John Wesley, Jr.: The Story of an Experiment — John Shaqi
John Wesley, Jr.: The Story of an ExperimentBrummitt, Dan B. (Dan Brearley)
Religion
John Wesley, Jr.: The Story of an Experiment
Brummitt, Dan B. (Dan Brearley)
Christian fiction; Methodists -- Fiction
"Oh, that's easy. You know how it is in our Sunday school: they don't
make one or two of us young fellows serve as librarians and secretaries
and such and miss all the class work: they have more help, and we all
get into class for the lesson. Well, two years ago Dad told me you had
nominated me for something at the annual Sunday school meeting. It was
only a sort of assistant secretary's job, but very soon I began to catch
on, and I've seen a lot of the letters and leaflets that come from the
Board in Chicago. Well, let me tell you that Board of Sunday Schools is
a whale of a machine. Why, it's the whole church at work to make better
Sunday schools, and more of 'em. They have Sunday school workers in all
sorts of wild places, and Sunday school missionaries in foreign lands.
Yes, and last year I happened to meet one of their secretaries, at your
house, you may remember. But you'd never think he was just a secretary,
he was so keen and wide awake. He knew the Boy Scouts from A to Z, and
that got me, 'cause I'm not so old that I've forgotten my scouting. And
he knew baseball, and boys' books, and all that. Don't you think,
Brother Drury, if more of the fellows knew what the real Sunday school
work is they would take to it like colts to a bran mash?"
"They couldn't help it," said the pastor. "And you may have noticed that
your father and the other people of our Sunday School Board are trying
to get them to find out some of the things you have found out. For
instance, you know what the two organized classes of high-school
freshmen are doing, and the other organized classes. Seems to me their
members are finding out that Sunday school is something big and fine."
"That they are," Mrs. Farwell agreed, "and you mustn't forget my
wonderful class of young married women, and the men's class of nearly a
hundred. I think our Sunday school has really begun to change the ideas
of a lot of people. Just think how little trouble we have now with what
Graded Lessons we have, and how happy all our teachers are because they
have the helps they need for just the sort of pupils that are in their
classes."
"That's so," said J.W., Sr. "I don't suppose even old Brother Barnacle,
'sot' as he is, would vote to go back to the times when the
superintendent reviewed the lesson the same way the teachers taught it,
from a printed list of questions. Seems as if I can hear Henry J. Locke
yet--his farm joins ours down by the creek--when he conducted the
reviewing at Deep Creek. He would hold his quarterly at arm's length to
favor his eyes, and then look up from it to the school and shoot the
question at everybody, 'And what did Peter do _then_, HEY?' He sure did
come out strong on Peter; but I'll say this for him, that he never
skipped a question from start to finish."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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