SOPHIA LYON FAHS: LIBERAL RELIGIOUS EDUCATOR 1876-1978
by Edith
Fisher Hunter, Author
The
life of Sophia Lyon Fahs was a remarkable journey
from the heart of evangelical Christian orthodoxy
to a leadership role in a revitalized religious
liberalism, a revitalization due in large part
to her role as an innovative religious educator.
Born in China on August 2, 1876, the child
of Presbyterian missionaries, Sophia Lyon
graduated from Wooster College in Wooster,
Ohio, dedicated to a career in the Student
Volunteer Movement for which she had signed
a pledge card reading: "It is my purpose in
life, if God permit, to become a foreign missionary."
The goal of this movement was the "evangelization
of the world in this generation," a period
roughly between 1880 to 1905. The goal was
not realized.
Following graduation and two
years teaching high school Latin, she spent
the next two years as a Student Volunteer visiting
colleges seeking to convince students to sign
the pledge that she herself had signed. Then,
in 1901, Sophia took a part-time job as a YWCA
secretary at the University of Chicago. She
planned to take courses while there, feeling
the need for further education to prepare herself
adequately for the mission field. Her older
sister andher future husband were already enrolled
at the University. Sophia had been warned of
its radical intellectual atmosphere, but she
confidently wrote her sister: "Many skeptics
are sent out from there who were formerly professing
Christians. They, however, had not found, I
believe, the real fundamental Christian life."
Sure of her own faith, but also armed with a
curious and able mind, Sophia began her studies
in Chicago.
Graduation,
1897, Presbyterian University of Wooster
(now the College of Wooster)
President of the University at the time was
William Rainey Harper, champion of the Higher
Criticism of the Bible, a study that takes into
consideration the historic context within which
the books of the Bible were written. This "scientific"
study had a profound effect on the churches
at the beginning of the 20th century, and resulted
in the Modernist movement that would come head
to head with Christian Fundamentalism in 1925
at the Scopes Trial. Also teaching at the University
was John Dewey, one of the father's of the progressive
education movement. Harper and Dewey symbolize
the influences that would lead Sophia Lyon,
over a period of years, to rethink the theology
that underlay "the real fundamental Christian
Life" of which she had been so sure.
In June 1902 she married fellow
Student Volunteer, Charles Harvey Fahs. Because
of his health problems, the young couple could
not go immediately into the mission field, but
moved instead to New York City where Mr. Fahs
accepted a position with the national board
of missions of the Methodist Church. Sophia
continued her studies, now at Columbia University's
Teachers College, another intellectually exciting
place where John Dewey would join the faculty
in 1904.
In addition to the influence
of the Higher Criticism of the Bible and the
humanistic concepts of progressive education
on the thinking of Sophia Fahs was the influence
of her own children. Between 1905 and 1914 five
children were born to Sophia and her husband,
and as she herself later wrote: "The children
who joined our family circle were not merely
the object of my educational efforts, they were
the most potent source of my own education.
In a vital sense, the children were unwittingly
my major teachers." Since her husband's health
continued to be a problem, all thought of going
out as foreign missionaries was abandoned.
Receiving
the degree of Honorary Doctor of Divinity
from Meadville/Lombard Theological School,
Chicago, January 16, 1962. Left to right:
the Rev. Edwin Theophil Buehrer, James
K. Killian, Jr., Sophia Lyon Fahs, Dr.
Malcolm R. Sutherland, President.
Harvey Fahs (the Charles was never used) had
found his niche in writing and working with
world missionary leaders, work that frequently
took him out of the country. Sophia Fahs joined
the Methodist Church so that she and her husband
would be members of the same denomination. They
lived in New York City for the rest of their
married lives.
Along with her studies under
men at the forefront of the progressive education
movement at Teachers College, Sophia had the
opportunity to observe teachers at the Horace
Mann School, the practice school of the College.
