A “New and Daring Approach”?

Under the heading “Christian Family Living” a writer in The Christian Century, March 3 ,1954, discusses the Sunday school and points to the “primacy of the family in Christian education,” that the “parents are the first teachers of religion, that the faithful Sunday-school pupil spends 90 hours under the influence of his home for every hour spent in church, and that the child is available to the training of parents in those most plastic years of life when he is not in direct touch with the church at all.”

The writer further observes that in spite of these facts some denominations “act as if parents do not exist. It would be better, far better, if we disbanded the conventional ‘Sunday school’ entirely and began with a new and daring approach.” And what is that “new and daring approach”? “Put our Christian educational task where it belongs, on the shoulders of the parents, and put the church at their service.” The sum and substance of the plan that follows is to organize classes to educate the parents so that they in turn can educate their children in the home.

While this may be a “new and daring approach” for organized Christianity it is not for the witnesses of Jehovah. The modern witnesses have been doing this very thing for many years, while the Bible records that Abraham did so about four thousand years ago, not to say anything about Moses’ commanding it a few centuries later.—Gen. 18:19; Deut. 6:4-9.