c. 1999 Religion News Service

MOBILE, Ala. _ When she was a little girl, Betty Spence loved to go to Sunday school. There, she heard the stories of Jesus. She was amazed by the miracles the Bible said he performed and awed by the words of the prophets.

Some 60 years later, even after she’s heard the stories a million times, she still gets excited, she said. But that’s not enough.

She wants everyone else to be filled with just as much wonder as she is.

So she has gone to work _ not only teaching adult Sunday school classes at Forest Hill Church of God, but writing lessons for the Pentecostal Holiness and Church of God denominations.”To me, the Bible is like a great piece of art or literature,”she said.”What has made them classics is that they never reveal all their beauty at one time. Each time you go back, you’re going to see something you didn’t see before. This is especially true of Scripture. “I try to make the Bible applicable to daily life so it is exciting,”she said.”The excitement and the surprises are always there. I do feel a great responsibility as a teacher and a writer (to) make this … new.” She’s not the only one.

Grown-up students and their teachers say religious education today is all about making old things new, as well as recognizing the old solutions to what society may view as new problems. Altogether, they make for lessons that aren’t exactly the stuff of your old Sunday school.

Whether students participate in in-depth Bible studies that may require years of work, weekly classes that fuse current issues and religious teaching, or monthlong surveys of a particular topic, an abundance of opportunities exists for amateur religious scholars.

Rabbi Donald Kunstadt of Spring Hill Avenue Temple here defines it as a case of supply and demand. “We’re finding more and more that people are interested in adult education,”Kunstadt said. At the moment, he says, two temple classes are examining books from the Hebrew Bible, while another meets monthly to discuss books about Judaism or the Jewish community.”More and more of our adult members are really looking to find a sense of Jewish literacy,”he said.”I don’t recall, 10 years ago, seeing so much interest.” For some, Kunstadt added, the interest is in historical information. But more wonder about their faith:”How does it make a difference in my life?” Such is the question that brings 77-year-old Neil McDade to Sunday school nearly every week. For years, McDade said he participated in adult Sunday school classes that were simply Bible studies. But during the last decade, he started attending Spring Hill Presbyterian Church’s current issues class, an hourlong session where he and fellow believers examine the spiritual fibers threading through daily life.

Wherever the topic runs and whoever the day’s guest speaker might be, McDade said,”the common strand is clearly that we expect to find a relationship between all of these people and religion.”This is a time in my life when I’m interested in coupling religion with life,”he said.

The interest is one crossing denominational and religious lines.

Ross McLaren, an adult biblical studies specialist, writes adult curriculum for the Southern Baptist Convention. And while the group produces two lines of curriculum that are Bible studies, McLaren said the most popular series is”Adult Life and Work,”which is topical in its approach.

To develop each week’s lessons, McLaren said he and others”attempt to look at today’s society and ask ourselves, `What kind of issues are today’s adults facing?'” Answering the questions sometimes leads the group into controversy.

In January, for example, lessons addressed pornography, abortion, homosexuality, injustice and poverty. And while the topics attracted some media attention, especially the lesson regarding homosexuality which argued gays and lesbians may be”changed”and become straight, such are the topics many churchgoers want to address.”Those are the tough issues that people want the answers to,”said the Rev. Dennis Hayford of Cottage Hill Baptist Church.”I think in the past we have been kind of hesitant to address those. We’ve felt, I guess, that there would be so many differing opinions. (But) people want to know what the Bible says about those things.” Still, students don’t confront hot-button topics every week.

This spring, McLaren said Southern Baptists will learn lessons about”turning negatives into positives.”More specifically, he said, they’ll learn about transforming”depression to hope,””failure to purpose,””loneliness to loving presence.” For these students, it’s about bringing faith to life.

At All Saints Episcopal Church, for example, one class _”Christian Living Today”_ deals with”issues of their own faith and trying to make that more applicable.””Finding a Christian way in a secular world is something everybody’s grappling with,”said the Rev. David A. Powers of All Saints. And while doing so seems to be of increasing importance to many, the matter in which individuals find that way is subject to some debate.”We try to meet a spectrum of spiritual needs in classes,”Powers said. Through them all, he said, the congregation hopes to foster a lifelong spiritual commitment, and not one that ends with confirmation.”You don’t graduate ’til you die,”he said.”And we hope it’s magna cum laude.”

DEA END CAMPBELL