A History of the Mennonite Brethren Church, Ja Toews

years the Mennonite Brethren Church has endeavored to maintain a balanced emphasis on teaching and experience in its church program. This chapter will describe the educational agencies that have been most active on a congregational level to promote spiritual growth and development of all members of the church family. 2 Special consideration will be given to the Sunday school (including the 216 TEACHING THEM TO OBSERVE 217 midweek program), to youth work and, in a limited way, to Christian camping. 1. The Sunday School in the Mennonite Brethren Church The Sunday school is not an "indigenous institution" of the Mennonite Brethren Church. As noted earlier, it was one of the innovations brought into the M. B. Church by August Liebig, the German Baptist minister. As time went on, the Sunday school became an integral part of the total educational and outreach program in Mennonite Brethren churches. The early Sunday schools in Russia differed in several respects from those that later developed in North America. As a rule, they were not a part of the Sunday morning service, but were held in the afternoons. Since the public school provided systematic religious instruction, the emphasis in Sunday school was not so much on the transmission of a factual knowledge of Scripture, as on the appropriation and application of biblical truth. 3 The Sunday school, moreover, was also regarded primarily as an institution for children, not adults. This is one of the reasons, A. H. Unruh observes, why the Mennonite Brethren who immigrated into Canada in the 1920's found it so difficult to participate in adult Sunday school classes which had become an accepted part of the church program in American M. B. churches. 4 There are no records of lesson materials especially adapted for Sunday schools. The Bible or the Bible story book {Biblische Geschichte) served as text for instruction and discussion. In later years a Baptist minister, Witte, from Poland, introduced some new forms of organization and methods of instruction into Mennonite Brethren Sunday schools. In general, however, instruction was carried on according to the traditional pattern, without a division of the children according to age groups. 5 There is also no record of Sunday school conventions designed to improve teaching and to set forth certain specific goals. According to I. W. Redekopp, the "philosophy of the early brethren seems to have been to assign learning to the public schools, and to look upon the Sunday schools as a supplement to evangelize, rather than to train children." 6 Although the Sunday school in the M. B. churches in Russia never attained the status it later received in the United States and Canada, it nevertheless was one of the distinctives of Mennonite Brethren work and worship. It appears also, that the Mennonite Brethren were the pioneers among the Russian Mennonites to incorporate the Sunday school into their philosophy an