Diane Siedenburg struggled against her four-year-old Clinton as she tried to wrangle him into the classroom, but the shy little boy was determined. He would not go in the door.
The whole routine lasted either six weeks or six months, she said, “Something horrible.”
While Diane struggled for weeks to cajole him, finally the main teacher who was so patient, won him over and, coaxed Clinton into the room. The next few weeks brought a new fight: sitting in the chair.
What began as a mother’s desire for her son to make some friends was aided by a few other reasons she had for turning up at Boulevard Park Presbyterian Church on that first Sunday morning.
Harvey and Diane Siedenburg had been living in the Seattle suburbs for two years but had left all their family and friends back home on the farms in Holyoke, Colorado.
Having left their community behind, their terribly shy son needed social interaction and Diane realized, in kindergarten next year, Clinton would need to know how to relate to the kids.
“Well,” she thought, “There's a church down the road that has nice architecture, and I don't have any reservations or prejudices against that particular denomination.”
This Presbyterian Church was not one those churches she held grudges against back in Holyoke and besides, the Presbyterian Church back home had a very cute minister.
Her faint memories of her own Sunday School years were fond ones. Those memories. the realization that she hadn’t gone to church on Easter, and the fact that Clinton had only ever heard the Lord's name as a curse, tipped her over the edge.
“For all those reasons, as silly or shallow as they were,” Diane said, “I decided, ‘Well, we could do this, and we could go to church.’”
Once Clinton was safely in Sunday School and her little 1-year old David was tucked away in the nursery, Diane needed somewhere to sit and ended up in her own Sunday School class. Here she learned “Basic Christianity” out of her little paperback book by John R. W. Stott.
From the 1940s to today, church attendance and involvement in the U.S. have changed dramatically.
According to Gallup, during this period, church attendance peaked in the 1950s and 1960s with roughly 49% percent of American adults attending church weekly. This leveled out at about 40% from the 1960s to 2000. In 2021 attendance reached a low point of 29% and has since risen to 32%.
Despite her prejudices against other churches back in Holyoke, when she was in high school Diane said, “Y ou were in a significant minority if you didn't go to church somewhere.”
How deep these churchgoers’ relationships with the Lord were, Diane didn’t know.
As U.S. church or other religious affiliation membership peaked in 1947 at 76% and in 2023 only 45% were affiliated members with a church, the time in which Harvey and Diane got involved with church was more culturally common.
Growing up, Diane had attended a Methodist church with her parents, but in her teen years her mother had become highly involved in Christian science.
“Because of my mother's Christian Science, I had been raised in some semblance of faith and prior in the Methodist Church, in a believing situation, I was read Bible stories too. I went to Sunday School, and Christian scientists read the Bible religiously all the time,” Diane said.
In fact, she remembers as a child hearing that a friend’s uncle was an atheist and asked, “What is that?” and upon learning thought, that is stupid, how could you not believe in God?
Her happy memories of childhood Sunday School left her with the message “God is love,” but before attending Sunday School again as an adult, Diane said, “It didn't occur to me that I there was anything else to know about the Lord.”
Her Sunday School class, taught by Pastor Bob Wheatley taught her about the authority of the Word, and she liked what she heard.
As a Vacation Bible School helper in the summer, Diane remembers praying with leader who offered an alter call to come to Christ, but said she still wasn’t sure what was going on.
The church, planted in an area with a high number of Boeing engineers like Harvey had many skeptics and agnostics in the area, who Wheatley had organized a conference to minister to.
At the conference Diane heard a woman talking about “a personal relationship with Christ.”
Though it meant breaking her Monday morning cleaning routine, Diane said, “I called up Pastor Wheatley the next day, and I said, ‘could you tell me what it means to have a personal relationship with Christ?’”
To her surprise, Pastor Wheatley responded, “I would love to… (But) you just talk to God, and you work this out with him.”
Out of a culture of social church goers, Diane said, ‘a personal relationship’ was a phrase that was emerging across the church nationwide. In her view, people were just simply going to church and were learning about the sanctification that needed to happen.
Michael Severe, professor and program director of Christian ministries at Taylor University, said that since the 1950s and 1960s there has been a pretty steady decline in church attendance which was first seen in mainline denominations and is now more broadly occurring within evangelical circles as well.
Additionally, what qualifies as “regular church attendance” has switched from once or twice a week, to once a month.
