Chapter XLI
Around the Council Fire
Our conventions are the grand council fires in the war the Sunday-school is waging against the forces of evil. The flame of the Holy Spirit should blaze in their midst. With military directness they should go straight to the immediate needs, find out what they are, plan the campaign. Orderly and in turn, all should have a part in them, not only the speakers, but the audience, one school and every school. With hearts uplifted, with zeal on fire, every teacher should leave the gathering bent on more valiant service.
Only a well-planned convention can effect this,—a convention long thought over and prayed over, not merely by one man, but by many. These meetings not seldom remind one of a house of which the owner takes possession prematurely. Over yonder the scaffolding is still up, here they are just removing it, the sound of the hammer and the saw is everywhere, and the smell of wet plaster is in the air. Thus in many conventions. Here and there the president bustles around, over the platform, through the audience. The local committee of arrangements are like bees before swarming. We begin late and with apologies; so we continue.
The model convention, however, began at least as far back as the preceding convention. At that gathering suggestions for the next meeting were called for and obtained. During the following weeks the president visited or corresponded with every school in the district, trying to discover its excellences and lacks, that the convention might exhibit the one and supply the other. Indeed, at the very opening of the preceding convention the new officers, if any, were elected, that during the sessions they might have ears open and brains and tongues active, gathering hints for the profitable meeting they were to plan. Therefore it was early known precisely what the coming convention was to teach, and that convention, instead of bumping along Haphazard Lane, rolls smoothly over Purpose Avenue.
Two methods will promote this preparedness of the audience, without which the best-prepared programme largely fails: there should be a convention press committee, whose pleasant task it is to pack the papers with appetizing details of the coming meetings; and every school should be supplied, at least two weeks beforehand, with a large number of the printed programmes. If these are attractively got up, if the topics meet genuine needs and are expressed brightly, suggestively, and not as Dr. Dryasdust would formulate them, and if the various superintendents and pastors advertise the convention wisely, the audience that will come together will be ready for its work.
So large a part of most Sunday-school convention audiences comes from the immediate locality that especial effort should be made to interest beforehand the church and the town in which the meetings are held; and this not merely for the sake of the convention, but for the quickening of Sunday-school interests throughout the community. But if only a few persons are gathered, do not make the mistake of losing them in a large room, with scores of empty pews into which their zeal can creep away and hide itself. The same coals that grow black in all outdoors will make a little stove red-hot.
No small part of the preparation that is to make a success of your convention is the careful and enterprising selection of speakers. The best policy is to choose none from "policy." Select the men that can inspire and instruct, though you must crowd out some pastor of a big church or some man with a big name. From the teachers themselves call out suggestions as to speakers as well as to topics. Search through your district for original workers, inventors, plummet men, women that win the hearts of the children, and get them to tell the convention how they do it. By all means call in the successful Christian teacher in the secular schools. If possible, import a skilled worker from outside your district. Fresh air will come in with him, the sense of a wider outlook. Only, he must not be an opinionated egotist, one of those ex-cathedra men, but a warm-hearted brother in the Lord; and it is far better to use him in several short speeches scattered over the programme than in one long address.
The wise choice of topics is quite as important as a wise choice of men to treat them. Let all programme-makers remember what the convention is to do: not to show off leaders, or to raise money, or to get acquainted, or to have a good time, but to learn more about teaching and managing Sunday-schools. Three aims must be set before every Sunday-school convention: to arouse new love for the Bible, to arouse new love for souls, to arouse new zeal for bringing these two together. Every convention, then, should divide its time among three classes of topics: the Bible, the children, the teaching.
1. The Bible. Such themes as these are suggested: "How the Bible differs from all other books." "Recent Bible discoveries." "My way of studying the Bible." "Bible-marking." "How to study Exodus." "The use of a 'teacher's Bible.'" "Interleaved Bibles,—why and how." "The value of the Victoria revision." "The study of the Bible as literature." "What is the best commentary?" "Reading the Bible in course,—how to make it most profitable." "The Septuagint and its importance." "How the Bible came down to the printing-press." "The story of our English Bible."