A headline slid past me this week with none of the usual fireworks in it: How My Church Revived Our Sunday School. No celebrity, no controversy, no numbers to make you blink. Just a congregation somewhere deciding that the unglamorous work of teaching people the Bible was worth doing again, and doing well.
I couldn't let it go. Partly because the whole world is loud right now and that headline was quiet. But mostly because I have watched, in church leadership and in business both, what actually builds something that lasts. It is almost never the big launch. It is the ordinary thing done faithfully, in the same room, with the same people, week after week, long past the point where it feels interesting.
A wooden platform and a long morning
There is a scene in the Old Testament that reads like the first Sunday School. The exiles had come home. The walls were up. And the people asked for the Book.
"Ezra opened the book. All the people could see him because he was standing above them; and as he opened it, the people all stood up... They read from the Book of the Law of God, making it clear and giving the meaning so that the people understood what was being read." (Nehemiah 8:5, 8)
Read that last line slowly. Making it clear and giving the meaning so that the people understood. That is the whole job description. Not performing. Not impressing. Not even inspiring, exactly. Making it clear, so that the person in front of you actually understands what God has said.
And notice who was doing it. Verse 7 lists a string of Levites by name — thirteen of them — men nobody has ever written a song about, moving through the crowd, stopping where someone looked lost, explaining it again. Thirteen names preserved in Scripture for the crime of helping ordinary people understand the Bible. That is the dignity God assigns to the work.
The compounding kind of faithfulness
Nobody claps for the Sunday School teacher. Nobody livestreams the woman who sets up eleven folding chairs and a plate of cookies for a Wednesday small group, or the dad who reads four verses at the kitchen table while somebody spills milk. There is no applause line in any of it.
But this is how faith actually travels. Not mainly through platforms — through people who keep showing up to make it clear. If you can name the person who first explained the gospel to you in words you could hold, you already know this. Say their name out loud sometime today. I'd guess they never thought of themselves as doing anything important.
And here is the part that keeps me hopeful: teaching is not only transfer of information, and it never has been. Jesus promised that the Holy Spirit "will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you" (John 14:26). Which means that in a church basement in West Michigan, with a flannelgraph or a whiteboard or a phone propped against a water bottle, there are two teachers in the room. One of them is visible. The other one is the reason a nine-year-old suddenly goes quiet and says, "Wait — He did that for me?"
I see that still happen. The Spirit is not finished opening people's understanding. He does it in services, and He does it just as happily in a side room with six kids and a bag of pretzels.
If you're the one who feels like it isn't working
Some of you have taught for a long stretch and watched the room shrink. Some of you have poured years into a child who is now grown and walking somewhere you didn't choose for them. I am not going to hand you a guarantee I have no right to give. What I can tell you is what Nehemiah 8 shows: the Levites' job was to make it clear. The understanding — the opening of the heart — came from God, and it came in His timing, to a generation that had been away a long, long while.
You are responsible for the clarity. He is responsible for the harvest. That is not a small comfort; it is the only comfort that holds.
So on Tuesday at 11, when a handful of us gather here to pray, bring names with you. Bring the children's workers and the small group leaders and the grandparents doing this by text message. And bring the ones still trying to understand.
Jesus Himself did most of His teaching on hillsides and in borrowed rooms, to people who often missed the point the first three times. He never seemed to be in a hurry about it. He is not in a hurry with you either — and the One who opened the Scriptures to two discouraged travelers on a road to Emmaus is still in the business of making things clear.
Join us this Sunday at 10:30am — Outpouring Worship Center, Ravenna.