Let's Sing?

Do your Sunday School children sing? Your preschoolers? Your elementary students? Your junior and senior high students?

What do they sing? Hymns? Popular Contemporary Christian Music songs?

To what style of music do they respond? Live piano accompaniment? Live praise band? Full-production recorded songs? With vocals or just accompaniment tracks?

I'd love to really hear your answers to those questions, but I expect I'll have to do a survey to really get the answers. It is enough if I can get you thinking.

The Lutheran Christian congregation spends a lot of time in worship singing! Garrison Keillor says it is one of the things Lutherans do best. He claims Lutherans are trained from birth to sing hymns in four parts.

There was a time when the epitome of Lutheran worship experience was accompanied by pipe organ. My guess is this may no longer be the case.

Thesis: One goal of a child's Sunday School experience should be to prepare the child to enjoy full participation in the worship of the congregation as an adult. (Note the emphasis on enjoy.)

So . . . think about these things:

• Are your congregation's children in worship each week with their parents? If so, they are learning how adults worship and growing into that practice. How can you help them?
• Is the musical experience the children have in Sunday School (1) similar to, (2) complementary to, or (3) distinctly different from the worship experience they will have as adults? If you pick door number three, how will they ever make the transition? Are they going to enjoy full participation in worship as adults?

How you choose to do music and singing in your Sunday School will have an impact on the future worship life of your congregation.

God bless you as you teach His children to sing!

What You Are Is What You Were When You Were Ten

More years ago than I care to admit, I was challenged (near the end of a 16mm HR training film) to reflect on the impact that my life at age ten had on my "after age ten" existence. The premise of the film was that a lot of our attitudes, beliefs, and practices are imprinted at about age ten. From that time on, we don't change all that much.

Maybe that's a stretch, but as I hear it today, it has a ring of truth, at least in matters of spiritual formation. A child's attitudes about church and Sunday School, his or her beliefs about what God is like and what life with God is all about, and devotional and worship disciplines at age ten may predict where that child will be in ten, twenty, or fifty years later.

What if this is true? What would you like that ten-year-old child to be hearing, learning, and experiencing?

• Opportunities for service in the church and community?
• Sunday School lessons filled with forgiveness for sin and assurance of God's love and mercy?
• Weekly participation in worship and Sunday School as a family?

What was life like for you at age ten?

What specific attitudes, beliefs, and practices would you like to imprint on the children you teach?

God bless you as you teach His children (and their families) His Word!

Going Digital

My Sunday School team is discussing how best to format the next revision of Sunday School material for Concordia Publishing House. This would be for material published for fall 2015 and following quarters. Among our observations are these points:

• Our scope and sequence is pretty solid; we might eliminate a bit of the annual repetition imposed by the Church Year.
• The biblical art created for Growing in Christ and reused in Cross Explorations is a winner.
• The demand for Sunday School material in general continues in a downward trend; many congregations are struggling to maintain their Sunday School in the face of a poor economy and fewer students.
• Advances in digital publishing suggest that we look seriously at how Sunday School material for teachers and students could be provided to congregations digitally.

Digital Sunday School material represents serious challenges. Our Sunday School customers are often late-adopters of technology. A significant part of our financial investment is recovered through sale of student material. For each teacher guide we sell five to ten student sets in our "print model." The financial picture changes radically if we are selling just one digital set of material that is then printed locally. Most of our publishing costs do not go away. The process of developing, writing, editing, and playing out the material in a designed format still remain; only the printing cost are reduced, which is a small part of the total investment.

Digital material also presents several significant advantages. Customers could have some choice in designing their own scope and sequence. Distribution of material to teachers might also be possible electronically.

Do you have time to answer a couple of questions about this possibility?

Would you purchase Sunday School materials as a digital subscription?

What advantages would you look for?

Would you print student material locally in color or black and white?

I would love to hear your thoughts on this thorny issue. Leave me a comment or write me at tom.nummela@cph.org.

God's blessings as you teach His children His Word.

Stewardship of the Gospel

I occasionally hear from Sunday School leaders and other Christian educators that they are looking for reproducible or "download it yourself and print it from your home computer" resources as a matter of good stewardship. Attendance varies so greatly from session to session, that they cannot accurately estimate the amount of pre-printed student material to purchase.

Here is what I wrote recently to a VBS director:
         'Let me step up on my soap box for a moment. I want you to be a good steward with your church’s financial resources. But even more, I want you to be a good steward with the Church’s Gospel message. Consider what you give up when you sacrifice “the official LCMS program” for sake of dollars: CPH is the only publisher who guarantees that your VBS will teach God’s Word clearly and fully from a Lutheran perspective without the false teachings of moralism (you can be good by your own power), synergism (you help God by cooperating in your salvation), or decision theology (you find and choose God). CPH is the only publisher who submits their material for an independent doctrinal review by LCMS theologians. I assume sharing the Gospel is the reason your church goes to all the work of preparing a VBS in the first place.'

Jesus, in Matthew 25:14-30, commends those stewards who put their master's treasure to work and condemns the one who guards the master's money and gains nothing with it. Since we know that Jesus is not teaching a course on financial management, we must consider: Is it good stewardship to save money and sacrifice theology?

But what about that "wasted" student material? You can:

• negotiate a better return policy with your supplier or publisher
• send the unused material by mail to the student who otherwise would have used it (with a sincere invitation to use the material in person next week)
• offer it to a local mission congregation
• in larger congregations where more than one class uses the same student leaflets, store the leaflets in a common area rather than in the classroom and distribute them at the end of opening, or simply make sure teachers know to ask and share; don't let leaflets sit unused in one classroom, while also classroom runs short

Exercise good stewardship of the Gospel, not just good financial stewardship. God promises to bless you as you teach His children His Word!