She was deeply impressed. But how translate
what she was learning and observing into her
chosen field of religious education? One of
her teachers, Frank McMurry, showed her how
to take the first steps in that direction. Heemphasized
the primacy of experience in the education of
children, and the importance of vivid, accurate
detail in materials written for them. He believed
that Bible stories did not meet these criteria,
but material about the lives and work of present-day
missionaries who were motivated by the Bible
did. Sophia's Master's thesis was entitled"Missionary
Biography as Supplementary to Biblical Material"
and marked her first step away from a Bible-centered
religious education.
Excited by this whole concept,
she wrote her first book, Uganda's White
Man of Work, which was published by the
Missionary Education Movement in 1907. Written
for young people, the book described an industrial
missionary in Uganda and brought in Biblical
material as it played a role in the missionary's
life and work. The book was very successful,
sold more than 50,000 copies, was kept in print
until 1947, and was even reissued in an "independently
Revised Edition" in 1970 by Rod and Staff Publishers
in Kentucky. The author would herself have long
since chosen a very different path in her thinking
and writing for the religious education of children.
In between bearing children,
coping with their frequent illnesses and the
death of two of them, Sophia Fahs was busy in
her field: she took courses in writing, lectured
at religious education conferences, taught Sunday
School classes in the experimental Sunday School
run by Teachers College, taught church school
leaders, and wrote numerous articles. As she
hammered out her increasingly liberal theology
and its implications for religious education,
she found herself drawing less exclusively on
the Judeo-Christian tradition and more on the
natural sciences, on the religion of primitive
people, and on other world religions. She had
discovered that primitive people developed their
religious ideas as they reacted to the natural
world around them. What if today's children
were allowed to express freely their reactions
to the same primary phenomena -- birth and death,
sun and moon and stars, dreams, shadows, wind
and rain? Should not children's inescapable
confrontations with and reflection on these
realities be the beginning of their religious
education rather than Bible stories about people
of long ago and far away?
Preaching
in the First Unitarian Church of Cincinnati,
Ohio, on Sophia Lyon Fahs Day, March
8, 1959.
Not only did she suggest delaying children's
exposure to the Bible until they were ready
for history generally, but she was even suggesting
that children not be introduced to other people's
idea of God until they had an opportunity to
begin to develop their own.
Sophia Fahs was experimenting
with experience-centered religious education
in any church that would have her, either in
a teaching role or as Sunday School Superintendent.
Thwarted by the unreadiness of most ministers
to embrace her ideas, and feeling the need for
a systematic study of theology herself, in 1923
she enrolled as a Bachelor of Divinity student
at nearby Union Theological Seminary where the
Bible was being taught from the Modernist point
of view that she had now so heartily embraced.
The Union School of Religion
had taken over the experimental Sunday School
at Teachers College, and Sophia Fahs was soon
a teacher there.
She also became a Lecturer
in Religious Education on the Seminary faculty.
However, word of her innovative ideas and practices
in the school at Union soon brought her into
direct conflict with the Union Seminary authorities
who, although they were Modernist, were still
basically orthodox. Moreover, by this time the
theological atmosphere at Union Seminary was
beginning to change, and a new orthodoxy was
preparing to move in.
The Union School of Religion
shut its doors in 1930, so that avenue of experimentation
was closed to Sophia Fahs. She continued to
teach adults at the Seminary, but with curtailed
hours. Fortunately, it was at just this time
that Riverside Church was built right across
the street from Union, built specifically to
provide a pulpit for Harry Emerson Fosdick,
the champion of Modernism. Its Sunday School
was to be forward looking and experimental,
and by 1933 Sophia Fahs had been invited to
try out some of her ideas there. The courses
developed at Riverside by Sophia Fahs and her
coworkers would prove to be the core of the
curriculum she would develop for the Unitarian
denomination between 1937 and 1965.
Mrs. Fahs' work had come to
the attention of the Unitarians through several
channels. In 1928 she had written an article,
"How Childish Should a Child's Religion Be?"
for the magazine Religious Education.
It had been read and commented on favorably
by the Rev. Albert C. Dieffenbach, editor of
the Unitarian Christian Register. There
were two major theses in her article:"We cannot
give our children a growing and creative religious
life. A fine religion is a personal achievement."
