Sophia Lyon Fahs
Sermon | August 28, 2022 | Lisa Jebsen
When I accepted the call of the lay minister here and contemplated the task of coming up with topics for 36 sermons a year, two ideas immediately leapt to mind. One of those is the “Hope for Humanity” series that I kicked off last week, which is a time to share some good news to help us cultivate hope during tough times. The other idea was for a series that would focus on famous UUs and highlight important moments in our church’s history. With the start of a new school year, Sophia Lyon Fahs struck me as the perfect person to celebrate, since she is credited with revolutionizing how we approach religious education.
Of course, there are other reasons besides education that made her story appeal to me. One is the fact that the contributions of a woman will always speak to my inner feminist! I also loved learning about this pioneer because religious education is the main reason my family came to the UU church. As I shared a couple Sundays ago, UUCOM was the perfect place to ensure that our son Zach had an opportunity to explore a wide variety of spiritual traditions. So in a very real sense, I am standing here because of Sophia!
In 1876, Sophia was born to Presbetyrian missionaries in China and her family moved back to the US when she was three. Throughout her childhood, she studied the Bible with her family and at their church. In fact, as a young woman, she signed a pledge of commitment to follow in her parents’ footsteps as a missionary. The goal: the evangelization of the world in this generation.
While her pledge as a young woman at the turn of the twentieth century was not reached, through a passionate pursuit of education and various religious traditions, she played a huge role in reinventing our approach to religious education and thereby setting the stage for the Unitarian Renaissance of the 1940s.
Going back to her studies as a youth, her primary focus was on the lessons of the Bible but as she studied religion and education later in her life, the kernel of an idea took root and she envisioned a new way to teach children. Through the years she earned a B.A. from The College of Wooster , an M.A. from the Teachers College of Columbia University in 1904 and her B.D. from Union Theological Seminary in 1926. Regarding this degree she said:
I decided I must have a theological education. I wanted to have the same education ministers have, because I want to understand the things that they understood.
After all of that education, she concluded that while teaching Bible stories was important, there were so many other things that are more important to a child’s development, including the direct experience of mystery and wonder. That sounds a lot like some of the words from our affirmation, don’t you think?
She grew to believe that religious education that only focused on the Bible is to “prepare the way for a loss of respect for the Bible; and what is worse, to court a cynical atheism when the child is old enough to learn for himself.” Back then Unitarian churches were still very Christian-centric. Children spent most of their time in Sunday school memorizing Bible verses and reading Bible stories.
Side note: the phrase “cynical atheism” really struck a chord with me. It is a very accurate description of my own rebellion as a young adult raised on Lutheran Sunday School lessons! I also wanted to point out that at this time in history “Unitarians” and “Universalists” had not yet merged. As you’ll see, I think there’s a strong case to be made that the 1961 merger of those two groups has direct ties to what’s to come with Fahs’ journey.
In the late 1930s, membership numbers in the Unitarian church had fallen off the cliff and it turns out, the biggest reason people gave for leaving was dissatisfaction with their children’s religious education. As a response to this, Fahs was hired by the Unitarian Association to edit a new curriculum – even though she was not a member of the Unitarian Church. Nevertheless, the group respected her as a religious scholar and tasked her with editing the curriculum for Unitarian Sunday schools that came to be known as the “New Beacon” series. During her years of service at the Unitarian Association she also co-authored over 40 books!
After eight years of working at the Unitarian Association she finally joined the church. (Which I think is a very UU move!) Her work provided inspiration for modern programs that are still taught today, like the series called “Neighboring Faiths.”
Thanks to this rethinking of religious education, families came back to Unitarian churches and membership numbers rose, leading to what is known as the Unitarian Renaissance of the 1940s.
For her contributions to religious education, Fahs was ordained as a minister by the Unitarian Assoc. in 1958 at the age of 82 . Few women had received such an honor at the time. I love this excerpt from her speech that day:
I have accepted the incongruity of my personal ordination in the later years of my life when my own ministry is nearing an end, in order that I may join my voice with yours in pleading that we put the children in the very midst of us.
Twenty years later in 1978, Sophia Lyon Fahs died at the ripe old age of 102. Her daughter wrote the following tribute.
Mrs Fahs contended that children’s faith should not be imposed but should grow out of their own ponderings, natural curiosity and direct experience of the natural world, with night and day, with the changing seasons, with birth, growth and death, with their own fear, worries and problems with human relationships. Particularly, in teaching young children she believed in building on the children’s own immediate experience of discovery and mystery. When children reached a point of clear readiness, she introduced study of our religious past including biblical material in the light of modern scholarship, primitive myths, our worldwide religious heritage and the findings of science.
I hear so many of our UU principles in this daughter’s tribute to her mother’s life work!
Sophia Lyon Fahs revolutionized religious education because she was inspired by children. One of her most famous quotes/poems was set to music by Jason Shelton. “Each night a child is born is a holy night, a time for singing, a time for wondering, a time for worshiping.”
I think this final quote of hers is a great way to conclude our time with this history today.
The function of the church for both young and old is not to give us on Sundays certain kinds of experiences different from experiences of the everyday. The function of the church is rather to teach us how to put religious and ethical qualities into all kinds of experiences.
I hope you’ve enjoyed learning about this remarkable woman. If you’d like to explore her life even more, I’ll post the sources I used along with this sermon online. Meanwhile, I look forward to exploring other important figures in our rich UU history with you and of course if you have any suggestions for the next subject in this series, please let me know!
Sources:
UU World https://www.uuworld.org/articles/sophia-lyon-fahs-revolutionary-educator
Harvard Square Library
YouTube Video
Wikipedia