Matthew O. Richardson:Teaching should be instructive and edifying
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Two essential elements in teaching, as revealed by the Lord to the Prophet Joseph Smith, form the foundation of the Sunday School in the Church, said Matthew O. Richardson in his Church History Symposium presentation: "Teaching One Another: Administering the Sunday School" Feb. 26.
Brother Richardson is a professor of Church history and doctrine at BYU and second counselor in the Sunday School general presidency.
He referred to Doctrine and Covenants 42, characterized by the Lord as "the law of the Church," citing verse 14, which gives the directive, "If ye receive not the Spirit ye shall not teach."
In the subsequent section, Brother Richardson noted, the Lord built upon that law with further instruction, given in verse 8:
"When ye are assembled together ye shall instruct and edify each other, that ye may know the how to act and direct my church, how to act upon the points of my law and commandments which I have given."
"From the very beginning, we see the importance of teaching," Brother Richardson noted. "We see this is not a suggested experience, but a commandment, and whenever we gather together, at least two things should happen: One, we should be instructed, and two, we should be edified."
These elements do not necessarily occur at the same time, or one before the other, he said, "but we learn through the restored Church that those two, instruction and edification, must come somewhere together for teaching to take place."
He added that the challenge as it pertains to Sunday School is, therefore, to make it instructional and edifying. "We know the importance, we feel the importance, of the teaching endeavor, but how we go about it is a constant challenge," he said.
In the remainder of his presentation, he traced the history of Sunday School's development in the Church as a response to that challenge. He identified five periods: Conception, when Sunday School in the Church began as an emulation of the traditional model in Protestant congregations in Great Britain; unification, in which individual, independent Sunday Schools in wards of the Church were brought together under one administrative umbrella; coordination, with the establishment of standard curricula and procedure; growth, which is still a challenge; and pedagogy, or the process and principles of teaching.