Secondly, the building blocks of such a religion
are a sense of wonder and a questioning mind.
At
her retirement ceremony, June 22, 1964,
with the Rev. Henry H. Cheetham, Director,
Department of Education, and the Rev.
Dana McLean Greeley, President, UUA
In 1930 Edwin Fairley, a Unitarian minister
who was taking one of her courses at Union,
had asked her to be a leader at a religious
education conference at the Isles of Shoals.
This invitation she accepted and thus began
a relationship that culminated in her acceptance
in 1937 of the position of Editor of Children's
Materials for the American Unitarian Association.
For more than thirty years she had been wrestling
with the question of what to teach in religious
education and how to teach it. By 1937, her
shift from a Bible-centered curriculum to a
child-centered approach that embraced "the latest
scientific findings" in all fields of human
endeavor was complete.
The Unitarian churches had
long been wrestling with many of the problems
that perplexed Sophia Fahs. In 1837, 100 years
before she took up her work with the denomination,
the prophetic Unitarian preacher, William Ellery
Channing, speaking before the Boston Sunday
School Society, urged his listeners to have
faith in the child and to see as the challenge"not
to stamp our minds irresistibly on the young,
but to stir up their own, not to tell them that
God is good, but to help them to see and feel
his love."
In spite of this message, for
the rest of the century, most of the Unitarians
would follow the Sunday School practices of
the mainline Protestant Churches firmly rooted
in the Judeo-Christian Bible, albeit from a
liberal and Modernist point of view.
But there were exceptions.
One prophetic voice was that of the Rev. Allen
Walton Gould, active in the last quarter of
the 19th century, whose book Beginnings
was an early sociology of religion. He wrote:
"All life is religious, all nature is religious,
our own pond lilies are just as religious as
the lilies of the field of which Jesus spoke."
Another prophetic voice belonged to Dr. Edward
A. Horton, a Unitarian minister who hoped the
denomination would lead the way as progressive
educators in the field of religious education.
In 1909 Dr. Horton helped develop a curriculum
known as "The Beacon Series" which emphasized
nature and world religions. And only two years
later work was begun on yet another new curriculum,
"The Beacon Course," which would draw on denominational
materials developed between 1891 and 1926. Years
later the nineteen titles in this course were
described as books that embodied "nature theism,
idealistic naturalism, and liberal interpretation
of Judeo-Christian history within an evolving
universe and a progressive social order." While
studying at Union Seminary in 1926, Sophia Fahs
discovered this curriculum and was favorably
impressed, but thought that it did not go far
enough.
In the early 1930s, the denomination
-- feeling the effects of the depression and
lacking funds to invest in new materials --
did exploratory work through study committees
in Boston and New York. Although not a member
of the New York committee, Sophia Fahs, as an
emerging leader in religious education, met
with the committee at times, and by 1935 the
Beacon Press had brought out three new "Beacon
Units: records of experiences in progressive
church schools." Because of her growing reputation,
Sophia Fahs was able to draw on the innovative
projects of her former students, or of religious
educators attracted to her new ways.
In 1935, Ernest Kuebler was
appointed secretary of the Unitarian Department
of Religious Education, and he was instrumental
in hiring Sophia Fahs in 1937. Almost immediately
titles in yet another curriculum, "The New Beacon
Series," began to appear. Not only was Sophia
Fahs the Editor of these materials, she was
in the majority of cases the author or co-author
as well.
With
12-week-old granddaughter, Brenda Beck
(1940)
Mrs. Fahs' dream of a religious education that
began with children's first -hand experiences
would become a reality with the publication
of the three Martin and Judy books, The
Family Finds Out, The Tuckers, Growing
Bigger, A Brand New Baby, and Animal
Babies.
