“Not lessons, but meetings of friends”: teachers from two dioceses discussed how to keep teenagers in Sunday schoolstranslated

At the Monastery of the Holy Royal Passion-Bearers in Ganina Yama, a seminar was held by the Synodal Department of Religious Education and Catechesis of the Russian Orthodox Church for directors of Sunday schools, teachers of rural and urban parishes of the Chelyabinsk and Yekaterinburg dioceses, as well as students and graduates of the Center for the Training of Church Specialists of the Chelyabinsk Diocese. The topic of the meeting was the outflow of teenagers from Sunday schools: according to experts, children stop attending classes en masse by the age of 11–12. The reason is said to be a crisis in the classical “knowledge” model, in which classes are modeled after school lessons. To solve the problem, the participants were presented with a unified educational and methodological complex (EUMC) “God and Man: Moving Toward,” created with the blessing of His Holiness Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Rus'. The concept of the complex emphasizes live communication and builds parish support according to four age stages: 5–7 years: games, quests and parental involvement to form personal spiritual experience.

8–10 years old: interactive formats and educational experiments. 11–13 years old: team analysis of the Gospel, the basics of the Church Slavonic language and film pedagogy. 14–17 years old:…