July 1928.
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work, how much more true is it in the case of Sunday school teacher needs to know in order to be successful. She must know the Bible, the child, and the great teaching principles. There are other things she needs to know also, but these three are absolutely essential; and knowledge of all these she can get through proper teacher training. She needs to know the Bible as a whole and in its parts; its history, its relationships, the great experiences out of which it came; and what the writers really meant to say. She needs to See it, not a s 'a dull, dry, dead thing, but throbbing with life and containing great life principles that;-are fundamental and timeless. Then she needs to know the child, his characteristics,' his needs, his pos sibilities, his dangers, the world in which he lives, which is not at all the adult world ; and the laws that God Himself has made a part of the child. She needs to know these that she may “train him up according to his nature,” which is the better rendering of the old proverb that has troubled some of us. She needs to know what specific parts of the Bible and other religious materials are suited to him at the different ages'that he may be “trained according to his nature.” Then of course she needs, to know the great teaching .’principles and the best methods, that the child may actually be taught the lessons which he needs, not as an external thing or something which she tries to pour into his mind, but so taught that they may actually become a part of him and of his life. O ur P la in D uty A' good deal is being agitated today about securing ,re leased time from the schools for some week-day religious instruction. In many cases, secular educators, realizing the tragic need of such instruction, would be more than willing 1o cooperate with the churches in securing this time and in having reports of and credit for the work go through the regular school channels. In order to do this, however, it would be necessary to have trained teach ers to give the religious instruction, and where are we to .find them || Certainly the churches. have not been pro ducing, them! It is our plain duty to produce a corps of Sunday school teachers that shall be in training and effi ciency the: equal of the public school teachers. The Sun day school teacher has a masterpiece in the material she has to present and the child with whom she is working needs this material more than any other. How tragic that the presentation of this material should be inferior to that ■of the secular school and unworthy both of the material- and the child ! Is this an impossible task ? Certainly it isn’t a light one: It demands vision and sacrifice and courage and devotion. It will bq done only by people who have heard the call and are willing to put their* life blood into it. But if our boys and girls are really to be won for Jesus Christ and built up into fine strong Christian manhood and woman hood, the church-r%nd that means all of us—will have to think very clearly and seriously and prayerfully about this matter bf teacher training. First published in The Lookout, June 6, 1926. 1| ; Aren’t You a Missionary? Dr. Grenfell tells a story of how, at a dinner given in his honor, a lady remarked to him : “Is it true that you are a missionary V’. “Isn’t' it true that you are?’’ was his unexpected reply. Do we ever stop, to think of it?
As to the importance of training for work in general, there is today little question in the mind of any intelligent and honest person. We wouldn’t expect to enter any mod erately important field of secular employment without pre paring for our task. Standards of training and prepara tion are today much higher than ever before, and gen erally speaking, the untrained person is the one that can’t be used. If this is true in comparatively unimportant There are at least three things that every Sunday school teachers who are working not with material things but with immortal souls; not for time, but for eternity. Yet in this most important of all tasks, we unconsciously take the attitude that any sort of person or any kind of work will do, and cheerfully place upon the Holy Spirit the responsibility for making effective poor and inade quate teaching. We forget that the Christian worker is to be “thoroughly furnished for every good work” ; that we are to “study to show ourselves approved unto God,'; workmen that need not to be ashamed,” One great reason that the Sunday .schools are failing-'to reach and hold so many of our children and young people is that these same young people recognize that the work isn’t interesting and vital and worth while. Of; course we recognize that a consecrated and .Spirit-filled Christian life is the first great essential for Sunday school teaching, and that nothing in the way of program or equipment or organization or training can take the place of this. But next to this kind of life a high grade of teaching would do more to build up our Sunday schools, than any other one thing. Here as elsewhere “a satisfied customer is the best advertisement.” Said a .junior boy,. “I don’t "want to go to that Sunday school. They don’t teach anything” ; and a little primary girl came home with the criticism that “her teacher didn’t seèm to know anything about modern methods.” F ew P repared T eachers The Sunday schools today, in order to hold the respect and allegiance of boys and girls’, have to compete with secular schools where there are trained teachers who do “teach you something'’:’ and “understand modern methods,” In the face of these searching facts—the higher standards of training in the secular schools, thè greater importance of the Sunday- school work, and the very meager time we have in which to do it—what are our churches doing about teacher training anyway? The writer has known hundreds of Sunday school teachers and is now in close touch with dozens of them, drawn from various parts of the country; and she feels perfectly safe in saying that much less’ than ten per cent ever took any kind of regular course in teacher training —even as much as a ten-lesson course. Some' of them have been exposed to me idea in conferences and conventions, .or teachers’ meetings, but any kind of a tegular syste matic course of training is entirely unknown to them. The church that has a good teacher-training class well attended (and generally speaking it would be well attended if it were a good one) is decidedly the exception, as is the church which has any large number of teachers attending a community or other kind of training class. 'Most of the teachers themselves are coming to feel their lack of preparation for the wor-k; and over and over we hear the same complaint, “I just feel that I ’m not accomplishing anything with my class because I don’t know how to teach them.” In many, many cases this is true of teachers who are thoroughly earnest and •consecrated and need only adequate training to do excellent work.
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