The Relationship of the Priest-Father to Church Education
The Relationship of the Priest-Father to Church Education
Two Extremes:
What are these two extremes, whether the right-wing or the left-wing one?
The Left-Wing Extreme:
Some priest-fathers who did not grow up in an atmosphere of serving church education take a negative موقف toward Sunday Schools:
Either there is no relationship at all—no connection; they do not make them feel that they are with them; they do not ask them about their service, its needs, or its condition…
Or clashes arise between these fathers and the servants of church education. Sometimes the reasons may include performing liturgical services such as an engagement, a wedding, or a funeral at the same time as the church education service, which disrupts it, without paying attention to that, and the matter is repeated… There may also be friction because Sunday School servants, or some of them, practice the sacrament of confession with priest-fathers in churches other than the church in which they serve… or for any other reason.
The Right-Wing Extreme:
As for the right-wing extreme, which may lead to the same friction and perhaps to much more serious consequences, it often arises from priest-fathers who, before their ordination, were servants in church education. Out of their zeal for this service, each of them appoints himself as the general secretary of this service in the church.
The result, of course, is the removal of the existing secretary of the service, and perhaps the removal of the secretaries of the auxiliary branches of the service, and the appointment of other persons in their place, with a fundamental change in the entire system of the service, without understanding or conviction. Sunday Schools are then run by a series of orders, which creates friction that may lead to the withdrawal of many teachers and the appointment of others… etc.
So what is the middle solution, and how should the relationship between the priest and the servants be?
The priest is a father, so let him preserve his position as a father, and not turn in his relationships into merely an authority in which the feelings of fatherhood disappear.
As a father, he has the right to supervise, to guide, and to offer advice, and at the same time to persuade, to give an opportunity for discussion and the study of matters, and to choose the best opinion. He also has the right to correct what is crooked, but in love and in the meekness of wisdom.
It is also his duty to encourage the service.
There is no objection to his participating in some of its activities: delivering a topic in a meeting of the servants or the servant girls, or delivering a topic in a meeting of young men or young women, visiting the club, the library, and the audio-visual aids center, studying the needs, and helping as much as he can…
And he, as a father, if he performs this fatherhood well, will become such that the servants, or most of them, will be his children; he guides them spiritually, and they listen to him…
In all this, he gives his servant-children the opportunity to work, freedom of movement, and the acquisition of experience, so that the personality of each one of them may grow, without feeling pressure from the priest-father who directs him, against his will, on a certain path, whether he is convinced by it or not convinced…
Here we move to the second topic in the relationship of the priest to the service.
Is it permissible for the priest-father to be the general secretary of the service?
Theoretically, it is permissible if there is a certain deviation in the service, whether in doctrine, or in the spiritual or ecclesiastical line, such that it would be dangerous for the situation to remain as it is, or if there is a division that cannot be resolved except by the priest himself taking charge of this service.
But generally, the work of the priest is the entire people, not the schools of church education alone. If he devotes himself to them, he falls short of the right of the people.
A servant of the schools of church education, if he is ordained as a priest, should know that his position has changed, and his responsibility has changed… and that he has become responsible for the people: in visiting them house by house, in solving their problems, in caring for families and personal status matters, and in caring for the poor and everything related to social service. Added to this are preaching and the diverse activities of the church, those that exist and those that must be established…
If the priest carries out all these responsibilities with complete faithfulness, will he find time to devote himself to what the general secretaryship of Sunday Schools requires?
How many complaints come from families saying that years have passed without a priest entering their home! Shall we say to them that he is devoted to Sunday Schools?! What shall we also say about church membership and its organization? And what about visiting the sick in homes and hospitals? And what about consoling people in their joys and their sorrows…?!
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