We have an opportunity, through the pages of the Journal, to engage in a worldwide workshop on Sunday School. Actually, the workshop has been in process for a long time. It involves your prayers, along with the prayers of church members around the world who yearn to help young people today discover their potential as spiritual activists and healers. Out of this prayer —and the ongoing prayer of those in the Global Outreach and Healing Ministry Department of the Clerk's Office— came the impetus for a special meeting at The Mother Church Sunday School last October.
Christian Scientists from Europe, Africa, Australia, and North and South America came together to explore the foundation in the Manual of The Mother Church by Mrs. Eddy for the Christian Science Sunday School and to challenge routine, take-it-for-granted views about this activity. Woven into their daylong discussion was the issue of how to perceive more clearly the dynamic spiritual purpose of the Christian Science Sunday School. What is its mission and reason for being? What do the Manual By-Laws regarding teaching children the Scriptures require of us? Finding the answers to these questions, it was agreed, begins with recognizing that Sunday School is not an activity that takes place in addition to Church—it is one with Church and shares the same mission to "reinstate primitive Christianity and its lost element of healing" (Man., p. 17). Spiritual healing. The awakening to it; the love of it; the joy of practicing it; learning to contribute its blessings to the world...isn't that the purpose that children and young people can find in the Christian Science Sunday School as they gain a spiritual understanding of the Scriptures?
Here is a sampling of the thoughts shared. We hope you will see this as just the jumping-off point for your own prayerful discovery of other ideas, the ones just right for your Sunday School and the children in your community. The remarks of the meeting's participants are meant simply to encourage each of us to bring new, reconsecrated thought to Sunday School.
