Religion: School on Sunday

Teacher: Do you have some idea of what God is like? Is there anything in church life or the Bible that will tell you a little bit of what God is like?

Girl: When I was little, I thought He was something white, floating around.

Teacher: He didn't see.m like a person? Girl: No. A white robe and blue hair—floating around.

This classroom dialogue is reported in a new manual for teachers, part of an ambitious experiment in Sunday-school education that is being launched this week by the Protestant Episcopal Church. Instead of aiming to give children some Biblical and theological background for the faith they will later join, the program undertakes to make functioning Christians of them here and now—from six-year-old Davy Crocketts on up.

Not for the Sensitive. The new courses, known as the Seabury Series,* are available to all parishes at a price of approximately $2 a child, with books, pamphlets and teachers' manuals for grades 1, 4 and 7. About 2,000 parishes have already sent in pre-publication orders. Planning for the series got under way nine years ago when the Episcopal Church decided that the Sunday-school curriculum in too many parishes was little better than a pious device for providing some peace and quiet around the house on Sunday morning. After the problem was turned over to the church's Department of Christian Education, its current director, the Rev. David R. Hunter, launched a program of meticulous pretesting. Hundreds of weekend "Parish-Life Conferences" were held to prepare laymen for the new program, and mobile teams in trucks and station wagons toured the country to review study materials with pastors.

The result is a plan that has the children taped and measured in the latest sociopsychological terms, from "group hostility" to "rejection." It anticipates virtually any question that a child can ask about religion, tries to give the answers with charts, diagrams and sample dialogues. The series calls for a cadre of Sunday-school teachers who are a far cry from the usual warmhearted spinsters and parish wheel horses. The new teachers should be well trained in Christian doctrine and church history, teach full 50-minute periods, be accompanied by a "classroom observer" who is to be "an additional set of eyes and ears ... so that the teacher may know his pupils . . ." Other conditions for effective use of the series: regular family worship on Sunday and a weekly class for parents and godparents.