Having grown up in a “traditional” church, I sometimes feel that such institutions, despite their noble intents, actually put young and developing Christians at a disadvantage when it comes to seeing the Bible for what it is.
When you attend “Sunday school” every week for years, you get accustomed to hearing an exposition of a small passage of scripture with the purpose of either revealing something about God’s truth or suggesting a means of bettering your spiritual life. Little kids are taught about David and Goliath, Noah’s ark, Jesus feeding the five thousand, and Adam and Eve eating an apple. Somewhat older children might be introduced to lessons from the prophets or the epistles. Then there’s Psalms, which is good poetry; Proverbs, which is good wisdom; some scattered Old Testament books that are about kings and war; and Revelation, which is bizarre and confusing and seemingly vaguely about the end of the world.
They are taught how to read a few verses, possibly in context (but probably not), and figure out what it means for their lives. They then adopt this attitude toward scripture in their personal study of the Bible (if they do even partake in such study), trying to extract big lessons from small morsels of God’s word. In short, we are taught to read the Bible as a loosely cohesive series of stories about God and His interaction with humanity. Because of this paradigm, it is difficult for many lifelong churchgoers to make the leap of taking a step back and seeing the Bible as a closely and carefully woven single story about God and His plan for humanity. Such a realization enables believers to return to their individual stories and begin to tie them together.
The lack of such a realization is what causes many Christians born and raised in Sunday school to reject Scripture in their teenage or early adult years; they cannot see it as one book that tells one story, one narrative, instead of sixty-six (or more) historical tales. They fail to see the beautiful, sweeping romance of God reaching out in love to redeem His fallen bride. They fail to see Jesus as the archetype of Israel, suffering through death and being glorified in resurrection, to demonstrate God’s purpose for His chosen people and eventually His entire creation. They are confused when the New Testament quotes the Old, because they hear not with their ears and read not with their eyes what first-century Jews immersed in their devotion to Scripture heard when the gospel of Christ the King was proclaimed. (Let me also note that the gospel, the good news of salvation, is not restricted to the first four books of the New Testament. The gospel is made manifest all over the Bible.)
Yes, being able to read one chapter and get a significant lesson from it is important. But no author writes a book hoping that its readers will only remember one page when they read it. The Bible is a book, a story, a narrative, and God wrote it so that His readers might see exactly what He is doing. The modern church has unfortunately done well in obscuring its overarching message.
My suggestion is not at all that churches abandon Sunday school; learning Scripture is absolutely vital to building faith and spiritual wisdom. Practically, I believe that any Bible-teaching church should offer a class, perhaps even making it mandatory, for all mature believers – those ready to shift from the milk to the meat – in which the continuity and coherent message of Scripture is taught, a class to help believers previously taught the Scripture in fragments to put the pieces together, to open their eyes not just to God’s plan for them but to God’s revealed plan for all creation. (Indeed, I wonder if many churches have a teacher qualified to lead this class! and indeed, I wonder how many churches would be utterly transformed if the lessons of this class hit home with their members and radiated the coherent gospel throughout the congregations.)
