Sunday school during the pandemic and beyond
The photo above was taken about two weeks into the pandemic in March of 2020. Until February of that year, we had been hosting weekly Sunday school classes between services and children's messages during worship. We had wonderful volunteer teams who taught different age groups from preschool up through junior high.
That all changed immediately at the start of the pandemic, and it was adaptations like the above (church in pajamas, hey look the pastor is on television!) that became the new normal.
As it became apparent the pandemic would be a matter of months and not weeks collectively we began brainstorming new ways to form faith with the children of our church. I'll remember until I'm old and gray (oh wait) the Sunday we hosted a group of baptisms on the church grounds and conducted socially distanced baptisms. Each family brought their own bowls and we kept the faith outdoors and as safe as possible. We then also continued worship services outdoors during that summer, a popular option for many families.
By the fall of 2020, we realized we would not be able to host traditional Sunday school classes. We had no plans to resume indoor worship, and indoor Sunday school was even more close quartered, bringing together unvaccinated children who were with quite a bit of trepidation returning to public school. We started making use of some great take-home faith formation resources published by Illustrated Children's Ministries, the first of which went out at the beginning of the Advent season that year. These Advent kits were immensely popular, I think we distributed around 100 of them during an evening drive-by event the first week of the Advent season. And just prior to that drive-by I also did a drive-around tour just to see in-person some of the littlest and newest children in the congregation.
The Advent boxes were such a hit, we decided to use the same faith formation resource for Lent of 2021, which went out as a mailer (including little canisters for the ashes). As a pastor, I've always believed that the best catechesis is the liturgy itself, so I loved this opportunity to get liturgical practices out into homes. But I admitby this point (one year into the pandemic) I was also really tired of not gathering with everyone.
It's hard to make decisions in a vacuum of information and one impact of the pandemic was to lessen our ability as church staff to informally survey folks to learn their needs. Throughout this time, we received some level of feedback from families who made use of the at-home materials. Some of you quite faithfully used the lessons every single week, conducting your own Sunday school program. But others reported that they were doing well if they got everyone in the same room for the worship live-stream each week.
Nevertheless, we are a congregation made up of families who took the pandemic very seriously and so we were not ready to gather in person until the summer of 2021, and even then many preferred outdoor options, which we continued that summer and once again blessed new families and baptized those new to the faith.
That spring also was a pivotal moment for us as a congregation in solidarity with LGBTQIA+ youth. The state of Arkansas passed legislation targeting trans youth in particular, but the legislation and conversation around it had a tremendously negative impact on all the queer youth in our community. As a church, we discovered we had the energy and the right connections to try something completely new: Queer Camp. Over the course of those spring weeks, we organized a one-week camp here at church for LGBTQIA youth. We hit the very limited "sweet spot" for the virus that summer. If the camp had been just a few weeks later, we would have had to cancel because of the rise of the delta variant. As it was, we hosted the camp, and we also aligned with youth in our church in the Pride and trans marches and we even traveled to Little Rock to stand with a trans young member of our church who is part of the lawsuit against the state of Arkansas for denial of health care access.
Last summer we also tried an experiment in multi-generational faith formation. We made use of the graphic novel Manna and Mercy by Daniel Erlander. Each week we held a service outdoors that included reading a chapter from the book and then discussing it. If you participated in the whole series, you surveyed the whole biblical story as a family. On this one, instead of doing a drive-by at church we did a drive-by of my front porch, and families picked up a copy in our yard prior to the beginning of the summer read.
In the meantime, we kept up some of the core faith practices for youth, baptism in particular. Some baptisms we were able to host during the live-stream services so you could attend virtually. Others we hosted during those few weeks in the summer, or again late fall, when we returned to in-person worship.
Finally, at Christmas of 2021, we could return at least in certain ways to in-person worship. We hosted what turned out to be a very lovely dramatic reading of the Christmas narrative in the round and then the week following a firelight Christmas Eve service. But since we were already into the academic year, we had not yet sorted how or in what format we would do what we had considered our traditional "Sunday school."
In the spring of 2022, we gathered a group of parents and discussed options. We decided to try what we called "Here Be Dragons," a learner-initiated format for learning where people offered classes they would lead, and then students would self-organize to take the class. We had a moderate level of success with this, with people trying things like church tours, tire-changing classes, and the most popular, a slime-making class. But we also didn't have wide-spread adoption of this program by the congregation.
Here at the end of this academic year, youth group has been going great on Wednesday evenings and our acolytes are back and active. We have been offering one more resource, a weekly children's message with our youth director, Callie, called "And Social Justice For All." She teaches the topic in worship with the children and then sends a very useful and thorough e-mail out the day after with resources for families to engage that topic for the week. Again, without a lot of feedback from end-users, it's hard for us to know what the uptake is on this program, but it's got some great options for those who do want to conduct faith formation activities and reading at home.
This fall, we imagine we will return to the traditional format for Sunday school we'd hosted before the pandemic began. It's our sense, having listened to all of you, that although we've learned a lot from some of our adaptations and experiments, there's still value in a classroom model. We're looking at a model where we focus for blocks of time, perhaps 4-6 weeks, on core catechism topics (Lord's Prayer, Creed, Baptism, Communion, Scripture) and then weave into these some topics we believe pertinent to our lives in 2022, like anti-racism education, climate change and faith, etc.
This last part is especially for those in our congregation…
We'd love to have a lot of input and leadership from everyone as we plan for this fall. We have a lot of great kids in this church and a lot of faithful parents, and we think we can put together a really great program. And it will rely on a set of volunteers to teach the age-specific programs.
Join us Wednesday evening, June 15th, for a first planning session. We'll meet at 6:30 p.m. and provide some fun hors d'oeuvres and sodas/bubbly water.
In Christ,
Pastor Clint Schnekloth and Youth Director Callie Newsom Doyle
P.s. a similar write up to this came out yesterday with more photos if you are on the church members email list. we are seeing that gmail is pushing these to the promotions folder for some so check there.