Who is Sunday School for—which children are ready for spiritual education? What books can we use to teach from? Can we have a workshop on teaching techniques to help us deal with children who won't sit still or who can't understand the Bible?
Many teachers are asking these and other questions as they try to strengthen their Sunday School teaching. Still other church members avoid teaching altogether because they don't feel they can communicate with young people today, or they believe that most of them just aren't interested in spiritual education. And yet there have been many accounts in the media of young people searching for spiritual answers on their own, turning in large numbers to churches, synagogues, mosques, or simply to prayer groups, whether or not their parents are religious.
Why then, you may ask, are some Sunday Schools so small; or why is it often difficult to get children or teenagers interested in a spiritual education? Well, it depends on our approach. We need to ask ourselves who we think the young people in our community are, and what we think they can learn in a Sunday School. To answer these two questions, we might look first at how the secular world might answer them.
