I gasped. “George Nye has been Sunday school superintendent for forty-seven years?”
“Yep. He’s an institution here at First Church,” I was told.
Stability, I thought. It will be great to have at least one position where I won’t have to beg someone to take charge.
For a young seminarian at his first church, what an awesome discovery: George already had been supervising the Sunday school for twenty years when I was born. He had witnessed the coming and going of eight pastors. When he started, the streets in town weren’t paved, the farmers in the countryside didn’t have electricity, and half the homes still had outhouses. And he assured me everything in the Sunday school was under control.
I casually asked George one day when the next Sunday school teachers’ meeting would be.
“Why?” he growled.
“Oh, I just want to get to know everyone,” I stammered.
“I gave you a list of the workers,” he reminded me. “We don’t have meetings unless I feel there is a need. We’ll probably have one in December to plan the Christmas program.”
I didn’t press the matter. After all, what did I know about Sunday school, except for some seminary classes and three years of teaching third- and fourth-graders? No plans for the Christmas program until December? The thought kept nagging me.
The first week in December, I asked George about the Christmas program.
“I decided not to have a program,” he announced. “It’s the same thing year after year. Mrs. Nye and I bought the children candy canes instead.”
A quick informal survey of the teachers, who had not had a meeting, revealed disappointment. They counted on the program as a way to meet some of the nonchurch children’s parents. At the last moment, we designated a Sunday for each class to hold its own Christmas party. But not many parents came out at 9:30 A.M.
The new class
A year later, I noticed that most of our couples under forty never attended Sunday school. We were providing two classes for adults. Larry Wilson taught a class in Romans; he’d been in Romans for about six years. The other class was taught by Mrs. Nye, George’s wife. (And it was strictly, “Mrs. Nye.” No one, not even George, called her anything else.) She led a ladies’ class entitled, “It’s a Woman’s World.” I had no idea what she taught. Every Sunday after opening exercises, Mrs. Nye and a dozen women her age marched off to the church library and closed both doors.
So after talking with the younger couples for months, I decided to introduce a new class. To not compete with the existing classes, we would begin with a topical study-“How to Be the Parent God Wants You to Be”-and we would meet across the street in the American Legion hall.
I mailed the flyers on Wednesday. Saturday, a furious George Nye called on me. There were to be no new classes without his prior approval. Besides, we did not need another adult class.
“There aren’t ten people in Larry’s class, and Mrs. Nye’s is about the same,” he said. “If those people want Sunday school so bad, they can come to one of the existing classes.”
I should have talked to George first. But being somewhat intimidated, I had chosen to by-pass him. “The elder board told me to go ahead. They were under the impression that adult classes came under their jurisdiction,” I countered.
“They’re wrong,” George boomed. “If it’s Sunday school, I’m in charge. Unless they want me to resign.”
“Oh, no,” I reassured him, “that’s not it at all.”
I spent two hours explaining the class and how it could make the Sunday school attendance grow. The last line started to melt George. “Wouldn’t it be something,” I pressed, “when you go up to the Sunday school attendance board and put some numbers in the two hundreds?”
“That’ll be the day!” he shrugged. “Go ahead, Pastor, and give it a try. But there’s no way you’re going to get them here. I’ve been trying for years.”
On the first Sunday, we had twenty-three new adults in our class. By the fourth Sunday, there were thirty-four. That week George posted the attendance: 202. “The first time since October of 1953,” George announced.
The addition of the class proceeded smoothly except for an occasional comment at the door by one of the women who attended Mrs. Nye’s class, phrases like “A legion hall is no place for a Sunday school class!” and “We’ve been trying to get Mrs. Riggers to come to our class, but you stole her away!”
Curriculum and code complaints
Somewhere in the middle of my second year at the church, the Sunday school teachers started coming to me and complaining about curriculum, supplies, and a general lack of unity.
“Look at this book.” Nancy showed me a yellowing teacher’s handbook. “Read the date.”
“June-August 1955!”
“Yeah, George says there’s no reason to spend the Lord’s money on new curriculum. You ought to see these lessons. This week is on ‘Why Christian Families Do Not Own Television Sets.’ The opening line is, ‘You can always tell where the Devil lives by the aluminum horns sticking up through the roof.’ And look at next week: ‘Don’t Be a Beatnik!’ Kids don’t even know what a hippie is, let alone a beatnik!”
“What do you do with lessons like that?”
“I’ve had to make up my own material for years. I’m just getting tired. It would be great to have material that helped instead of hindered.”
