The pro position of today’s Key Resources Point/Counterpoint gets to the core of my concerns about traditional Sunday school models:
My own education prioritized hands-on, project-based, interdisciplinary, student-empowered learning.
I wrote jingles and parodies as a participant in Odyssey of the Mind and Destination Imagination, months-long creative problem-solving competitions. I built towers and trebuchets out of nothing but ropes and poles as a Boy Scout.
I performed music and theater and produced big events as a member of garage bands and pit orchestras and student play festival teams. And I helped create monthly newspapers and a yearly literary magazine as a well-mentored student journalist.
At the same time all that was happening, and especially in the later years of it, my church was encouraging me to learn like this: by sitting in a room and talking.
Image credit: “Godly Play Resurrected” by Claire via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).