“I think one way to describe this is (that church has) moved from this centerpiece for many people's lives, to a peripheral place in their life and comes as a secondary or tertiary or a nice accommodation to their life,” Severe said. “(It’s) “like softball or some other activities in the family.”
A product of this is that there is a drastic change in the view of what truth is and a general lack of knowledge of the faith among people who profess Christianity.
“Christian Smith would actually say in his national study of youth and religion that, ‘The typical American calls themselves a Christian but cannot describe any core Christian belief and does not practice any core Christian practice,’” Severe said of the Notre Dame sociologist.
This would have been dramatically different 75 years ago, Severe said.
Beginning in 1780s England, with its roots in the education efforts of Robert Raikes for factory children, Severe said a core tenant of Sunday School has always been the “school” component.
Sunday Schools have been used as social justice tool, an evangelistic tool and today as a tool for instructional information.
“We're following an actual schooling model for children to induct them into the faith, Bible stories and doctrines,” Severe said.
Today a variety of Sunday School approaches are used whether they be evangelistic, or are adult Bible studies, which create structure for people in a Sunday School sort of environment, to talk through passages of scripture.
The new “Sunday School” may be in or out of the church building, on or off Sunday Morning, operate like an inductive Bible study rather than a class and come by an assortment of names.
Because each church’s approach to Sunday School is so varied, Severe said “The role of a Sunday school teacher then would have to be determined by the goals of the program that they're within.”
In children’s classes they will likely learn through Bible stories, but they’re also going to see their teacher model Christ for them.
“I think having a caring Christian adult who knows you is incredibly important, and maybe more important than the content for many children,” Severe said.
Though, this doesn’t mean Christian care and discipleship should be isolated to the classroom and not the home, Severe said.
For adults, often Sunday School is a place for the delivery of information, as opposed to forming the whole person for Christlikeness.
“If we want to do something that is transformative and also following the biblical model, we need to be thinking about cognitive and behavioral and effective sort of domains of the person, and these are all clearly described in Scripture,” he said.
Because it still follows this schooling model, Severe said it matters to have good classroom engagement.
If someone sits down, receives a lecture, and goes home, there's not much direct engagement with the truth, Severe said. It’s mediated by whoever is leading.
“Just like you have a good college class or elementary kid class, if you're going to be using interactive, active learning, the teacher’s facilitating more hands on, the student gets to interact directly with the material and then go try it out. There's debrief and experimentation. If all of that kind of learning happens, then you're going to have a much richer, transformative experience.
Severe thinks that when the church doubles down on information and does not give people the opportunity to obey it or practice it, some people just abandon the information.
“Yeah, we're not preaching the gospel,” Severe said. “We're teaching it.”
Part of what can make Sunday School classes effective are the social aspects.
A big driver on Diane’s walk with the Lord was the friendship and admiration she had for the older people at church who reached out to her and brought her under their wing.
At this point, turning 23 and with two little kids, she said “I wanted to be like one of those gals when I grew up.”
“On a very broad level, every relationship is a spiritual relationship, that is a discipleship opportunity,” Severe said. “I think when we fully see who God is placed around us and where he's working, we're going to begin to see every relationship as an opportunity to either edify or demolish someone.”
Every relationship becomes an opportunity to disciple someone, but that’s not just through information dumping.
“We miss the opportunity to be in spiritual friendship and build one another up towards maturity,” Severe said.
By 1968, Diane was a Bible Study Fellowship (BSF) leader and remembers doing her leaders study on Monday for BSF on Tuesday.
“I was pleading with the Lord to give me some sort of encouragement about my husband's agnosticism and I came to this verse in the front end of Philippians.”
With her Bible in front of her, Diane read, “God's going to complete the work in you that He started.”
Diane turned the page. “That's just for Christians,” she thought. However, she turned the page back.
“I looked at that again, and I thought, ‘I am going to claim this as a verse to pray for my husband.’”
At that point, Harvey had begun attending church just for something to do. Growing up outside of town, Harvey had little experience with church and had never attended Sunday School as a child.
Not being raised in a strongly churched environment and with anti-Christian family members, Harvey said he didn’t have strong beliefs.
“I always thought (church) would be the thing to do, but I never got around to it,” Harvey said.
Diane remembers Harvey being eager for a history class he would take at Colorado State University because he hoped then he would learn whether Jesus was real. The presentation that he received claimed that Jesus was a good man, but He was not God.
The claim didn’t leave Harvey with warm feelings.