I mentioned the curriculum problem to George. He insisted that teachers had no wisdom in using the Lord’s money. “We need that money for missions. It’s better that some heathen hear the gospel than a dozen more overpriced quarterlies gather dust.”
Norm and Cheryl Tarhee had a more serious problem. They taught the fourth-grade class, which met in an upstairs room.
“The fire marshal said we had to have outside stairs as a safety precaution,” Norm related. “He allowed us to get by with these rope ladders, as long as they are always stored by the windows and the children know how to use them.”
“Well,” I stammered, “rope ladders do seem, er, rather primitive.”
“Oh, the ladders are okay,” Norm continued, “but George Nye insisted on nailing the windows shut because sometimes the kids would lean out the windows and yell at people coming into the parking lot.”
This time I didn’t bother taking the problem to George. Armed with comments from most of the teaching staff, I approached the board of elders with a suggestion: “Why don’t we appoint a new Sunday school superintendent?”
Silence. Then they all spoke at once.
“Yeah, well, good luck, Pastor.” “Tackling George Nye is like burning a flag at a veterans’ meeting.” “You’re right about needing a change,” one commented, “but if you insult George, you’ve turned all the Nyes against you. Not only that, there are the Coughlins, Realtmans, and Nagleys. They are all related, you know.” I hadn’t known.
Practical principles
Finally, one board member suggested, “Maybe if we had better guidelines, some of the struggle could be worked out. Then we can tell George this is the way things must be done.”
So we tabled the notion, and I prayed for a set of guidelines, or a miracle. We ended up, after three more months, with guidelines agreed on by all twelve elders (which was probably the miracle). Here are some of the underlying principles that made them work.
Establish terms of service. We decided that no appointments were to be open-ended. Superintendents would serve for three years, teachers for two, and nursery supervisors for one, before they would be required to take a break.
Set up accountability structures. In our case, we gave every appointed position a job description. We tried to make each description as clear and short as possible: one paragraph describing what the board expected, and one line stating to whom that appointee was responsible. We made each appointed position responsible to one of our church’s seven committees. The committee met with the appointee yearly to review the position. And since each committee was chaired by one of our elders, this maintained accountability.
Select people carefully. We established a personnel committee of three elders and the pastor. When the individual committees recommended candidates for appointments, this personnel committee interviewed the prospects and made a final nomination to the board. We even went so far as to appoint only people whom the entire board could support.
Adequately recognize each appointee. We realized that longevity was about the only quality we honored. That encouraged people to work longer but not necessarily better. We set aside a Sunday to honor workers and give them certificates, presents, and a reception.
Retiring, but not shy
It took some months to implement these new guidelines. And two Sunday school teachers, feeling the yearly reviews were threatening and showed a lack of trust, chose to retire.
That’s when George Nye came to see me again.
“I told you all these new rules would disrupt the Sunday school,” he complained.
“George, I’m sorry to lose two of your teachers,” I said. “But we felt some policies would be needed, not just for now, but for the future. Someday, we won’t have teachers with all the experience of these folks. Why, the day might come when we have a superintendent who doesn’t have almost fifty years of ministry.”
Two months later, right before the first yearly job review was scheduled, George and Mrs. Nye both decided to retire. “Time to turn it over to the young people,” they said publicly. But we knew they felt pushed aside. That’s when we decided to hold a first-class celebration.
Forty-nine years of continual leadership is phenomenal. Can you imagine that for half a century no pastor at First Church was ever phoned early Sunday by a teacher announcing, “I can’t be there this morning. You’ll have to find someone to take my place”?
From all accounts George had put in many good years as superintendent, though he should have retired earlier. Proper recognition was in order.
We rented the Memorial Building and invited the community. We declared it “George and Mrs. Nye Day.” (The printed napkins actually read GEORGE & MRS. NYE.) We invited former pastors, missionary friends, and former members and students. There was cake, punch, and a Sunday school choir. And we presented a plaque declaring that our adult Sunday school room would forever be called Nye Hall.
It was a happy celebration with a clear message: First Church was changing leadership, but we would never forget the faithful service of those in the past.
It took two years for me to decide how to address the problem of George. That was probably the Lord’s mercy. Had I demanded changes earlier, I wouldn’t have had people’s support. And it took about two more years to get the new system working smoothly. But the time, stress, energy, and tears were worth it. Not only did the new guidelines ease the leadership problems I faced, it set up the church to deal with such conflicts in the years to come.
-Stephen A. Bly
Winchester, Idaho
Copyright © 1989 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
