Growing up, I hated going to Sunday school. My parents waking me up too early on a weekend to attend a class that gave no report card and put me right back to sleep? No thanks. As an adult, I shunned Sunday school altogether, until the spring of 2018. That’s when Jimmy Carter announced that he would be cutting back on his Sunday school teaching schedule at Maranatha Baptist Church. He had taught there since 1981 after leaving the White House and returning to live in his hometown of Plains, Georgia.
As a Carter admirer who lived only 2.5 hours from Plains, I figured I’d better go check it out since the end of an era was approaching. It was the best Sunday school class I’ve ever attended.
Carter, like any good teacher, asked lots of questions of his class, made us think, inspired us and made us laugh. A lot. I was surprised at the then-93-year-old’s sharp comedic instincts.
Set in a pecan grove on the edge of a town of less than 600 people, there’s nothing grand about Maranatha to make passersby think that a former leader of the free world worshiped and taught there for 40-plus years. It looks like many churches one might see driving through small towns in the Deep South — a one-story red-brick affair with a modest white-painted four-columned front portico and a short spired white steeple topped by a small cross.
When I arrived, I had to park in a dirt overflow lot way in the back of the pecan grove. I was told to arrive by 5 a.m. for the 10 a.m. class if I wanted a seat in the sanctuary. Surely that can’t be right, I thought. The sanctuary holds 350 people. Not being a morning person, I took my chances, got an extra hour of sleep and arrived groggy-eyed just after sunrise. There was a line at the back of the church for latecomers to watch the class on a TV monitor in an overflow room. After going through the Secret Service checkpoint that included being wanded by an agent, I entered the church. Lucky for me, I was able to bypass the overflow room because a friend who lived in Plains had connections with some of Carter’s relatives. She told me there was a seat for me in the sanctuary.
I was also told that if I wanted to have my picture taken with the former president, I would have to stay in the sanctuary throughout the worship service after Sunday school. It made sense, but the little kid inside me was groaning at having to get up early and sit in a church for so long. This time, I knew it would be different, but those old pangs of youthful resistance to pedantic church ladies and boring sermons bubbled up a bit before Carter walked out to begin his lesson.
First, he was interested in knowing where everyone was from and spent about 10 minutes going around the room to figure that out. By my count, 10 different countries were represented in the sanctuary that day. People had long come from points far and wide to experience this class, but, as Carter pointed out on this particular Sunday in early April 2018, the Carter Center in Atlanta had a group of graduating young interns there from countries around the globe. The interns were standing around the edges of the pews allowing people like me to have a seat.
Carter taught using traditional bible study methods without using notes, standing and slowly pacing back and forth while talking, sometimes heading to the lectern to refer to scripture. Quoting from Acts of the Apostles, he buffered his point about how we should all take care of each other. He talked about hard-hitting current issues such as the child sex trafficking trade. You don’t expect to hear about something like that during a Sunday school lesson, but as someone who personally did so much to alleviate human suffering in the world, that was his way. His teaching method used his ample firsthand experience from his days as a politician and as a current global ambassador for peace and justice.
Ultimately, he urged people to “take care of each other, even the people we don’t like.”
Amidst all the seriousness, the laughs were plentiful, too, further buffering his points while keeping people attentive. One of my favorite bits was his telling about a long-ago impromptu square dance once thrown in Plains to celebrate some victory.
“We closed off Main Street to traffic [slight pause for effect], so those two cars had to drive around us.”
More laughs came from then-pastor of Maranatha, Brandon Patterson, during the worship service following President Carter’s lesson. Patterson was only 24 at the time. He talked about how surreal it was to be asked personally by Carter and “Mrs. Rosalynn” to become pastor at Maranatha even though he was just out of seminary and had never held a full-time job at a church before. Someone asked what his favorite story was about the Carters. It was one from before he was born. According to Patterson’s telling, there was a celebration after Carter won the presidency. Carter turned to Rosalynn and said, “Aren’t you glad you didn’t marry that other guy?” Rosalynn turned back and replied, “If I had married him, he’d be president now.”
Jimmy Carter died on Dec. 29, 2024, at age 100. His Sunday school class still exists today as an ongoing family tradition in Plains. His niece, Kim Carter Fuller, now teaches the same class at Maranatha.