It’s Better to Build Boys Than Mend Men

In his book, It’s Better to Build Boys Than Mend Men, the late S. Truett Cathychallenged readers to allow God to work through them to change the life of a child. Truett Cathy did this in large part by teaching 13-year-old boys in Sunday School at the First Baptist Church in Jonesboro, Georgia for over 50 years. Of course, the only way to truly change any life is with the Word of God, and Sunday School gives me the opportunity to reach 6th-grade boys with God’s Word every week.

On any given Sunday morning, it is not uncommon to get a very serious question about a current dark topic in our world, like school shootings and terrorist attacks. While Kris and I prepare to teach a lesson from The Gospel Project curriculum, as well as answer questions about the lesson, it’s the out-of-the-blue questions about the heavy topics that weigh on our hearts about the world today’s boys are growing up in and confronted with daily.

Recently, one of the activities associated with the lesson about the prophet Habakkuk was to invite the boys to write a question on a sticky note that they would like to ask God, just like the prophet Habakkuk asked God questions. There were 35 questions from 26 boys placed on the classroom whiteboard in less than three minutes. Among the questions for God were:

“How do we fix bad things when we don’t know how?”
“Why is there always evil in this world?”
“When will my family get back on track?”
“What makes people do bad things?”
“Do bad people go to heaven?”

These are serious questions whose answers can only be found in the Bible, and our time with these boys in Sunday School allows us to intentionally teach the Word of God and minister to the boys by helping them find the answers to their questions in the Bible. More times than not we go back to Genesis, review the foundational biblical teaching that God created everything, and that man has a unique relationship to God among all creation because “God created man in His own image.”

Many of these boys won’t hear this worldview and these biblical truths taught anywhere except Sunday School, which is why the commitment of First Baptist Dallas to Sunday School is critical to fulfilling our mission of “transforming our world with God’s Word…one life (one child) at a time.”