A New Kind of Sunday School

My church has been experimenting with Sunday School for many years. When our pastor got his D.Min. degree, one of his projects involved creating a multi-generational Sunday School. Now we're experimenting again.

We've got a lot of people in our church who have some performing arts experience in their background. We've done a lot with chancel dramas and skits. Occasionally, our pastor's children's sermon swerves into the realm of improv. It's probably only natural that we might experiment with drama and improv in Sunday School.

We're looking for a way to help children know and remember various Bible stories. So, we've chosen 8 stories, and each week we'll focus on one story. There's no way to cover them all, but we have consensus on what's important.

We're not sure where we'll go from here. We'll probably stay away from scripts. We'll probably go for lots of audience participation--in this case, we imagine the audience to be the children who aren't in Confirmation class.

For example, in the first Creation story, where God creates each element and pronounces it very good, maybe we'll divide the group into the good and the not good section. When God creates something and calls it good, we'll have that group shout out. By the end, it will be vividly clear that God does not consider anything bad or not good--that group won't have said anything. They won't have had a chance to shout.

In later stories, maybe we'll assign roles to the children and the team leader will be the narrator/director. Maybe we'll have fun with puppets, with clowning, with mime. It will be different each week, because different people will be in charge.

We divided our Sunday School leaders into teams, and each team will be responsible for 2 stories. What happens now?

I'll be reporting back to let you know.