Experiences with nature were
of crucial importance to encourage children's
natural sense of wonder, and the course How
Miracles Abound met that need. Her dream
-- that as children become aware that people
of all times and places had the same wonderings
about elemental things they should be exposed
to these wonderings -- was realized in the publication
of: From Long Ago and Many Lands, Beginnings
of Earth and Sky, Beginnings of Life
and Death, and Child of the Sun.
As children's ability to grasp history grew,
the New Beacon Series offered such titles as:
Joseph, Moses, Jesus: The Carpenter's Son,
The Drama of Ancient Israel, and Men
of Prophetic Fire. To help the children
of Unitarian families understand something of
the churches their friends might attend, The
Church Across the Street was made available.
Still some parents and even
some of the children pressured the denomination
to provide materials about the Bible. And although
Sophia Fahs wanted to delay Bible study until
children could really grasp that it was actually
a library of books written by fallible human
beings over hundreds of years, she was made
acutely aware that this was not the Bible that
permeated the culture of the past and much of
our culture today. For this reason she made
available, in a book she herself wrote based
on Saint Augustine's understanding of the Bible,
The Old Story of Salvation.
With every book, a teacher
or parent guide was provided with ideas for
artistic and dramatic activities, and with bibliographies
of resource materials. Sophia Fahs always maintained
that it took more research and preparation to
teach children than to teach adults. She co-authored
a book to explain the philosophy behind "the
here and now" stories for the youngest children,
Consider the Children How They Grow.
She also fostered the production of new song
books to accompany the curriculum.
In 1952, Sophia Fahs took the
time from her editorial duties to write the
book that presented the underlying philosophy
of The New Beacon Series, Today's Children
and Yesterday's Heritage, A Philosophy
of Creative Religious Development. In 1965,
Worshipping Together with Questioning Minds
was published, summarizing her experience in
"leading children in worship" (which had been
the title of a booklet published in 1943, an
early offering of the New Beacon Series).
Individual congregations at first greeted
the new curriculum with varying degrees of
enthusiasm. Many old line Unitarian churches
ignored it and used the materials of other
liberal, less radical denominations. But following
World War II, many young parents were seeking
a progressive religious education for their
children and, discovering the new materials,
embraced them wholeheartedly. Membership in
the Unitarian churches, which had been shrinking
for years, began to grow by leaps and bounds
and new congregations and fellowships sprang
up all around the country. Beacon curriculum
books came into use not only for Unitarian
religious education but also by other denominations,
and by some private schools as well as by
parents who were not Unitarian. It was therefore
most appropriate that in February 1959, at
the age of 82, Sophia Fahs accepted the invitation
of one of these new churches, the Montgomery
County Unitarian Church of Bethesda, Maryland,
to be ordained into the Unitarian ministry.
It was a booming church with the largest church
school in the country.
Sophia Fahs used the occasion
to press for more reforms. She was by no means
satisfied with what she had so far accomplished.
In the ordination sermon, which she delivered
herself, she shared her dreams with the congregation.
She had always dreamed of church schools with
at least three hour sessions: time for dance,
for art, for dramatics, and for meaningful spiritual
growth. She dreamed of ministers who had been
educated not only in liberal theology, but also
trained as progressive educators in laboratory
schools sponsored by the seminaries. She dreamed
of seminaries that would graduate men and women
who had been exposed "to the latest findings"
in psychology, and all the natural sciences.
When Sophia Lyon Fahs completed
her remarkable life journey on April 14, 1978,
at the age of 101, these reforms had not taken
place. Neither have they taken place in the
quarter century since her death. A variety of
curriculum materials are continually being developed
for liberal church schools. With the exception
of From Long Ago and Many Lands and
Old Tales for a New Day, I believe I am
correct in saying that all of the other titles
in The New Beacon Series are out of print. That
is to be expected of materials that embrace
the philosophy that "New occasions teach new
duties/ Time makes ancient good uncouth/ They
must upward still and onward/ Who would keep
abreast of truth."
The
life of Sophia Lyon Fahs was a remarkable journey
from the heart of evangelical Christian orthodoxy
to a leadership role in a revitalized religious
liberalism, a revitalization due in large part
to her role as an innovative religious educator.
