Last year, I made my first foray into teaching Sunday School at my pleasantly small, very connected, completely wonderful church. I taught four and five year olds. They were amazing! So fun, so sweet, so energetic, so bright. Dayspring seems to somehow attract a slightly more intellectual-minded congregation that you'd find at your typical Texas church on Sunday mornings. And those slightly more intellectual-minded parents have super-smart, super-curious, super-thinking kids! They never fail to blow me away, even at such a wee age.
But, it was my first foray into teaching Sunday School. I'd never before spent a chunk of time as the sole supervisor of a group of very active preschoolers. And I'm one of those that tends to learn by experience. And by making mistakes. And I had so much to learn! So I felt, a lot of the time, like I was the *Bad* Sunday School teacher.
There was the day that our lesson centered around the Sermon on the Mount. It was a beautiful, sunshiny Spring day and we have this lovely, grassy hill right outside our church, which I thought would be perfect for letting the kids re-enact the Sermon on the Mount outside. And then we could have a picnic and enjoy the glorious day. Well, it turns out that hill was also perfect for rolling down! It took about three seconds for the kids to figure this out and commence rolling down the hill over and over again.
I eventually managed to regain control, but it took a bit, and by the time I had the children sitting meekly on the picnic blanket it was too late for the pastor's daughter, whose darling pink sweater dress and white leggings were covered in grass stains and sticker burrs. My embarrassment only deepened when I realized she was supposed to sing with the children's choir in front of the entire congregation during "big church" that day. *Bad* Sunday School teacher!
Another day I led them in rousing game of follow-the-leader, only later to realize that our boisterous participation had been disrupting all the other Sunday School classes. Oh, and the time I preheated the church's oven for the cinnamon rolls I was making, but forgot the make sure it was empty first. Apparently, the oven was being used to store the kitchen's entire inventory of Tupperware containers. Smoke and the acrid smell of burning plastic infiltrating the whole church. And on it went. *Bad* Sunday School teacher!
And then, this year, I apparently graduated to teaching 4th through 6th graders. Not sure what the thinking was behind that, though I suspect someone may have been hoping that an older group of kids would be mature enough to keep my antics under control. And I dragged Keith into it with me, despite the fact that he's notably more comfortable dealing with college-age students than middle-school age, so that we could be a husband and wife *Bad* Sunday School teaching team. And we have continued along the vein in which I had already begun, which is to say, badly.
We have a beautiful, new, pristine children's building and stark, white, freshly-painted walls for our classroom. And our kids constantly ask if they can paint or color or marker directly onto those pristine white walls. And thought it hasn't actually happened yet (won't actually happen, I promise), I must confess that a big part of me wants to let them. I don't know the names of all the kids on my Sunday School roster (though I know all the ones that actually attend), and I hardly know the names of any of the parents. I want our kids to ask hard questions, and I don't have a problem telling them I don't know the answer. There's a little girl, eleven, who already knows she wants to be a missionary when she grows up and sometimes all I want to do is make her yell and giggle and not take things so seriously. I almost never think of things from the parently perspective (perhaps because I'm not yet a parent) until it's too late. I don't spend hours planning and prepping for teaching.
I want coming to Sunday School to be fun for them, and for me. I want them to be okay with wondering. I want them to know it's okay if their faith doesn't fit in a neat, pat little box. I want them to look at things differently. I want them to learn reverence and a regard for the sacred, but I want them to know that sometimes laughter and silliness and, yes, even doubt are the most sacred of things. All of these things keep our faith real and fresh and growing. I want them to be, to really be, children for as long as they can be. I want them to want to color on walls. I want them to enjoy exploring their faith. I want it to be something so alive that they can't always hold onto it, that it sometimes runs away from them. And then I want them to chase it, so hard, that they tumble down mountains and laugh with joy at the grass stains on their knees.
So maybe I want to be a *Bad* Sunday School teacher. And I want, I hope, to think that's a good thing.
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