Note: I
missed her birthday yesterday, but Sophia Lyon Fahs rates an entry, even if it
is a day late. Adapted from the biographical notes for my worship
service/readers’ theater piece 400 Years
of Unitarian and Universalist Poets from John Milton to Sylvia Plath.
Sophia
Lyon Fahs is now revered among Unitarian Universalists as the dynamic innovator who revolutionized
religious education by making it child centered and incorporating modern
educational precepts. She started her
life on another journey entirely.
She was born in China on August 2, 1876 to Presbyterian missionaries David and Mandana Doolittle Lyon. All through childhood she dreamed of nothing
else but becoming a missionary herself and bringing the Christian gospel to the unsaved slaves of false religions. While a student at Wooster College in Wooster,
Ohio, she enthusiastically signed
the pledge of the Student Volunteer
Movement which read, “It is my purpose in Life, if God permit, to become a foreign missionary.”
After graduating from
college and spending two years teaching high school Latin, she enlisted in the Student Volunteer organization, visiting
college campuses and promoting the Pledge.
In 1901 she took a part-time job as a YWCA secretary to pay for her further religious education at the University of Chicago. Warned that William Rainey Harper’s new university was a hot bed of unsound
doctrine and radical intellectualism, Lyon wrote to friends that she felt
secure in her Christian faith against any temptations.
She was wrong. The heady temptations of Biblical Higher Criticism and modernism
would slowly batter her old time religion.
At Chicago she was exposed to giants like Harper and especially John Dewey, father of the progressive
education movement.
Still, there were
things to tie her to tradition. In 1902
Lyon married fellow Student Volunteer Movement activist Charles Harvey Fahs, whose fragile health prevented his being
posted on for overseas service. Instead
the young couple moved to New York City. Her husband took a job with the national Board of Missions of the Methodist Church and Sophia enrolled in
another progressive institution to complete her graduate education, Columbia University Teacher’s College. Two years later John Dewey would follow Fahs
to her new school.
She had to crowd her studies
in-between raising a family. Five
children were born between 1905 and 1914, some of them sickly. The realization that her children possessed
independent minds and were capable of rational exploration of the world around
her did more to revolutionize her thinking about religious education than all
of her college courses. While her
husband frequently traveled for the Methodists, Fahs observed the techniques of
the teachers at Horace Mann School,
the college’s practice school.
She was impressed by the
experimentation she found there and yearned for a way to bring the techniques
she learned there to tradition bound, Bible based Sunday School. Fahs was
convinced small children could get little out Bible study until they were old enough to really grasp the concepts
of history in their early teen years.
Instead she was convinced that children would respond to vivid and
detailed stories about people who mattered.
Recalling her own obsession with missionaries, she decided that the
lives of contemporary foreign missionaries would make excellent study
material. Her first book for children, Uganda’s
White Man of Work, about a real life missionary was published in
1907.
It was just the first
in a long line of books, articles, curriculum guides and worship materials,
including finely crafted poetry that would pour from her in the coming
decades. It was not easy. Two of her children died, and her ailing
husband was often out of the country. Her
personal theology became ever more liberal and she looked for new sources for
instruction materials for children drawn on the natural sciences, the religions
of primitive peoples, and world religions.
She wanted to find ways for children to connect with the experiences of
life—birth and death, the sun and stars and evolving life on earth and out of
that experience begin to develop and articulate their own faith lives.
She tried to put these
theories into practice in a series of jobs as a Sunday School superintendent,
but she was frequently at odds with both ministers and parents who demanded a
traditional Bible study curriculum,
even if they were modernists. In 1933,
however, Fahs was invited by the great modernist preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick to head up the Sunday School at his brand new
Riverside Church. It was there that she was able, finally, to
develop the kind of progressive curriculum for which she became famous.
Unitarian
religious
education leaders had been following Fahs’s work since in 1928 article How
Childish Should a Child’s Religion Be.
They were impressed by what they saw.
In 1930 she was invited to lead a Unitarian religious education
conference at the Isle of Shores. Thus began her blossoming relationship with
the denomination that would finally lead her to leave conventional Christianity
behind.
In 1937 Fahs was
appointed Editor of Children’s Materials
for the American Unitarian Association
(AUA). She was given a free reign, within the
limited budget of the Depression
ravaged Association, to completely remake the Beacon religious education curricula. Fahs edited all the resulting New
Beacon series and she was frequently the principle co-author.
From the first hand
experiences of her Martin and Judy books for primary children to explorations of
nature in How Miracles Abound, to broadening understanding of other
cultures and past experience in From Long Ago and Many Lands and Child
of the Sun, to the practical comparative religion of The
Church Across the Street Fahs was innovating and even daring.
Of course, not everyone
was ready for change. Many congregations
clung to the same Bible based Sunday School materials that were being used in
mainline Protestant churches. To provide
a Bible based course in which children could grasp that scripture was written
by fallible human being over hundreds of years, Fahs wrote her popular The
Old Story of Salvation.
In 1952 Fahs presented
the underlying philosophy for the New Beacon Series in her book for religious
educators, Today’s Children and Yesterday’s Heritage: A Philosophy of Creative
Religious Development. Other
materials to teach the teachers followed.
The post war years really proved the popularity and durability of what
Fahs was doing.
When she had been
hired, Unitarianism was a dwindling denomination. Largely on the strength of its dynamic new
religious education program, young families flocked to the congregations. New congregations and fellowships sprang up
far from the traditional strong holds of New
England, the upper mid-west and California. The Beacon curriculum books were also being
used increasingly by other denominations and even by private schools.
Despite advancing age
and a crushing workload, nothing seemed to slow Fahs down. In 1959 at the age of 82 she was able to
fulfill a life-long dream when one of the new congregations built largely on
her sound basis of Religious Education, the Montgomery County Unitarian Church of Bethesda, Maryland,
ordained her into the ministry.
Fahs finally took
retirement at age 88 in 1964 and died honored and beloved in New York City in
1978 at the age of 101.
Fahs legacy lives on in
every Unitarian Universalist church
school. The curricula that she
introduced may no longer be taught, but the spirit that created it lives
on. Much of that spirit comes from the
remarkable poems and reading Fahs left behind and which are included in the UUA’s Singing
the Living Tradition. Not a
Sunday goes by but that somewhere a congregation does not share the loving
words of Sophia Lyon Fahs.
By far her most popular
poem is often used in child dedications
services and Christmas worship:
And
So the Children Come
And so the children come
and so they have been coming.
No angels herald their beginnings.
No prophets predict their future courses.
No wise men or women see a star to show
where to find
the babe that will save humankind.
yet each night a child arrives is a holy
night.
Fathers and mothers—
Sitting beside their sleeping children’s
beds
feel glory in the sight of new life
beginning. They ask,
Where and how will this new life end?
Or will it ever end?
Each day a child arrives is a holy day.
A time for singing,
a time for wondering,
a time for worshipping.
—Sophia Lyon Fahs
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