Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

Brothers and sisters, I could not address you as people who live by the Spirit but as people who are still worldly—mere infants in Christ. I gave you milk, not solid food, for you were not yet ready for it. Indeed, you are still not ready. You are still worldly. For since there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not worldly? Are you not acting like mere humans? For when one says, “I follow Paul,” and another, “I follow Apollos,” are you not mere human beings?
What, after all, is Apollos? And what is Paul? Only servants, through whom you came to believe—as the Lord has assigned to each his task. I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God has been making it grow. So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow.

• 1 Corinthians 3:1-7

We have much to say about this, but it is hard to make it clear to you because you no longer try to understand. In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God’s word all over again. You need milk, not solid food! Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness. But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.

• Hebrews 5:11-14

I have prayed about this post for a long time, and there are parts of the story that may be left out even then.

Have you ever gone to a church, and you see something stuffed into a closet, a framed photograph, maybe two?  If there are two photos, they will be the adult men’s Sunday school class and the adult women’s Sunday school class.  Everyone is dressed in their Sunday best.  Each photograph has fifty to one hundred people in the photo, standing on the front steps of the church, or wherever around the church has the best lighting.  And the photographs are 60, 70, or 80 years old.

Some churches these days could put all their adult Sunday school class attendees in the aforementioned closet.  Or maybe that is me being judgmental.

But some of the churches that I have attended recently, the old traditional denomination churches, here is the Sunday school attendance.  The parents drop off their children for Sunday school while they go to the restaurant for breakfast (no wonder the children acted like they were hungry…) or they go to the coffee shop for that hour.  It is nail-pulling to get an adult to volunteer to teach the class.  I knew some people who taught third and fourth graders when their children had already graduated college, just because no one would take over.  But what do the children learn?  They learn how to behave, be nice, and they learn the basic Bible stories.  With someone that is secularly minded, the teacher may even say that this is what the Bible says happened, but I personally do not believe it.  Thus, the teacher may easily be teaching doubt instead of belief.

Then when the children get up to sixth and seventh grades, those early teen years, they become rebellious to the point of demanding that they stay home.  They are tired of the stupid Bible stories that they know by heart.  Besides, youth group is on Sunday afternoon, and they like that more.  Sure, youth group is fun and games, and very little Bible instruction.  Maybe planning service projects and fund raising to go on a mission trip.  Those mission trips become the sum total of all their religious experience when they decide they want to join the church and they have to write a statement of faith.  Well, at least they have something.  And yes, there are exceptions.  I know someone who has devoted his life to service to God emerging from this atmosphere, but his parents had a lot to do with it.

But for those who understand growth from mother’s milk to solid food, it seems that just at the time when solid food can be introduced, the kids have rebelled and refuse to go to Sunday school.

Then as adults, they know all those Bible stories, so why show up to adult Sunday school?  Isn’t adult Sunday school the same thing?

But adult Sunday school is where, if the teacher is wired that way, it’s where you get that solid food.

And adult Sunday school should at times be offensive.  There are polite ways to say most things, but some are offensive on the surface.  God is offended by our sin, and we should be also when we look introspectively.  Some of my best learning is when I was offended.

My wife was in a women’s Bible study.  The chapter they were assigned to study in the study guide was one that my wife struggled with all week long.  She was visibly agitated.  Why?  Because the subject was about sin in her life that she struggled to deal with.  It was edgy material and the Scripture let my wife know that she had a long way to go to measure up.  She got to the Bible study early.  One young lady was there.  My wife and this lady had bonded, soul mates, although the lady was about the same age as our children.  As they looked around the room, my wife and this lady were the only two that had written anything in their study guide for the assigned chapter.  The teacher showed up late, as usual, and she announced that the group would skip that chapter.  It was “controversial.”  No, it was just as hard for the teacher to look in the mirror as it was for the people in the class.  My wife was heartbroken.  She brought this incident up often for the next twenty years.  Since the class had not started working on the next chapter, they broke into a gossip session, but my wife and the young lady stepped aside and went through their answers.  They confessed.  They cried.  They hugged one another.  And they learned.  They chewed the solid food.  They went beyond mother’s milk.

I am teaching Jeremiah in Sunday school.  It is an offensive book, a book where God gives His chosen people no easy way out.  It relates easily to the present explosion of the secular progressive culture throughout the world, although a resistance is growing in many countries.  Some people can compartmentalize and separate what the world does, even accept what the world does, while being a nice person who goes to church.  Yet, you read Jeremiah and the people are about to be punished for not living the life God intended them to live.  They had to repent.  And they had to surrender to Babylon and take their punishment or things would get worse.

Adult Sunday school should cover this topic adequately by looking at the excesses of today, the hot buttons and determine are we going in the right direction or not from a biblical perspective, trying to do so without mentioning a political party – for salvation cannot be made by any political party.  And then, if we decide that the world, not necessarily one country or another, is going in the right direction, will we be guilty of being a false prophet, claiming God will rescue us, even if we never repent?

It is a minefield to go through such material unless everyone is of like minds and all chewing solid food.

I can be labeled a religious fanatic.  I can be labeled out of touch.  I can be labeled someone that does not understand how things work today.  But I teach as God guides me.  I pray about that a lot.

But should I ever have to apologize for teaching the truth?  Adult Sunday school teaches what children Sunday school could not teach.  The people attending children Sunday school had not faced such trials yet.

And if anyone wants to comment, am I wrong?

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.