Organizing and Building Up the Sunday School: Modern Sunday School ManualsHurlbut, Jesse Lyman
Religion
Organizing and Building Up the Sunday School: Modern Sunday School Manuals
Hurlbut, Jesse Lyman
Sunday schools
(1) _A Sincere Disciple._ The Sunday-school teacher must be a follower
of Christ, not merely in profession but in spirit. He is one who has met
his Lord, has heard and has obeyed the call, "Follow me." He enlisted in
the grand army of which Christ is the Commander, before he received his
assignment to the army corps of the Sunday school, and his fidelity to
the department is inspired by his deeper loyalty to his Lord. It is
eminently desirable that the Sunday-school teacher should be a member of
the church; but it is imperative that he should be a disciple of Christ.
(2) _A Lover of Youth._ By far the largest proportion of scholars in the
Sunday school, perhaps nine tenths, are under twenty-five years of age.
Therefore, with few exceptions, the teachers must deal with young
people; and youth at all its stages is not easy to understand and to
manage. Moreover, the fact that not only the teachers, but to a large
extent the scholars, are volunteers enters into the problem. Pupils
attend the week-day school and submit to a teacher's rule because they
must, whether their teachers are acceptable or are disliked. But the
rule in the Sunday school is not the law of authority; it is the law of
persuasion. The teacher who cannot draw his scholars, but repels them,
soon finds himself without a class. In all teaching sympathy, or the
coördination between the interest of the teacher in the pupil and of the
pupil in the teacher, is a strong factor in success; but in the Sunday
school it is an absolute necessity by reason of the voluntary element in
the constitution of the Sunday school. That mystic power which will
combine uncongenial spirits, and fuse the hearts of teacher and scholar
into one, is love. Let the teacher love his scholars, let him see in
each pupil some quality to inspire love, and the battle is half won.
Love will quicken tact, and love and tact together will win the complete
victory.
(3) _A Lover of the Scriptures._ Whatever the Sunday school of to-morrow
may become, the Sunday school of to-day is preëminently a Bible school.
There are tendencies in our time which may in another generation render
the Bible less prominent, and introduce into the Sunday school studies
in church history, in social science, in moral reform, in missions,
perhaps in comparative religion, or in some other departments of
knowledge. But as yet the great text-book of the school is the Holy
Scriptures. The volume should be in the hand of every teacher and of
every scholar during the school session; and the teacher, especially,
must study it during the week. If all of the Bible that he knows is
contained in the paragraphs assigned for the coming lesson, and the rest
of the book is sealed to his eyes, he will be a very poor teacher. He
needs to have his mind stored with a thousand facts, and to have these
facts systematized, in order to teach ten; and the nine hundred and
ninety which he knows will add all their weight to the ten which he
tells.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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