Over the last few days, MDH has posted an excellent series thinking carefully and critically about the Church’s new second-hour schedule. (His posts: RS/EQ, Sunday School, and passing period.) I broadly agree with what he’s written and don’t need to reiterate it here
But a combination of the impending change, his excellent posts, and the amazing Sunday School class I attended yesterday got me thinking. While I broadly think that 25 minutes every week is inferior, pedagogically, to 50 minutes every other week, the schedule change could allow the Church to make a bigger change that is, frankly, long overdue
Job in Sunday School
My ward’s Sunday School lesson was excellent. The teacher came in prepared with one big question and a handful of sub-questions if we needed them. The 50 minutes (or so) allowed for a natural ebb and flow, but by and large, the class was filled with ward members (and a visitor!) talking sincerely about what we took from Job, how the poem’s message(s) reflected in our lives, and how we could be integral people
The teacher, very much to her credit, didn’t try to cram everything she had prepared into the time. She acknowledged that 50 minutes wasn’t nearly long enough to do justice to a dense 42-chapter book. So plenty got short shrift: we spent maybe one sentence mentioning Job’s friends. We only spent a little time on the frame narrative, and a not-small part of that was acknowledging that the frame narrative is, in many ways, inconsistent with the poem itself. There was maybe a glancing mention of God’s monologue at the end.
And that’s fine! If you only have an hour to talk about the whole book of Job, you have to pick and choose. If you only have 25 minutes, you have to pick and choose harder and cut even more ruthlessly.1
The new schedule doesn’t require shallowness! It allows for depth, narrowly focused.2 But there’s another option:
At least since I’ve been an adult, the Church has had a four-year Sunday School cycle. Year 1: Hebrew Bible. Year 2: New Testament. Year 3: Book of Mormon. Year 4: D&C (plus Pearl of Great Price and some Church history)
But there’s no reason we need to be on that schedule! It forces us to skip a significant portion of the Hebrew Bible, and, frankly, once we get past the Torah, even the parts we don’t skip often involve dozens of chapters. We get, perhaps, a form of scriptural literacy without the power
The New Testament is shorter, but we generally take roughly the first six months on the Gospels, and cram the rest into the last six months
Frankly, a one-year lesson cycle doesn’t do a lot of justice to the Book of Mormon
What if, instead of doing a mediocre-at-best job of engaging every book of scripture once every four years, we took four years to really dig into the Old Testament? Spent a year on the Gospels (and, maybe Acts) and the next year on the rest of the New Testament? Took two or three years to really dig into the Book of Mormon?3
The Church hasn’t made this move, in spite of it being a sensible thing to do. I suspect that a lot of it is the inertia of decades of the current four-years-rinse-and-repeat and another part is the symmetry of one year per book of scripture. But there’s no reason we need to give in to inertia or symmetry. And the change in second-hour schedule is an ideal excuse to get out of that!
Responding to Some Objections
There are a couple relatively obvious objections, but I don’t think they’re insurmountable.4
First is that a few years ago, the seminary schedule was shifted to match up with the Sunday School schedule
I actually think that was a bad move: because the school year (at least in the U.S.) and the academic year are shifted, it means that freshmen come in in the middle of a book of scripture. And they end high school on a cliffhanger
But more importantly, for decades, seminary taught a different book of scripture than Sunday School. It’s fine! Kids are capable of reading and studying more than one thing at a time. The four-year schedule is grossly artificial for Sunday School, but it makes sense for high schoolers, where they have four years of instruction before they move on to their next thing
Second, we might go 7 or more years without studying the Book of Mormon (or the New Testament or whatever your preferred book of scripture is)
That’s true. Kind of. But it doesn’t have to be
Because look, we already go three years without studying the Book of Mormon. Like I said above, a four-year rotation, while it feels natural because we’ve done it for our whole adult lives, feels natural, but it’s not. It’s an artificial timeframe, which makes sense, but isn’t the Platonic Sunday School ideal
But also: we have Elders Quorum and Relief Society. In those classes, we talk about General Conference talks.5 If Church leaders are worried we’re getting too far from the Book of Mormon (or the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament or the Doctrine and Covenants), they can talk more about that book of scripture in their General Conference talks! As more talks focus on scripture, the chances that a RS/EQ lesson will (indirectly) focus on scripture increases! The last 25 minutes of our church meetings can, very seriously, be used to ensure that we don’t forget books of scripture between their Sunday School years.
Conclusion
We won’t move now, of course. The Come Follow Me manual is already written and implemented
And, unfortunately, we probably won’t make that move next year. The Church has already released Come Follow Mefor 2027 (though it could use the next few months to rethink it if it wanted!)
But even if the change is slow, I think a change like this is critical to maintain members’ scriptural literacy. I think that the change in schedule is the perfect justification for rethinking Sunday School coverage. And I think this kind of change would be incredibly beneficial for members, including me and you
- Critically, meeting every week wouldn’t mean that we could spend the same amount of time on Job. The reading for last week was Esther. This week was Job. So following the Come Follow Me manual would have halved the time available for Job. ↩︎
- It will likely lead to a shallow broad overview in at least some wards, though, because frankly, it takes guts as a teacher to say, “I’m not even going to bother with a good portion of the reading.” ↩︎
- You notice I keep skipping the Doctrine and Covenants? I really like it, and I suspect that many of you reading this—nerds, all of us!—do too. But without a narrative, storyline, or poetry, it’s harder to engage. But the chronological version of it is also less critical, so maybe we throw it in to the last month of the New Testament, then the last half of Year 3 of the Book of Mormon, etc.? It’s not absolutely critical that we remember section 87 when we study section 89, after all! ↩︎
- There may be other relatively obvious objections that just didn’t occur to me, and I confess that I’m not going to respond to objections I didn’t think of in this blog post. But I doubt any objection can’t be overcome with careful planning. ↩︎
- I’m not going to rant about what I think about using talks as the basis for lessons, except to say that I think very very poorly of it. ↩︎
