Book Review: Sacred Challenge: Blazing a New Path for the Sunday School of the Future

Sacred Challenge: Blazing a New Path for the Sunday School of the Future
by Mike Ratliff
Discipleship Resources, 2006

By virtue of baptism, every Christian has the sacred challenge to develop his or her own life of faith to become a mature follower and disciple for the transformation of the world. Fortunately, this is not a solitary endeavor; we have the whole weight of the church and its community for support.

The Sunday school has a special role to play in the development of disciples, although the form and content of our Sunday schools may need to shift and grow to meet the challenges of the cultural and societal realities of the twenty-first century. Mike Ratliff offers us a tool to help meet that challenge.

Sacred Challenge uses an engaging story form to present the transformational opportunities in a model of Appreciative Inquiry (AI) as applied to the Sunday school. AI, simply stated, uses a "4-D" cycle from Discovery (appreciating the best of what is) to Dream (envisioning the results of what the world is calling for) to Design (co-constructing the ideal) to Destiny (sustaining through empowerment, learning, and change). The friends we meet in the pages of Sacred Challenge could be any of us — people who have their own gifts and strengths to bring and who are committed to sharing and cooperating to put those gifts to best use for all.

The book unfolds as we see these new friends come together from their community to address their shared challenge of vitalizing the Sunday school as one avenue of faith formation and disciple-making. They agree to host a series of workshops for mutual visioning, learning, and planning, which they lead in turns from their own strengths. Through the chapters, each character highlights the steps in planning and presenting the subject. They cover what we would expect: purpose, teaching, care giving, evaluation, generational theory, and ways of learning, but do so in a way that we also see the pattern, process, and occasional pitfalls in reaching for success in those areas.

Ratliff begins his Sacred Challenge with a brief summary of the challenges that face the church, specifically the church school, today. He celebrates the glory of what was and anticipates the glory of what can be by emphasizing the benefits of collective planning and building on shared strengths. We can easily see ourselves in these pages and situations, and so we should be able to make the leap of putting these words, images, ideas, and processes in action.

Sacred Challenge is readable and real. Interspersed through the story are selected questions for reflection and planning. If we take those questions seriously and wrestle with the answers, we will be on our way to accepting and succeeding in our own sacred challenges.

Reviewed by Diana L. Hynson (dhynson@gbod.org), Director of Learning and Teaching Ministries at the General Board of Discipleship in Nashville, Tennessee.

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