After being appointed superintendent of our Sunday School several years ago, I often would receive, sometimes weekly, telephone calls of discouragement from the teacher of the class of kindergartners. She diligently prepared for her class and had been a favorite substitute for all classes before she accepted her assignment as a teacher for this class. Apparently, this group of children had been exceptionally challenging. We would discuss and pray about whatever the current challenge was. And every Sunday she would arrive full of hope, only to find that by the end of class several pupils would have to be taken from the class because of poor behavior.
This went on for about two months; and then it came time for the classes to change at the beginning of the new school year. None of the other teachers would take this now first-grade class. Finally, I assigned myself the class. Even though I had at that point taught Sunday School about fifteen years, I began to learn what true teaching and authority really are. In The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, is a letter from Mary Baker Eddy "To the Superintendent and Teachers of The Mother Church Sunday School" that became the light burning in darkness to illumine my way. It reads in part, "It is a joy to know that they who are faithful over foundational trusts, such as the Christian education of the dear children, will reap the reward of rightness, rise in the scale of being, and realize at last their Master's promise, And they shall be all taught of God.'" Miscellany, p. 230.
What was so helpful here was that it was not a personal ability to be a "good" teacher that was needed, but that there is one teacher—our Father-Mother God—to whom student and teacher alike are receptive. In fact, this was proved true. The first Sunday with the class, I was led to open the Manual of The Mother Church by Mrs. Eddy to Article XX (on "Sunday School"), Sect. 3, "Subject for Lessons." I told them what the Manual is, and then read to them that By-Law. They were so impressed that Mrs. Eddy had actually designated what they needed to learn! They instinctively had great respect for the Manual, and with that a deep desire to be obedient to its By-Laws. Every Sunday after that, step by step we followed the direction given. That year each pupil made a small book of the Ten Commandments, one of the Lord's Prayer, with its spiritual interpretation from Science and Health by Mrs. Eddy, and also a little book of the Beatitudes.
