154 Steps to Revitalize Your Sunday School and Keep Your Church Growing

Abstract

reverential trust.It was a concept of salvation.Today we might describe "fear the Lord" as a person getting saved, receiving Christ, or trusting the Lord for salvation. STEP 7: Sunday School Is the Maturing ArmFinally, Sunday School is the maturing arm of the church.Maturing is bringing a person to completion or making him well rounded.One of the objectives of every Sunday School should be the maturing of its members so that they "carefully observe all the words of this law."Some call this nurturing; others call it training.This is our definition: the Sunday School is the reaching, teaching, winning, maturing arm of the church.However, this definition becomes a mosaic when applied to individual churches.Just as it takes all the pieces of tile to make up a mosaic picture, so it takes all four aspects of the definition to describe a beautiful Sunday School.But some destroy the beauty when they focus on one section of the tile and lose the whole picture.This happens when some have a strong reaching dynamic, so that there are an abundance of visitors; such as a Sunday School with a dominant busing outreach.These focus on numbers so that they lose the total perspective.Some are strong teaching Sunday Schools, with a deep commitment to Bible mastery.Other Sunday Schools are committed to soul-winning and their success is measured by how many they have won to Christ or prepared for church membership.Finally, some Sunday Schools are maturity oriented.These are committed to teaching environment and relationships.They measure their effectiveness by the quality of change in the lifestyles of their pupils.From generation to generation there seems to be a different emphasis on the character of Sunday School.In the early '70s the emphasis was on reaching with attention given to Sunday School busing and Sunday School contests.The current emphasis is on the teaching arm.The Sunday School was the steeple, but is becoming the foundation.The steeple is the most visible part of a church building and its most symbolic emblem.The teaching foundation of the Sunday School will give the church of the twenty-first century stability and direction.In keeping with this shift in emphasis is an obvious attendance pattern.Visitors attend the preaching service first, not like past years where they visited Sunday School first.The average American Sunday School runs 24 percent under the attendance of the average church service. RECOGNIZE THE ROLE OF THE SUNDAY SCHOOL TEACHERSunday School teaching is one of the greatest opportunities in the world to serve God.But with that opportunity comes responsibility.Teaching Sunday School is different from most teaching.It involves a supernatural curriculum, the Bible; it involves a supernatural command, the Great Commission; it involves a supernatural unction and enduement, God's call and bestowal of gifts; it involves the supernatural power, the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit.Therefore, the teacher who teaches in Sunday School should be more than an instructor who is using the Bible as content.A Sunday School teacher has the responsibility for the spiritual welfare of his students. HOW TO SOLVE ETHNIKITIS1 Begin Bible classes or cells for new groups.2 Hire staff members who represent the new groups moving into the neighborhood.3 Begin a second-language preaching service.4 If the church moves to another neighborhood, dedicate the building to spawn a continuing church.5 New groups do not automatically visit existing churches, they must be aggressively sought and brought into the church fellowship.The church that suffers ethnikitis is first, sinning against God, second, disobeying the Great Commission, and third, allowing a cancer to fester within its body. STEP 18 Cure Old Age by Reaching People In TransitionOld age is another disease of church growth.This disease describes the community more than the church.When a church and the community become "old!' so that not many people are moving in or out of the neighborhood, it is described as suffering "old age."Though there are many advantages of a stable community, there are some disadvantages.When no one is moving in, there are no prospects for evangelism, nor are there unchurched who are candidates for church membership, hence no numerical growth.Churches are candidates for growth when they are located in growing areas such as in new housing subdivisions, or areas where the population is mobile.This is because when people move they go through a transition in their lives which St. Augustine referred to as "the seasons of the soul."This means people are ripe for evangelism, like fruit for the harvest.During times when people move, they go through culture shock or disequilibrium.The uncertainty created by culture shock creates a void in a person's life.This emptiness drives him to find satisfaction, and since the greatest satisfaction is Christ, the person is a candidate for salvation.Dr. Thomas Holmes, professor of psychiatry at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle, Washington, devoted 25 years of research to the subject of stressproducing experiences in life and rated the 43 most common crisis experiences.The more severe the crisis, the more likely one is entering a season of the soul.It is difficult to build a growing Sunday School in a stagnant neighborhood.When everyone is stable and no one is moving geographically, they are also probably not moving spiritually.And when people move out of a neighborhood (such as a dying mining town or a small farming town), it is difficult to see growth.

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