was discussing this with Golden and got the idea to look around and see what other materials are available so that, once we complete this series, we can do another that might be easier to teach. So far, I am feeling that I must be a bit overly picky. I don't want people to wonder why they bothered getting up and going to class, so any series I teach has to have meat. I don't want to torture the people in class, either, so I need something that is somewhat entertaining as well. I can't be spending my entire weekend creating lessons, either, so I can't just write my own lessons as I have in the past.

The drawback in doing a search for Sunday School lessons is that I have to filter through a ton of children's series to find even a few adult programs. That is deeply disturbing. Do people really think that Biblical learning ends at age thirteen? Another drawback is that experience tells me that a large percentage of the adult materials will be lacking as well. As an example, I don't like that most series' lesson questions simply fish for predetermined answers.

Why aren't there more Sunday School lessons that present actual theologically useful teaching in a way that isn't ridiculously dry? I know I would use them if they existed. For all of the Christian literature that exists, you would think that someone somewhere would have noticed the need for a Sunday School material overhaul. That would be far more useful than most of the books that litter most Christian book stores.

Also, am I the only one who wishes that the phrase "Sunday School" was changed to something less nerdy? I think the term has too many negative connotations. I absolutely hate continually typing that phrase on my blog. Maybe I could come up with a code word for it that doesn't annoy me as much. How about, "Pre-Service Coffee Time"? That's the best I can come up with right now.