Teaching Through Ritual

By Deb Smith

When training to perfect a movement of some type, athletes often practice it repeatedly so they can execute it without conscious effort. This is frequently referred to as developing “muscle memory.” In a similar way, ritual helps us to form “faith memory.” Those things that we do over and over again eventually become part of our very being. Although we may not be conscious of these ritual acts, they affect our thoughts and actions.

For many years I taught the 1^st through 3^rd grade Sunday school class in my congregation. When I began teaching, there had been a “ritual” in the class that the first thing a student did when arriving was to place a sticker on an attendance chart. I wanted to develop a ritual that would be meaningful and affirming to a visitor, a child who could only attend occasionally, as well as those who attended every week.

So, I did away with the attendance chart and created a Seasons of the Church Year Calendar with an old cookie tray, colored construction paper, and a set of 52 magnets. A few weeks before the beginning of Advent I would create the calendar dates out of the construction paper; purple for Advent, white for Christmas, green for the Season After Epiphany, purple for Lent, white for Easter, red for Pentecost, and green for the Season After the Pentecost.

Each Sunday as the first children arrived, I invited them to find the day’s date. Together they would search through the pile of colored tags with the dates of all of the Sundays yet to come, until they found the correct one. Then using one of the magnets, they would attach it to the cookie tray next to the previous Sunday’s date. We started at the top of the tray and by the end of the year had come all around the tray and back to the top. As the calendar dates were added we talked about the color and the name of the seasons. We frequently reviewed the names of the seasons we had already experienced.

Next, we lit the candle on the worship center. The children loved lighting the candle and developed among themselves a rotation that ensured equal opportunities to be the candle lighter. Guests were usually given the privilege of lighting the candle. As the candle was lit, I would say, “The lighted candle reminds us that Jesus is always with us.”

At the end of the Sunday school hour, we always gathered around the worship center with the lighted candle, had a few moments of silent prayer, and then a short spoken prayer. The final act of the session was to blow out the candle, another responsibility that rotated among the class members.

We did a wide variety of different learning activities in the Sunday School class – games, crafts, service projects, and so forth, but every Sunday we located ourselves in the Christian year, invoked Christ’s presence, and prayed together. These ritual actions, I believe, were helping to create “faith memory” that will sustain the children throughout their lives.

Consider these questions about your own teaching / learning experience:

• What are the rituals that are unique to your class or congregation? What is the underlying message these rituals teach?

• What rituals were a part of your youth and childhood? In what ways have they continued to affect your life?

• What new ritual would you want to create for your class or small group?

Deb Smith is Director, Best Practices at the General Board of Discipleship in Nashville, TN..

You can establish rituals to create and deepen “faith memory.”