The Boy and the Sunday School | Page 9

the
school proper has but little time for the doing of its work. Fifty-two
sessions a year, of an hour's or an hour and a half's duration at best,
fifty-two or seventy-eight hours a year, only one-third of which is given
to Bible study, furnish a meager opportunity to accomplish its aim.
Compared with twelve hundred hours a year in the public school, or the
twenty-eight hundred hours a year a boy may work, it seems pitifully
small, for the aim of the Sunday school is bigger than the other two.
The Sunday school purposes to fit the boy to play the game in public
school and work and life. It seeks to give him impulses that will help
him to keep clean, inside and outside, to work with other boys in team
play, to render Christian service to his fellows, and to love and worship
God as his Father and Christ as his Saviour. The means it employs for
these great purposes are Bible study, Christian music, the association of
the boys in classes, and Christian leadership. To these the school is
beginning to add through-the-week meetings for what have been called
its secular activities. All this has come after a great deal of campaigning
on the part of groups of devoted men and women interested in boy life
and welfare. The Sunday school has had to overcome many handicaps
in reaching the boy of teen age, among which were the lack of efficient,
virile teachers, a misunderstanding of boy nature, lessons not adapted
to the boy's needs, music that was not appealing, and the indiscriminate
grouping of boys with members of the other sex. These, however, have
been rapidly overcome, and today the school is fairly well organized to
meet the needs of the boy.
There are yet some definite things to be written into the life of the
Sunday school to win and hold the boy of teen age in its membership
for life.
The first of these is the incorporation into the Sunday school activities
of those things that interest and touch and mold every phase of a boy's
life. It means the allotment of a definite part of the school period for the
discussion of the things the group of boys will engage in during the
week, and a through-the-week meeting as a real part of the school work.

This allows and provides for the athletic, outdoor, camping, social, and
literary outlet for the boy spirit.
Another forward step is graded Bible study, graded athletics, graded
service, graded social life, and graded mental activities. The work of
the school, to hold the boy, must be new and diverse in its interests, and
big enough and broad enough to command his constantly changing
attention. As his years so shall his interest be. To his years the work of
the Sunday school must correspond.
The Organized Bible Class that is self-governing must be added to the
above. Better have the gang on the inside of the church with a
Christian-altruistic content, than to permit the boys to organize under
self-direction on the outside. The Bible Class, too, has advantages over
every other form of organization. It has the Bible at its heart, the one
thing necessary to assure permanence, and never allows the thought of
graduation. Other boy organizations meet the need of certain specified
years; the Bible Class meets all the needs of all the years, and is
flexible enough to include all the special needs that are met by other
forms of organization.
The greatest need of the Sunday school is capable teaching. By it the
Bible Class becomes efficient or the reverse. For the boy the teacher
should be a man, a Christian man, who has personality enough to
command the boy's respect, and ability enough to direct the boy in
doing things. This means a comrade-relationship of work and play,
Bible study and athletics, spiritual and social activity, Sunday and
week-day interest, and a disposition on the part of the leader to get the
boy to do everything--government, planning, presiding, achieving--for
himself. This is true teaching and leadership. The greatest thing in the
Sunday school is the teacher. For now abideth the Lesson, the Class,
and the Teacher, but the greatest of these is the Teacher.
In view, then, of all that has gone before, what shall be said of the
Sunday school and the boy? Each to each is the complement; the two
together form a winning combination. On the one hand, the modern
Sunday school should meet the boy's need at every stage of his
development in a physical, social, mental, and spiritual way. It should
give him variety and progression in the processes of his maturing, and
suitable organization and trained leadership for character-building and
man-making. On the other hand, the