Sunday Action School

I've never liked Sunday School. There, I've said it. It's boring, repetitive, usually taught by people who ought not be teaching ANYTHING, and it is the one school you never graduate from. If I had to sum it up in one word, that word would be mediocre.

I hate mediocrity. My life is ate up with it (pardon the intentionally poor grammar). I don't want one more mediocre, half-hearted attempt at spirituality gypping me out of one more hour of good sleep time on Sunday morning. Of course, I'm a pastor now, so I pretty much have to be there for Sunday School, so I go.

Now I will say that since my friend Scott Hardy has been leading Sunday School at our church, I have enjoyed it immensely more than I ever have before. He's actually teaching DOCTRINE! And we are having fruitful (in my mind) discussions on the deep things of Scripture. That excites me, no matter what the forum is, so I'm pretty pleased with what we have going on right now at our church. It's about to change, though, and so I am once again having thoughts about Sunday School and its place in the church.

I just so happened (as if there were such a concept) to be thinking about this while reading the ninth chapter of John Piper's, Don't Waste Your Life, this afternoon and a really good, really radical idea hit me. I've been also pondering the possibility of putting together an 'action committee' at our church that would brainstorm and put into action radical ideas for reaching our community with the gospel. My crazy thought this afternoon was: what if we combined Sunday School with the 'action committee'? What if each Sunday School class was actually just a group whose purpose was to plan evangelism and missions projects and put them into action and their meeting times were times of brainstorming, planning, arranging, and preparing for outreach?

Just think about that for a second...What would you teach in Sunday School? Well, you could use some of your class time to teach gospel presentation strategies. You could assign homework each week to read various Bible books and passages and maybe choose one person each week to present insights from that material as it relates to the mission of the church. You could have each class devote a more significant amount of its meeting time to prayer. Each class could have a brief worship time together (have a song or two). The lion's share of the work, though, would be outward focused (something that Sunday School classes really need). The class members would be planning and thinking about various ways to reach the lost.

A lot of Sunday School classes have parties and fellowships to help class members get to know one another better. In this new paradigm, there would be even more fellowships than before, but they would all be outreach events as well.

One of the hardest things in our church is moving people from worship-service-only attenders to being full-time attenders (Sunday School, Sunday evening worship, Wednesday prayer service). Imagine the impact this new paradigm of Sunday School class could have on this age-old problem. Much of the real ministry of the church would be wrapped up in the various classes. Attenders would see and hear evidence of this everywhere. It would become very obvious that if you wanted to really participate in this church, you would have to come to the 'other part' as well.

Also, I cannot estimate the value, as a pastor, of having the congregation go through an intensely spiritual outwardly focused meeting of prayer, worship, and preparation prior to the worship service. The influence this would have on the spirit of the worship hour would be amazing.

This idea is in its infancy stage right now in my mind, but I wanted to write it down somewhere so that it would not go away. I hope that any of you that read this would share your thoughts with me on how this could be done.