The Boy and the Sunday School: A Manual of Principle and Method for the Work of the Sunday School with Teen Age Boys — John Shaqi
The Boy and the Sunday School: A Manual of Principle and Method for the Work of the Sunday School with Teen Age BoysAlexander, John L.
Religion
The Boy and the Sunday School: A Manual of Principle and Method for the Work of the Sunday School with Teen Age Boys
Alexander, John L.
Sunday schools
The law of the boy life in adolescence is organization, or the gang.
The church has its choice, either to let the boys organize themselves on
the outside, under self-directed and therefore incompetent leadership,
or to organize the boys on the inside of the church, provide a definite
place for this organization, and so permeate the gang instinct with the
spirit of Christian altruism. Every church organization for boys, the
organized Bible class, the church club, and other church forms of
organization, are aiming to do just this thing. The law of the boy's
life is to associate with his fellows and the expression of his purposes
is team work. The church, through suitable organization, can meet this
need of the boy life.
5. _The fifth and last principle is Leadership_. Leadership is
inseparable from organization, and organization is useless without
leadership. The leadership which is necessary for a group of adolescent
boys is that of a man, and the problem which is presented to a leader
with a group of boys in the adolescent years is not that of teaching,
but of awakening virile ideas and purposes in the boy life. The leader
must be able to enter into sympathy with and in at least a partial way
into participation with all the activities of the group. Everything that
a boy does is just the thing that the man used to do. There is,
therefore, little hardship, but instead the joy of living again, when a
man becomes the leader of a group of boys.
BIBLIOGRAPHY ON FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES
Alexander (Editor).--Boy Training (.75).
Boys' Work Message (Men and Religion Movement) ($1.00).
Robinson.--The Adolescent Boy in the Sunday School (_American Youth_,
April, 1911) (.20).
VII
METHOD AND ORGANIZATION
=Organization=
By organization is meant, of course, boy organization, the form of
organization that attempts to keep the adolescent boy tied up to the
interests of the church. Today the forms of organization for this
purpose are legion, and strangely enough every such form but one has its
headquarters outside of the local church it seeks to serve. The one
exception is the form known as the Boys' Organized Bible Class, an
integral part of the Sunday school with no allegiance of any sort or
kind to any organization but the local church of which it is a
part--bone of its bone, flesh of its flesh, muscle of its muscle.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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