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What's Existentialism? But content often lags behind the methodology. For one thing, says one minister, modern texts "require teachers with training and imagination, and we haven't got many of those." Children may ask: "What is Christian existentialism?", and many teachers, afraid to admit that they do not know, continue to pull answers out of the air.
"We have to try to avoid teaching them things they'll have to unlearn later," says an Austin minister.
As a result, almost every Protestant denomination has a growing program of teacher training. Some Manhattan churches, their ranks of volunteers hopelessly depleted by the race to the suburbs, have been forced to hire teachers. Still, says the National Sunday School Association's Donald Reeder, "the training of teachers and leaders is the greatest single unresolved task of the Sunday schools." Also unresolved is the problem of Sunday schools being a floating one-hour "Peace and Brotherhood" poster unrelated to the rest of a child's experience.
Children sent to Sunday school by parents "to make them good" often find the teacher's message irrelevant or contradictory.
"For one hour a week we tell them to love one another," says the Rev. Marideen Visscher of the Cleveland Church Federation, "and the rest of the week they hear, 'You've got to fight to get anywhere.' " In many urban areas, where children can see the fight firsthand all week, Sunday schools are empty and crumbling —and many churchmen believe that the funds required to rebuild them would be better spent on the adult community.
Pleasanter Play-Doh? When Sunday school does become a form of institutionalized baby-sitting for the younger children, and hollow moralizing for the teenagers, the students are the first to discover it. In Berkeley, Calif., during a typical Sunday morning of how people should "relate" to people, an Episcopal teacher was startled to hear an eighth-grader ask, "Why can't we study something interesting, like the Egyptian Copts; I'm solving all my own problems." A woman in Atlanta was equally disturbed by the Sunday-school valuation of her visiting grandson: "I like your church better than mine, Grandma, because their Play-Doh is softer." But most parents feel that even in the most lighthearted Sunday-morning hour, some feeling for religion and morality rubs off with the Play-Doh—and they are often drawn to church themselves by their children's Sunday-school attendance. Enrollment in Protestant church schools now stands at 36,429,269. Noting that 85% of the baptisms in his denomination come by way of Sunday school, one Southern Baptist concludes that "the greatest technique of evangelism in the 20th century is not revivalism but Sunday school."