Drowning Christians in Christianity

I have discovered in myself a strong disgust with Sunday School (or Children's Church, whatever you want to call it). It wasn't until yesterday, though, that I realized why it is that Sunday School makes me sick: we're teaching our kids the wrong things the wrong way. We may say our theology has changed, but Sunday Schools are still teaching the same things they taught 10 or 15 years ago when I was in Sunday School. And it's messing up their theology as much as it messed up mine.

We are teaching kids to "be good" without first teaching them to be with God. How are they supposed to achieve the one without the other? They can't, and they probably won't realize this for a very long time--I know I didn't. For years I vacillated between guilt and despair because I could never be everything the church was telling me to be.

It was only five years after I left Sunday School that I began to untangle the knotted ends of theology that had tied my brain up in mindless pursuit of good without passionate pursuit of God. Church taught me many things, but very few of them turned out to be true.

For example, my innocent young mind observed all of the women in church and summed up what a Christian woman was like: busy, pious, and not very pretty. Christian women didn't have what secular women had, as far as I could see, and I didn't understand why a woman would choose Christianity. Worldly women had real romance, Christian women just stayed with their man because that's what you did (although I realize now that that isn't true). Worldly women were allowed to be beautiful on the outside, Christian women could only be beautiful on the inside. So I rather resigned myself to my fate: grow up to be not pretty, marry someone who tolerated me, have too many children, and spend my life trying to be something I could never attain.

I also learned that God hates me. No one ever said as much, but it was implied in our theology. Yes, God saved us, Christ died for us, we have the Holy Spirit inside of us, but so what? God still doesn't want to have much to do with us. He doesn't really want to talk to us or spend time with us until we die and He can really fix us. Then maybe we'll be good enough that He will talk to us. Probably not though, and we'll just have to spend all of eternity groveling and hoping that He will deign to look down upon us in His infinite tolerance. I am still learning how He really feels about me, about all of us (which, by the way, is quite contrary to what I thought as a child).

And I learned that God lied to us. Yep, the theology I learned as a child directly contradicts His Word, the Bible. Oh, they tried to hush that up, because they didn't really believe He was a liar, I guess they just thought there was some other interpretation for the things He said that they didn't agree with. For example, Matthew 5:48 says "Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect." But they say we are all still terrible, horrible sinners and will never stop sinning until we die. Would Jesus tell us to do something we cannot possibly achieve? How about the verses that say we are dead to sin? Are those lies too? How can they be true if we are still horrid, awful sinners not worthy of anything?

But the worst of all is that I learned that the cross was not--is not--big enough. It's not big enough to save all of us, God had to pick some of us to save and the rest of us are damned for eternity because God's not big enough. And even those of us that are saved are only partly saved, mostly we're still enslaved. We are not free from sin, we are not a new creation, we are not dead to sin, we are not good and holy and perfect as God says we now are. We are yet slaves to sin and we will remain enslaved to sin until the day we die. Isn't that optimistic Christianity?

So you know what I would really like to see? Sunday School--all of church, in fact--radically transformed. Christian childcare needs to be about love, nothing else. You can't really teach a child to always do what's right, you can only teach them to be in right relationship with God. If you skip step one you will just be teaching them to put on the mask of doing right without actually changing anything inside of their souls. Sunday School as we know it now cannot achieve this, not without radical changes. Church as we know it doesn't do a very good job of this either, and it needs to see some drastic change as well.

But I believe it's possible. God can do anything, and He is bigger than our churches, organizations, lesson plans, and sermons. And I believe He wants to do something to renew our churches and bring them back to Him and His plan. I don't pretend to know what that is, but I'm quite sure that we have fallen from His plan to our plan, and He wants us back with Him. After all, that's the best place for us to be.