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What is the Truth We Must Pass to Our Children? (Editor's Note: The author of this article was one of our pioneers, but he was very progressive in many ways. In our earliest years, we opposed the Sunday School, but soon espoused it and became leaders in the Sunday School movement in the United States. This heritage article is from pp. 7-10 of the “Introduction” to his book How to Conduct a Sunday School, published in 1911 by the Gospel Trumpet Co. The only changes made have been mechanical, such as updating spelling, grammar, etc.) Purpose. The purpose of the Sunday School is to teach the Word of God. The central theme of its teaching should be the great moral law of supreme love to God and equal love to men, the principle on which hung the law and the prophets and which, also is based the new covenant. While the purpose of the Sunday School is to teach the old as well as the young, its primary objective is to teach the young. The home is the beginning place of religious education as well of of secular education, but is the province of the Sunday School to take up the more technical education of our children in religion and complete the education begun at home. In many instances it falls to the part of the Sunday School to give the child all the religious education it ever gets, for often religious education at home is neglected. The Sunday School is the school of the church. As such it should teach the doctrine of the church, or the gospel of Jesus Christ. The Sunday School, therefore, should teach the great fundamental truths of the creation, temptation, and fall of man; of the universal depravity of the human heart; and of the atonement of Jesus Christ--presenting these truths in such ways as to make them comprehensible to the various grades. If the underlying truths of human redemption are presented in the right way, they may be comprehended by the child at a very early age. The great centers around which are grouped the doctrines of the Bible are God, man, Satan, sin, the Savior and salvation. In a negative way it is the propose of the Sunday School to combat the powers of sin and to counteract the evil influences of pride in the world and in the hearts of the young. Satan is ever ready to lead the young hearts astray, and the Sunday School, with the church should wage relentless war against the encroaching powers of evil and plan in the hearts and minds of the young the precious seed of the kingdom of God. First, last, and always, it is the purpose of the Sunday School to lead the soul to Christ, and hence every lesson, from the infant class to the highest grade, should point to Christ as the Savior of the world. Importance of Sunday School. The Importance of Sunday School can be estimated only in the light of its high purpose and by its marvelous achievements in the past. Every man and every woman whose privilege it has in childhood to attend a well-conducted Sunday School has but to consult his or her own experience in order to realize the vast importance and the inestimable value of the Sunday School. Solomon said, "Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it," Proverbs 22:6. This text has, by many, been restricted to home training; but in the margin of our Authorized Version [i.e., the King James' Version] it is rendered, "Catechize a child in the way he should go." Like Jewish parents, we should not merely tell the child to do this and not to do that, that this is right and that is wrong; we should catechize him in the principles and precepts of religion. With a Hebrew, religious ceremony begins at birth and never ends until death, and no people have ever clung with more tenacity to the principles of their religion than have the Jews. Though often backslidden, they would remember in their oppression the Holy One of Israel, and even when surrounded by the magnificence and splendor of wealthy Babylon, they remembered Zion. One of the strongest reasons for early religious training is that the things learned in childhood stay with us the longest. Older people may learn a lesson today and forget it tomorrow, but many of the lessons of childhood are never erased from the memory. Little sentences and striking lessons learned in the Sunday School have followed many a man through all the vicissitudes of life and have protected his honor and strengthened his soul when men and devils would have cast him down, and, following him still, have shed a ray of light upon his mind and soul when he entered the shadows of death.
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D. O Teasley Pioneer Preacher, Author, Educator, and Song Writer |
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Teaching the children of Haiti the love of Jesus, the great doctrines of the church, their ABCs—and feeding their bodies and sheltering them at the same time!
(Photograph courtesy of Children’s International Lifeline.) |