During those beginning years in town and at church as an agnostic, Harvey was in a depression.
“I didn't have a very good opinion of myself. I kind of looked at myself as a failure and kind of a mixed up,” he said.
Harvey said, “it was really very bleak time in my life.”
Depressed and discouraged, the more he thought (which he reflects was a dangerous thing to do), he knew he needed help.
Harvey ended up going for a few sessions to talk with the pastor and get help. “It didn’t really do much for me,” Harvey said.
The Wheatley essentially told Harvey he didn’t have anything better to do, so he might as well become a Christian.
With Harvey’s agreement, Wheatley led him is a prayer and confession of faith.
“He led me into a confession that I needed the Lord, and so after I got done with that, I couldn't tell whether I (received Him),” Harvey said. “There wasn't a big swell of thankfulness or anything else like it.”
As time moved on, Harvey began to grow steadily in his faith, and his problems began to seem less demanding.
“It was kind of a gradual thing,” he said, but he believes it was a real confession.
To Diane, she could see Harvey begin applying what he was learning at church in attitudinal ways at work and home.
Sunday school is one of the ways we now practice the ancient church practices of catechesis.
“Catechesis means to teach and train people in the way that they should go,” Severe said.
The catechetical model served to induct believers into the life and doctrine of the Church.
One element of this was the material, which was mainly formed from three parts, the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments and the Apostles’ creed.
“Often, you were trained in those things over months or years before you were allowed to even say you're a Christian or join the church,” Severe said.
This was especially relevant in times of persecution like in the Roman Empire in the first centuries, because the church did not want people celebrating their conversion, getting instantly persecuted, and then leaving the church.
“They would make them wait until they actually knew and had grown into the faith, Severe said, and so there was sort of this exploratory phase (that was) governed by a mentor.”
This mentor would have walked with them, explained the truth, kept them accountable, helped them align their lives with the beliefs of the church.
“I think some of what we've lost of the Sunday school that could be reclaimed and very beneficial is this person the role of the teacher in the life of the student, helping them be inductive in the life of the church.”
Severe said, Sunday School needs to be more than a warm body who is willing to teach the material.
One of the early Sunday school critiques from the 1880s to 1900s was that Sunday School allowed too much teaching from the untrained and was practically an invention of the devil.
“You could pull out a newspaper clipping from the New York Times that actually has accusations from Christian leaders about how Sunday School allows ill trained and ill-informed people to experiment on the souls of other people,” Severe said.
An aspect of a small group should be that there is training of the people and an equipping people for their role.
This doesn’t mean seminary training for everyone, but it does mean a Sunday School teacher’s role is to do more than fill a spot.
“I think there's this huge panic across the U.S. every August, September, whenever they're trying to fill every slot. And then there's this collective sigh of relief across every church in America when we're like, oh, we've got all our Sunday school teachers, and then we just let it run for nine months,” Severe said.
There is an opportunity instead to use this programming to grow people better.
“Ministry is not about programs. It's about life-on-life relationship,” Severe said. “The overflow of our relationship with God and other people's lives”
As a new believer, Diane remembers “dear, old, Mrs. Crosby,” the Sunday School superintendent taking the class through a little vignette.
“She had a ribbon that had construction paper shapes of some sort hooked on to it and those ribbons had one of the memory verses that she took us through every opening, and I remember, ‘Be ye kind one to one to another, tender hearted, forgiving one another. Chant, chant, chant,” Diane said.
That one stuck with her.
“I remember one morning when I woke up in the apartment very convicted about an old sin that I had been in denial about,” Diane said.
The verse was in her head, and she pulled it out, recited and prayed.
“It was another step of actually opening up before God, being made aware, being convicted by God on this particular issue that I had never acknowledged before,” she said.
No longer a “drop-out cult person,” Diane said her time in that first Sunday School class opened up scripture to her.
“God brought me back in, and I am crying now to think how God retrieved us from our disinterest or our unwittingness, our ignorance along with the sin, and look what he's given us.”
Today, my grandparents, Harvey and Diane Siedenburg, have 4 children, 17 grandchildren and 10 grandchildren, all who are professing believers or being raised in the church. All four of their sons met their wives at Boulevard Park Church where two sets of their sons and daughters-in- law still attend. Harvey and Diane feel incredibly blessed with how the Lord brought them to himself and has sustained their family in their walk with Him. “God drew me in, despite the fact that I didn't get that I needed Him for more,” Diane said.
