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

Religion: practices for bringing life into accord with The Ultimate, individually and on a communal basis.

Religious Education, then: the process of developing the full capacity of individuals and communities for living in accord 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. And "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 underdeveloped, or wholly unschooled, yet very well developed.

In Unitarian Universalist congregations we have a program dedicated to the religious education of children-the core of the Religious Education (RE) program is classes on Sunday morning-traditionally known as Sunday School. To this we add various ancillary programs and activities.

Over the years I have observed the whole RE scene with a growing sense of unease. It's not that anything bad has been happening. I know of only good things happening in RE 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 my home congregation in Vancouver, WA we have five grade levels with two sessions each Sunday, with 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-experience the stress of a chronic "volunteer shortage" It is virtually impossible to have enough volunteers in RE. We end up prevailing upon people to do more than they really want to do or are ready to do.

The second pinch point is that the outcomes of the RE program are, in terms of the actual effects it has on the lives of our children and families, lackluster.

What do I mean by that? What I mean is that 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.

They say nice things about the program. "We're doing good things, covering good topics, I'm so glad it's not like those fundamentalist churches," and so forth. But I don't often hear that it is actually touching the lives of children and families all that deeply. Perhaps there are congregations where it is otherwise, but I think the situation I describe is not unusual.

Let me be very clear: The naming of these pinch points is not a 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 the RE system, this is what I see: Excellent people working very hard and producing not excellent, but lackluster, outcomes. It makes me think, "There has got to be a better way!"

When I first broached these observations in private conversation with some RE people in my congregation, I expected that they might feel defensive and think their efforts were being denigrated. And, frankly, I was prepared to drop the subject. But time and again I instead found them saying, "Well now that you mention it." So I have been obliged to pursue the matter further.

What, then, are some of the limiting factors in the current way of doing RE?

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. There is 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 who want, from time-to-time to do other things on Sunday morning (like attend church) the classes are usually staffed with teams of teachers and assistants who rotate from week to week. 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 teaching UU Sunday School when they have never experienced it. Many teachers have been UUs for only a short time and may be rather unclear about the history and traditions and philosophies of Unitarian Universalism. This is not a criticism of these wonderful volunteers. But I know it is a source of anxiety for them. And, while this situation may be inevitable for a movement of converts 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 1,200 classroom hours and is still just a beginner. 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 full-time classroom hours!)

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

We have striven 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 weekly teachers who will stay with it for five, ten, or fifteen years.

Over time this situation has caused me pain and frustration. It seemed intractable, so I kept my mouth shut. Then, while I was on sabbatical last year, an insight came to me, which, if correct, transcends all these considerations: 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 learning about all the different religions and their Bibles.

It's about drawing our children into experiences, which help them align their inner lives 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 in the process. Sunday School is incredibly labor intensive and is not well-suited for our purposes. Kids already spend plenty of time in classroom settings. They don't need more on Sunday.

So, what then?

First of all, I say look to the aspects of our program that do seem to touch lives deeply and emphasize those. For instance, retreats. People go to a deeper level on retreat. The sustained time together, the novel environment, and the more natural, lifelike situations (compared to a classroom setting) all plow the soil of the soul 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. What about age group-specific 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 experience retreat activity very differently from week-in-week-out commitments. And again, if families can be together, it makes a big difference. Then there is social action.

I know that parents very much want this for their children-to cultivate the expectation of working to make the world a better place and to gain confidence in doing that. They want to do it together as a family, 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 otherwise be eager to "work in RE." When we have done social action with children and families it has been great, but the enormity of putting on Sunday School has kept us from doing nearly as much of this as we would like.

A third thing that does touch lives deeply is the UU sexuality education program, Our Whole Lives (OWL). Many adults who went through the now out dated sexuality program, About Your Sexuality, cite this experience as the most powerful aspect of their childhood religious education. Our Whole Lives, greatly expanded and improved, only stands to improve on that record. And fourth, I propose emphasizing a much neglected 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 rituals and practices that they do at home. That is good, but they don't get much support in that from their UU religious community. There is a tremendous power for children when they engage in practices at home that they know are done by others in the community. It gives them a much deeper sense of identifying with the community, and it gives the practices a greater sense of being real (not just something their weird parents made up).

I'm thinking of things like bedtime rituals, mealtime rituals, and holiday rituals, for starters. This touches experience deeply, but requires no additional volunteer work on the part of the parents. It's just support and encouragement for meaningful ways of being together as a family.

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 that 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 ever 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 and instead, have 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 would be spent in making music, in dynamic meditation and prayer practices, and in engaging rituals. It would also include a lesson, during which stories of character and spirituality 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 preschoolers would have trouble focusing for a whole worship service. They would need to have a separate group and "graduate" up to Chapel when ready.

The junior high group is transitioning toward the youth group experience and adulthood. They would have a separate program, perhaps attending Chapel from time-to-time in a 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 each Sunday for the elementary age group, there would be just one, which is presented twice. 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.

A key feature of Chapel is having a standard liturgy. This makes management far easier, but more importantly, the liturgy allows us to ensure that we revisit key elements of the overall educational curriculum. They are written right into the liturgy. Children are empowered by the familiarity-they know what to expect.

Chapel requires 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.

Chapel requires an aesthetically coherent and beautiful children's worship space. At our congregation, we are in the process of creating such a space.

I had planned to take a year of study before even proposing to change anything; but there was such enthusiasm that I launched the idea last December and, to my great surprise, we are making the change this September.

A fantastic group of creative leaders has arisen to make th transition to the new program. We are going to take building up the retreat, social action, and home practice aspects of the program slowly. In the first year we will concentrate on getting Chapel on good footing. We don't want to overextend ourselves, right?

Each Sunday morning we are looking at the children being in the sanctuary with the adults for the first fifteen minutes, as is already our norm. Then the elementary children go to Chapel for forty minutes. After Chapel, they will break into smaller Friendship Groups for twenty minutes of community and, perhaps, some very low-key follow-up to the lesson. This is seventy-five minutes altogether. I have some materials available describing the Chapel liturgy and the whole flow of the children's Sunday morning experience.

It is all unproven at this point, and I'm sure there is much to be learned, but I believe this approach plays to the strengths of our community. We can have a deeper impact on the lives of our children and families with volunteer efforts more in line with the capacities and needs of our people.

So in a nutshell: Stop doing Sunday School; have a mixed age Children's Chapel instead. With the energy freed up, emphasize retreats, social action, sexuality education, and at-home family practices. An exciting adventure in religious education awaits. If we use the right tools, being religious with our children in community need not be such hard work.