Education: the development of a person's full capacities.

Religion: practices for bringing life into proper alignment with The Ultimate, on an individual basis and on a communal basis.

Religious Education: the process of developing the full capacity of individuals and communities for living in proper alignment with The Ultimate.

I remember the day I first came to see "education" as something distinct from "schooling." In contemporary usage "well educated" means to have gone to school for many years. "Uneducated" means to have attended little or no school. What an awakening it was to distinguish the essence of education (the development of capacities) from a widely practiced educational technique (schooling). One can be highly schooled yet grossly underdeveloped, or wholly unschooled, yet very well developed.

In Unitarian Universalist congregations we have a program dedicated to the religious education of children - Religious Education or RE. The core of the RE program is the Sunday morning classes - traditionally known as Sunday School. To this we add various ancillary programs and activities. Over the years I have observed the whole RE scene and a growing sense of unease has come upon me. It's not that anything bad has been happening. My unease derives mainly from two what I call pinch points - two realities that chronically pinch us in congregation life.

The first pinch point is that running the RE program is an awful lot of work. It requires an enormous amount of volunteer staffing and management. In our congregation we have five grade levels with two sessions each Sunday - teachers, assistants, and room parents for each class.

Plus, we try to do other things to round out the program and the net result is that we -- like most UU congregations -- are forever experiencing the chronic stress of a "volunteer shortage." It is virtually impossible to have enough. And the second pinch point is that that the outcomes of the RE program -- in terms of the actual effects it has on the lives of our children and families - are lackluster.

I do not hear parents saying, "The RE program is making a really important difference in my child's life and drawing our family together in a powerful way." I don't hear that and I don't see it in people's faces. I hear people speak highly of the RE program. "We're doing good things, covering good topics," and so forth. But I don't often hear that it is actually touching the lives of children and families all that deeply.

We must be very clear: The naming of these pinch points is no criticism of the wonderful people who have been working in RE over the years. I praise and celebrate them and the good that has come of their efforts. But when I look at a system, and I see excellent people working very hard and producing not excellent but lackluster outcomes, I think, "There is something wrong with the system!"

This perhaps sounds like a harsh thing to say, and when I first broached the matter in private conversation with some RE people, I expected that they might feel defensive and think their efforts were being denigrated. But time and again I found them saying, "Well now that you mention it..."

What are some of the kinks in the existing system?

First, I think most of the curricula available to us are mediocre. We are a small religious movement, and many of our curricula have been produced by heroic volunteer efforts at one or another of our congregations. Some good stuff there, but the lessons require a lot of work and creativity on the part of each teacher to make them shine.

Second, because our teachers are human beings with lives -- who like to do other things from time to time, like attend church -- the classes are staffed with teams of teachers and assistants who rotate from week to week. Most RE programs work that way. It's a necessary and humane accommodation for teachers, but the inconsistency in the classroom is nevertheless a major obstacle to excellence in terms of the children's experience.

Third, unlike in some other traditions, few of our teachers were themselves raised in this faith. In other words, they are responsible for leading UU Sunday School when they themselves have never experienced it. Many teachers have been UUs for only a short time and may be rather unclear about the history, traditions, and philosophies of Unitarian Universalism. This is not a criticism of teachers. But I know it is a source of anxiety for them. And while this situation may be inevitable for a movement of converts such as we are, we've got to face facts: Under these conditions it will be difficult for volunteer teachers to achieve excellence.

(Consider: By the end of their first year, a public school teacher has had about 1200 classroom hours and is still just getting the hang of it. At one hour every other week for 32 weeks, it would take one of our RE teachers 75 years to log one year's worth of classroom hours!)

Just about anyone can teach in some sense, but not just anyone can teach a group of children in a classroom setting about material they are a little vague on themselves, certainly not excellently.

We have been striving to make marginal improvements to these limiting factors -- massaging the curricula, training teachers, optimizing rotations, etc. -- but it has become clear to me that such efforts are just playing around on the edges. We're not going to get dramatically better curricula any time soon. We're not going to get a large number of every-week teachers who will stay with it for five, ten, or fifteen years.

Through the years this situation has caused me pain and frustration. It has seemed intractable. But all these factors are trumped by an insight that came to me to upon return from sabbatical last spring: Even if we did magically get great curricula and consistent, experienced teachers, Sunday School is simply the wrong tool for the job.

Sunday School was invented for Bible study. But that's not what we think religious education is. It's not a matter of learning about the Bible. Nor is it a matter of learning about all the different religions and their Bibles. It's about drawing our children into experiences that help them get aligned deeply and truly with ultimate reality. And it's about drawing families together in a world with many forces driving them apart.

