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
These organizations that flourish in our modern church life naturally
fall into three classes: religious, semi-religious and welfare. Other
nomenclature, characterizing them might be used, and would be by their
founders, but these words classify them for the purpose of our
investigation. The _religious_ organizations have for their sole aim the
deepening of the religious impulse, and the missionary objective of
carrying this impulse to others. The _semi-religious_ are built around
religious and symbolic heroes, make a bid for the heroic and the gang
spirit, and seek to inculcate more or less of religious truth by the
sugar-coat method. The _welfare_ type aims at the giving of all sorts of
activity in order to keep the boy interested and busy, and so raise the
tone of his life in general.
The religious type of organization includes the forms that may be
classed under the church brotherhood idea--the junior brotherhoods of
various sorts. They originated because of the need of some kind of
expression for the religious impressions that were continually coming to
the boy in his church life. The idea was good, but its release poor.
Senior forms of organization were imitated, adult forms of worship and
service diminutized, and juvenile copies of mature experience
encouraged. Junior brotherhoods and junior societies thus have tended to
destroy the genuine, natural, spontaneous religious life of boys, and
have unconsciously aided the culture of cant and religious unreality.
The semi-religious organizations have gone a full step beyond those of
the religious type. Societies like the Knights of King Arthur, Knights
of the Holy Grail, Modern Knights of St. Paul, and others of such ilk
have in symbolism sought to teach and find expression for the religious
impulse. The method has been more or less the religious type in
disguise--ancient titles, elaborate ritual, initiations, and degrees,
red fire, fuss and feathers, and something doing all the time to attract
the boy. The result has been and is a play-idea of organization and a
make-believe environment on the part of the boy. In his thought it never
classifies with his school or home or general church life. It is a
thing apart, some thing or place to retire to, to forget the everyday
thing for a moment of romance. The mature mind that is responsible for
all of this, however, seeks to bend and use this make-believe world for
the inculcation of religious truth; and the product is an astonishing
variety of results. Most of it is beyond the grasp of the ordinary man,
the only man who at present or at any time will do this work in the
church; and where set programs or ritual are followed the work itself
loses its fire and misses its effectiveness.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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