By the Rev. Aaron Solberg, Fort Smith
Recently, while indulging in that quintessential Gen Z pastime of scrolling through TikTok, a video of a non-denominational pastor caught my attention with these striking words: “Sunday School is the Church’s greatest failure.” And I think he might be right. We have raised a generation of children who do not know how to worship, who do not know how to attend Church. You can teach principles all you want, but it’s like watching Church online—it’s not the same thing.
As a pastor looking out at your Church, young and old, you ask yourself the question: do I preach to inspire, or do I preach to catechize? The answer is neither. The answer is you preach the Gospel in all its glory and all its challenge. Because if we believe in the power of the Holy Spirit working through us, we must be willing to let Him work through us—not in catechism, not in inspiring TED talks, but in raw, real, transformative power. And that is why Sunday School doesn’t work as we’ve traditionally approached it. Don’t get me wrong—I am not advocating for an end to Sunday School, but I am advocating for children in Church, learning faith through participation rather than isolation.
My son just walked into my office, grabbed a small censer (something you burn incense in), and began marching around the house singing “Holy, Holy, Holy” and wanting to shake everyone’s hand because “it’s time for peace.” He learned this not from a curriculum, but from watching worship unfold week after week. It takes a village to raise a child—that is true. And it is a village of moms and dads in the back of our Church, each working together to wrangle one toddler or another from running up to the altar at the moment of consecration. As a Church, we’ve had to accept that maybe it’s time to have a nursery for our children during the sermon, but we will not send our children away, because it is at our side they learn to sit, they learn to kneel, they learn to listen.
This understanding of children learning faith through immersion rather than isolation leads us to a deeper truth about where Christian education truly begins. The great voices of the Church have long recognized that the foundation of faith formation doesn’t start in the classroom—it starts in the home. From Charles Spurgeon to Billy Graham, and to Pope Benedict, there is consensus that the home is the Church. The late Pope Benedict XVI said, “Every home is called to become a ‘domestic church’ in which family life is completely centered on the lordship of Christ and the love of husband and wife mirrors the mystery of Christ’s love for the Church, His bride.”
So when we as a Church are concerned with the education of children, what we truly should be concerned with is the education of adults. Parents are the primary educators in faith, and the Church’s role is to equip them for this sacred calling, and many of them have lived through a failed system. But this principle of patient, personal formation extends beyond the family. If we’re serious about Christian education, we must also be serious about the kind of discipleship that actually transforms lives. And here’s what I’ve learned: t r a n s f o r m a t i o n doesn’t happen in groups of thirty with a workbook— it happens one life at a time. Secondly, the Church is called to discipleship— not just those in their congregation, but those in their parish (the geographic region that the Church serves).
Recently, I calculated how much time I spent with one person before he joined the Church: 50 hours in one year. Fifty hours of conversations, prayer, study, and relationship building. You don’t get a bigger or younger Church by some fancy course or extracurricular activity. You get it by giving young men and women the one-on-one attention they never got in Sunday school—the kind of patient, personal discipleship that Jesus modeled with the Twelve. This brings us back to where we started: the recognition that our current approach to Christian education has fallen short. But instead of despairing, we can return to what has always worked.
Christian education isn’t about better programs or more engaging curricula, though these have their place. It’s about creating spaces where the Holy Spirit can work through authentic relationships, where children see adults living out their faith, and where discipleship happens in the context of real community. The Church’s greatest success won’t be found in perfecting Sunday School, but in returning to the ancient model of faith formation: life-on-life discipleship, families centered on Christ, and children learning to worship by watching their parents worship. This is the village our children need—not just teachers, but disciples making disciples, one relationship at a time.