Using Sunday School for this purpose is like trying to drive a nail with a screwdriver -- no amount of effort will ever produce the desired result, and you are likely to skin your knuckles. Sunday School is incredibly labor intensive and not well-suited for our purposes. And kids already spend plenty of time in classroom settings. They don't need more on Sunday. So, what then?

First of all look to the aspects of our programs that do seem to touch lives deeply, and think about expanding those. First there are retreats. People go to a deeper level on retreat. The sustained time together, the novel environment, the more natural, life-like situation (compared to a classroom setting) all fertilize the soil on retreats. People become open to new modes of experience. Insights come. Relationships deepen.

I'm thinking of the Coming of Age retreats, the high school youth conference retreats, and adult retreats. In recent years we have been drifting toward having more retreats. We could be more intentional about that. Maybe age group retreats for the children. Maybe an all-congregation retreat. Maybe a retreat especially for families.

Putting on and attending retreats does take time and energy, but people generally experience retreat activity very differently from week-in week-out commitments. And again, if families can be together, it makes a lot of difference. The second major piece of the RE program would be social action.

I know that parents very much want this for their children -- to cultivate the expectation and habit of helping to make the world a better place. To develop confidence in doing that. For families to do it together, at least some of the time.

This is such a natural for us. There are numerous adult activists in our congregation who would love to help children and families make a contribution, people who may not be eager to "work in RE."

When we have done social action with children and families it has met with general acclaim, but the preoccupation with putting on Sunday School keeps us from getting around to it nearly as often as we would like.

The third major piece of religious education would be the strong new UUA sexuality education program. It's called Our Whole Lives (OWL) because of its premise that sexuality begins long before puberty and continues to develop our whole lives. So this program has segments for every age level. The now out-dated sexuality curriculum, About Your Sexuality, deeply touched the lives of a generation of UUs in this area of profound human need. Many adults who were raised UU cite this sexuality education the most powerful aspect of their RE experience. Our Whole Lives only stands to improve on that record.

Fourth, I propose developing an obviously powerful but often missing element of religious education: at-home family practices. Think about any religion that touches children's and families' lives deeply. They do it at home. They may learn it at church, but they do it at home. Many families do have their rituals and practices at home. That is good, but they don't get much support in that from their religious community. They don't have common practices that the children can see are also done by others in the community, and which are an expression of community life.

I'm thinking of things like bed-time rituals, meal-time rituals, and holiday rituals, for starters. This is not additional "work" to be done by families, just support and encouragement for meaningful ways of being together. This concept could be expanded to include a family night, weekly or monthly, with suggested activities for religious and spiritual exploration.

This could further expand to involve family clusters - groups of three or four families who gather in one of their homes for a shared family night type of experience. Monthly? Quarterly? At certain holidays? There are many ways to approach it. And needless to say, there is no thought of requiring families to participate.

Perhaps this all sounds great, but so far it's just more work when I've said we're already working too hard. What are we going to do less of, and what about Sunday morning?

Here is the radical idea that makes all the rest plausible: Stop having Sunday School, in favor of a mixed-age children's worship service -- what we might call Children's Chapel. Worship is primarily about inviting religious experience, and only secondarily a matter of learning about other people's religious experience.

Much of the time in Chapel is spent in making music, in dynamic meditation and prayer practices, and in ritual. Children's Chapel includes a lesson, during which stories of character and spiritual awakening are told. UU history and world religions are taught. And so forth. By including a wider range of ages than our classrooms do now, Chapel promotes a children's community less confined to the narrow age span of the classroom.

I view this as a plus, but there are important developmental issues. Probably the pre-schoolers would have trouble focusing for a whole worship service. So they will still have a separate group and "graduate" up to attending Chapel when ready. The junior high group is transitioning toward the youth group experience and adulthood. So they will have a separate program, perhaps attending Children's Chapel from time to time with some special leadership role.

Children's Chapel requires fewer adult volunteers on Sunday, yet provides an experience that goes to the heart of the matter. And instead of preparing six or eight lessons for each Sunday, we will only need to prepare one. True, that one presentation will need to be of higher quality than a typical classroom lesson, because it is a larger group and a broader age range. But it can be done.

We need a small number of dedicated Chapel leaders who become very good at guiding the children through the liturgy, galvanizing their attention, and evoking a sense of the sacred.

We need to convert the RE main hall into an aesthetically coherent worship space. And of course it will take some time to develop the non-chapel aspects of the program - social action, retreats, home practice etc. It won't happen in one fell swoop. But this approach plays to the strengths of our community. I believe that we can have a much deeper impact on the lives of our children and families. And our volunteer efforts will be much more attuned to the capacities and needs of our people. So here it is in a nutshell: Stop doing Sunday School -- have Children's Chapel instead. Emphasize and expand retreats, social action, and sexuality education. Promote at-home family practices.

An exciting adventure in religious education awaits us. Being religious with our children in community need not be such hard work.