Children’s Sunday School – One Thing Teachers Should NEVER Do

The most important Christian message we try to impart on our Children’s Sunday school students is that the love of Christ is free, it’s unconditional, and it’s available no matter what a person has done. Christ is willing to meet students wherever they are—in the darkest corners of doubt and stressful circumstances—and that love does not change.

However, we forget to apply the same to ourselves. When it comes time to be a teacher, we fall into traps. We feel inadequate. We are afraid we won’t love these kids enough. We’re thinking of what mediocre (or horrible) students we were, and thus we think we’ll make horrible teachers. We think of how little time we have and how much of a time commitment this job will take.

Many falsehoods need to be yanked out of those concerns:

All fall short

First: We’re all inadequate. It’s not just you. It’s your pastor, your spouse, your kids, your teachers, your doctors. “All fall short of the glory of God,” Paul says in the Book of Romans.

One woman ran all her concerns past her mother when she was asked to be a Sunday school teacher. She got to the part about being a terrible student, hence a potentially worse teacher, and her mother interrupted.

“You’re being a little presumptuous, aren’t you?”

“What do you mean?” the daughter asked impatiently. “I’m stating everything that’s wrong with me!”

“To think you’re so much worse than the rest of us, that makes you rather important, doesn’t it? You’re not that, important, Sarah.”

The myth of poor teachers

Second: When we say we’d make poor teachers, we often don’t understand what a teacher is. We think of teachers as people who stand in front of a class and say this or that, and the students walk away enlightened. However, studies reveal that how students learn has very little to do with people standing in front of them and listing off important facts. Children learn with their senses. They learn by touching, by handling, by figuring things out for themselves. They learn
because they want to.

The best teachers are facilitators. They learn as they go. They let their own natural curiosity match their students—and of course, Bible study and the wisdom of years has imparted a bit of wisdom upon them. This combination of humility and wisdom makes them good teachers, whereas some very poor teachers have all the information yet little understanding of how easy it is to impart..

Finally, we misunderstand the goals of a church when we think we can’t teach. A church is not supposed to be like a school. Or if it is somewhat like a school, it is still a lot more like home. Church is supposed to be a family. Mothers of five worry sometimes about how to teach their children family values, ethics and morality. But their concerns do not keep them from moving forward and simply doing the best they can. If we look at the kids we teach as part of our family, we have a better chance of being good Sunday school leaders than if we think of it in terms of desks and chairs and lesson plans and oh so much to-do.

This is why it’s important to think of your Sunday school classes as places where teachers and students feel like a family. It should be a relaxing place where everyone can have their say, express their desires, and make mistakes. If you feel you have “a lot to prove” to a lot of people, it’s pretty hard to think of those little people as your friends.

A youth minister’s job is not one of filling little heads with as many Biblical truths as possible in the short time we have with them. We hope that children go away far better educated than when they came to Sunday school. However, our biggest concern is spiritual growth, a process that involves the entire child, not just his intellect. Spiritual grown involves the heart, soul, and mind.

Hence, a teacher’s understanding and ability to flex with situations is more important than her getting the lesson out to the students without flex-requiring interruptions.

Keep your eyes on the big picture, even when you’re deep in the details. Think of the children in your class, and think of them thirty years from now. When they look back on Sunday school, they will remember your kindness, your leadership, your empathy. They’ll have come to believe that Jesus is a little like that.