Silver Spring, Maryland …. [Wendi Rogers/ANN]
A precise schedule on how to conduct Sabbath School came all the way down from the Seventh-day Adventist Church world headquarters and was distributed by local Adventist regional offices to the local church.
It said: “At 9:15 a.m., welcome everyone; at 9:17 a.m., conduct opening prayer …” The list continued and told the Sabbath School leader what to do, and the time to do it.
This actually hasn’t been done for quite some time, but Jim Zackrison, director of the Adventist Church’s Sabbath School and Personal Ministries department for the world church, can remember when it did.
But now, he says, “We don’t care about any of that. You can do Sabbath School any way you want within the parameters of those four purposes.
Get creative, get innovative, make it work.”
The four areas Zackrison refers to are fellowship, outreach, Bible study and mission.
“When you get up and simply say, ‘Here’s what Sabbath School is all about,’ and mention those four points, it’s amazing what happens,” he explains. “People say, ‘Wow, why haven’t we thought of that before?’
Because they never heard it before.
“We have built an entire philosophical basis for Sabbath School on those four elements. Everything we do in terms of strategy somehow or another gets into that pattern. That’s our vision statement.”
Zackrison says there seems to be a new awakening, or awareness, of the value of Sabbath School.
Worldwide Sabbath School attendance is actually higher than church attendance. “In some places, Sabbath School starts at 9 [and] people know they have to come by 8 to get a seat. We realize this is not the case everywhere, but it is an encouraging sign that we are moving in the right direction.
“We have a whole new approach on Sabbath School. It’s not built around the old model of somebody getting up on Sabbath morning and reading something,” Zackrison adds. “All research that has been done on Sabbath School around the world has showed us that the main complaint people have is that it’s so routine and boring. They don’t want to go. So we have built entirely new ways of doing Sabbath School.”
He explains that in the 1970s there was a reduced emphasis on Sabbath School in some parts of the world. “During the late [19]50s and [19]60s they used the topic ‘The church at study,’ which lended itself, I don’t think by intention, to building the idea that the teacher gets up there as the professor and tells you. And it took out the outreach aspects of Sabbath School, which we have built back in.”
“With Sabbath School materials, and programming and teaching, we’re trying to encourage more re-emphasis on affective parts of learning,”
explains Gary Swanson, editor of the Collegiate Quarterly, who works closely with Zackrison. “[It’s] heart knowledge versus head knowledge.
People have come together for Sabbath School class and basically get together and exchange information and leave … We don’t ask ourselves, ‘So what?’ So [the] affective [part], in addition to intellectual aspects of learning, is one of the things we’re trying to emphasize.”
Zackrison says the key word is “participation.” The Sabbath School “hour,” or whatever amount of time the local church uses for Sabbath School, can feature an expanded discussion of issues on the lesson, he says. A video can be used, or a small group discussion can be held, or a focus can be a mission story or mission experience.
“We’re traditionally a top-down people,” Swanson says. “Any time you move a Sabbath School teacher from being in a position of a purveyor of information, and you create an atmosphere where everybody is contributing, which is what we mean by interactive learning, not all of the information is coming from the teacher. It’s coming from a collective group, and the collective group knows more than the teacher.”
“It takes creativity and initiative on the part of Sabbath School leadership of the local church,” Zackrison says. “It goes beyond just saying, ‘Well, you have a prayer and you do this and that.’ Where it’s being used, Sabbath School just takes off.”
He adds, “Everything we do, the philosophy behind it, can be verified straight out of ‘Counsels on Sabbath School Work’ by Ellen White. She knew what she was doing 150 years ago that still works.” White was one of the church’s founders.
“People believe things but it doesn’t mean it changes them,” Swanson adds. “We’re in a society now that we all believe that smoking kills, yet how many of our population still smokes? So [it’s about] believing something and acting on it, making a change of heart; making knowledge personal. Adding heart knowledge to head knowledge. Sabbath School is information and transformation–head and the heart.”
For adults, the Sabbath School and Personal Ministries Department has built “Cool Tools for your 21st century Sabbath School.”
If you looked at an adult Bible study guide from five years ago and compared it to one now, it’s “much more interactive than it was and much more user-friendly and more logically put together,” Zackrison says. “It’s easier to use and easier to study. It’s hard to say what the specific differences are except there’s a whole new philosophy out there floating around trying to find a place to land.”
A problem, Zackrison says, is that the message is not getting down to the local church level.
The department is working on building a “significant internet presence.” They also hold training seminars all over the world, and have an international association of Sabbath School teachers, which, Zackrison explains, is the key method of getting training out to teachers. On the Adventist Television Network (ATN), the department hosts a program called “Sabbath School University,” which is “geared toward people who want to have a way of presenting interactive Sabbath School.”
There’s also a new Sabbath School handbook published in several languages that “has all kinds of creative stuff in it of how to do Sabbath School,” Zackrison says.
“Sabbath School Leadership,” a magazine published by the church-owned Review and Herald Publishing Association, has given ideas to local churches, Zackrison says.
For the younger ones, he adds, Sabbath School is “going really well.
This is the first time in the history of the church that we have had a coordinated curriculum that goes all the way from birth through junior and teen.” The materials, called “GraceLink,” go through the Bible and are “built around the fundamental concepts of what kids need to learn as they go along.”
Zackrison says that some areas of the world are beginning to hold Sabbath School congresses. “In many places around the world [getting] a lot of people together for inspiration and instruction works better than just holding even small groups, because they’re hierarchy oriented, and when they see this is a world program, they really grab the thing and make it work. We have told them to put it in your cultural framework and figure out how to make it work. And these guys are good. They know what they’re doing.”
He adds, “Our approach to this is very pragmatic: if it works, do it.”
Copyright © 2004 by Adventist News Network.
