In Sunday School, in the sixth grade, I was a class of one.
Other guests or visitors came occasionally. But mostly it was just me and Miss Diane, our fifth grade Sunday School teacher. We held the class as though I was a class of twenty: I sat on a folding chair in the center of the room and she sat at the desk, and she studied the lesson weekly so that she could teach.
We talked a lot, Miss Diane and I. She was able to stop the lesson wherever I wanted when I had questions. If she wasn’t sure about an answer, we looked it up together. And I got to spend all the time I wanted on prayer requests.
I remember her most, though, for the green tea.
We’d had a lesson about God’s love for all the people of the world, and to facilitate my understanding for the past month we’d covered different countries and their cultures. I had been particularly interested in our lesson on Japan—and so, that Sunday morning, she took me down to the fellowship hall and made matcha.
“They really drink this in Japan?” I asked. “Just like this?”
She nodded. “But it’s not like the tea you usually drink,” she said, meaning the Lipton cans I adored. “It’s a different flavor – a very grown-up flavor. It’s what they call an acquired taste.”
I took a sip. It tasted like grass. I did not want to hurt Miss Diane’s feelings by wrinkling my nose. Moreover, I found Miss Diane to be sophisticated: she wore long flowing dresses and beautiful jewelry and she was very educated. I assumed sophisticated people liked tea from other countries. Liked green tea. I decided I would like it too. Enjoying the taste could come later.
I had many Sunday School classes like this during my youth, where I was the only girl in the room, or perhaps one of two. All of our teachers prepared in faith for multitudes. We got their best effort, for the whole forty-five minutes of class.
I cannot help but think that now, this would be considered a waste of resources.
It would be wiser, more efficient, to consolidate classes, to have one teacher maximizing time with as many students as possible. I can imagine one might argue that it is silly for one person to spend an entire week preparing for a forty-five minute lesson for a class of one.
Maybe so. But God’s math rarely makes sense. And it is rarely efficient.
I am who I am in no small part because of those classes, because of women who devoted a singular amount of time and energy to my spiritual growth and did not consider teaching a class of one to be a waste. I would not have gotten that attention or specialized focus in bigger classes. I wouldn’t have become me without them.
But we dismiss the small things, in the modern church. We have a contempt for them. We talk about waste and efficiency and maximization and effectiveness. We consolidate and expand and conflate. We decide that if a ministry’s not reaching a significant amount of people (but what is significant, really?) we’ll close the doors. We decide that if the dinner is badly-attended (what does that mean?) it’s not worth having. If only two people come to the small group, we shuffle them over to the bigger one and close up shop.
But what’s the sin in thinking small?
Certainly, let’s not waste. We don’t need to waste resources for forty on a dinner for five—but that doesn’t mean a dinner for five isn’t worth having. If “only” six people can get to the prayer service, that doesn’t mean we drop the idea.
Cherish the small things. Feed the few. Invest in what the world calls little.
Back when I was a poor college student, I used to make “happy bags” for my friends. I had next to no money, but I’d hit up the local dollar tree, buy party favor bags, and fill them up with silly things: cheap candles, confetti, soaps, fun pens, socks, notepads, whatever I could find that was small and cheap. I’d wrap them up with a card and leave them for the recipient.
I left one, once, for a guy friend of mine. He was a serious sort of guy, largely disinterested in silly, trivial things.
I remember that I felt a little embarrassed leaving it. The amount of effort to put one together for a person who almost certainly would not want it seemed foolish. But I had given one to every member of our friend group, and it seemed unkind to leave him out. I thought about writing an apology with it: “I know this is stupid, but…”
It disappeared from his door, but he never mentioned it to me. I idly wondered if someone had stolen it. Years later, I found out that wasn’t the case. “I was so depressed then,” he mused. “But that stupid confetti—it was the most ridiculous, unnecessary thing. But it made me smile. It was a reminder people wanted me around.”
And most Christians have similar stories, where God took loaves and fishes and multiplied them in scope and impact. But why don’t we trust He can do the same with our small crowds—not in number but in meaning? When did it become an embarrassment to play a song for twelve people? To teach one? To make art not for a multitude, but a singular few? Do we think the investment can’t possibly be worth the dividend God can produce?
God always works big. But sometimes He works big by working small. The impact that Miss Diane had on me is incalculable. She passed away years ago but one day, I will see her again, and I believe in the light of eternity she will be given the gift of seeing what it meant, in its totality, for her to teach one person.
Whenever I drink green tea, which I like now genuinely, I think of her.
And I think of how grateful I am for my little class of one.
Think big. Give small. Let God’s math take over and stop making decisions and gauging ministry and meaning in the name of efficiency and scope. Extravagant excess, in the Kingdom, is the name of the game.
Samaritan's Song 