Sunday school / Children’s church. Are we doing it fairly and right?
Back in the day, when I was still a kid, I used to go to Sunday school / children’s church, of course. There’s nothing wrong with the goal of those services:
During children’s church, a Bible story is often told, sometimes with crafts, songs, or other creative activities. The goal is to help kids understand the biblical message better and think about it in a way that fits their age.
I also used to go to a kind of Sunday school during the week, where Bible stories were told (and we also did crafts!). I always found those stories super exciting and looked forward to them. There was always a “flannel board” (for the younger ones among us: a large board where pictures about the story were stuck. Nowadays, we would project pictures on a projector) with the most beautiful illustrations of the story.
But the older I get… the more I have to unlearn the stories from back then, because in the short term, they were beautiful, but in the long term, they didn’t help me. On the contrary: they brought a lot of misery.
Let me try to explain it like this: the Sunday school story (I’ll add some pictures) usually went something like this:
Paul and Silas were on their way, telling everyone about Jesus. Most people listened well, but unfortunately…
There were also some angry people… and they threw Paul and Silas in prison.
You’d think that Paul and Silas would be scared, but nope! They weren’t! They even sang songs in prison because they were happy with God.
And then there was an earthquake, and the prison doors opened! And that’s how they were set free and told even more people about Jesus.
The moral of the story: So, you should also tell everyone else about Jesus, and God will always protect you!
And they lived happily ever after.
And because of the way the story was told and the pictures they showed, this was my childhood image of Paul and Silas in prison: (story continues below the picture)
Beautiful story!
Until I was beaten up on the schoolyard for telling my “friends” about Jesus. My “prison” wasn’t fun, my “prison” didn’t open, my “prison” really hurt. The real picture didn’t look like the Sunday school one, but was actually very different. It’s not fun in that “prison”… And I wasn’t as happy as Paul and Silas, and singing and being happy about it? Definitely not! So, I was a bad Christian, and my faith wasn’t as strong as theirs. (period)
Time to grab some verses and see what it really says in the Bible:
It happened that as we were going to the place of prayer, a slave woman who had a spirit of divination met us, who was bringing great profit to her masters by fortune-telling. She followed Paul and us and cried out repeatedly, saying, “These men are bond-servants of the Most High God, who are proclaiming to you a way of salvation.” Now she continued doing this for many days. But Paul was greatly annoyed, and he turned and said to the spirit, “I command you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her!” And it came out at that very moment.
But when her masters saw that their hope of profit was suddenly gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace before the authorities, and when they had brought them to the chief magistrates, they said, “These men, Jews as they are, are causing our city trouble, and they are proclaiming customs that are not lawful for us to accept or to practice, since we are Romans.”
The crowd joined in an attack against them, and the chief magistrates tore their robes off them and proceeded to order them to be beaten with rods. When they had struck them with many blows, they threw them into prison, commanding the jailer to guard them securely; and he, having received such a command, threw them into the inner prison and fastened their feet in the stocks.
Now about midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns of praise to God, and the prisoners were listening to them; and suddenly there was a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison were shaken; and immediately all the doors were opened, and everyone’s chains were unfastened. When the jailer awoke and saw the prison doors opened, he drew his sword and was about to kill himself, thinking that the prisoners had escaped. But Paul called out with a loud voice, saying, “Do not harm yourself, for we are all here!” And the jailer asked for lights and rushed in, and trembling with fear, he fell down before Paul and Silas; 30 and after he brought them out, he said, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?”
They said, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.” And they spoke the word of God to him together with all who were in his house. And he took them that very hour of the night and washed their wounds, and immediately he was baptized, he and all his household. And he brought them into his house and set food before them, and was [g]overjoyed, since he had become a believer in God together with his whole household. (Acts 16:16-34)
Dragged to the square, publicly shamed, beaten badly, clothes torn off, flogged? Wow! When I read that now, I don’t think Paul and Silas had a party in prison anymore. And they didn’t have a window, because they weren’t just thrown into a cell, no, they were thrown into the innermost dungeon, where there was no light. What do you think when you read that story, which is literally in the Bible? Does it still sound like that Sunday school story?
Can you start to see the difference between what I was told, what was “planted” in my mind, and how the real story is? When I read it like that, I definitely read that Paul and Silas sang hymns to praise God, but did they sing with full force as if it were nothing??
And that “So, you should also tell everyone else about Jesus, and God will always protect you!”?
When I read the story myself in the Bible, I definitely see something else, and definitely not a “piece of cake, we praise God and everything will be fine” vibe.
Yes, they were saved from prison, but they were beaten, those lashes were real, the wounds were real. And the story isn’t about God always literally saving you when you’re literally in prison. That’s a fairy tale. The Bible itself doesn’t explicitly mention how Paul died, but according to Christian tradition, he was beheaded in Rome around 64-67 AD during the Christian persecution under Emperor Nero. Does that sound like “God always saves you if you praise Him”?
So, why does the story matter? This story encourages believers to trust God in difficult times, to keep praying and praising, because God is with them and can bring something good from suffering. Through suffering, God’s plan was fulfilled.
Paul and Silas found peace in God, in all their misery, with their wounds, in the deepest dungeon (imagine how it must’ve smelled), because they trusted God’s plan, no matter what happened to them or how it would turn out. And in that peace / through that divine peace, they could call out to God with praise and prayer. That’s so much more than the Sunday school story! There’s so much more depth in it… and that real story still holds true today.
The fairy tale, as well-intentioned as it was by the volunteers back then, is a story we somehow see quite often with our clients who are struggling:
- God would save me, right? Doesn’t it say that in the Bible?
- God will make everything right for me if I believe in Him? That’s what I was told, right?
- I believe a lot, but does that mean my faith isn’t big enough now? Why isn’t God helping me?
- With God, everything will be okay, it says in the Bible, but here I am, in prison. Either the Bible isn’t true, or I’m a bad Christian who doesn’t believe well enough.
Do you see where it goes wrong? Sometimes, we try to simplify stories too much. We even try to make them more fun. Because we don’t want to talk about suffering, death, sin, punishment, and dying… especially not with those little souls. So we tell… fairy tales?
As humans, we think that by “spicing things up,” we make it better and reach more people with the good news. You’ll definitely reach more people, but the “news” you’re actually bringing… is far from good. In the short term, you’ll pack the place, but in the long term (if we’re not VERY careful), we create “lukewarm Christians” who build their house on sand, drink milk, can’t handle solid food, and in the worst case, believe a false story about a false god, and are false Christians… without even realizing it. And when the storm, the prison, the flogging comes… everything collapses like a house of cards, and people RUN from that god who didn’t keep His promises???
I think it’s time for us as Christians to think more deeply about this. How do we bring the real Good News in Sunday school, children’s church, evangelism campaigns, in personal conversations? Is what we’re doing really right? Because as things stand now…
We see many victims in our practice, due to well-meaning little stories with pretty pictures that create a nightmare in the long run… for eternity… We see the victims every day… Somewhere, it’s going wrong far too often. 🙁
The real story from the Bible is a beautiful story of trusting God, of God’s plan (even though we don’t always understand that plan). Shall we tell that story from now on?
(Copyright images: Boettcher+Trinklein TV Inc and Lars-Goran Ronnberg, via FreeBibleImages.org)
