“The Sunday School Project”
Liggett Studio
June 8, 2025
As someone with not a little residual trauma from attending Rhema Bible Church’s Sunday school as a very young child, I had to gird up the loins of my mind (1 Peter 1:13) to walk into Liggett Studio for “The Sunday School Project.”
Developed by performance and theatre artist Jessica Davenport (a former Tulsan) through the Creative Exchange Fund, CACHE, and The Medium in Northwest Arkansas, “The Sunday School Project” is an immersive performance art piece that faithfully reconstructs a 1980s-era evangelical Sunday School experience. This is a very particular world, well-known to many who grew up around here: the world of the Jesus Movement, which in the ‘70s and ‘80s swept countercultural young adults into a life defined by faith healing, blood atonement, rapture-forecasting, felt puppets, Chick tracts depicting bodies burning in hell, children’s pastors in polyester skirts, and LPs by long-haired music duos whose lives had been changed by a personal relationship with Jesus and a contract with Maranatha! Music.
As a grinning “Sister Rachel” offered me animal crackers and red Kool-Aid (wink) at the door, I entered a space of tangible, hyper-specific memory, which quickly became a fever dream of familiar cognitive dissonance. The performance opened with 30 minutes of free-floating “fellowship and crafts,” and I was grateful for the time to ease into this situation while my limbic system freaked out.
photos by Alicia Chesser
I remember this tinny hi-fi system, this orange and brown afghan, this song that goes “He’s a rock that doesn’t roll.” I remember the blended smell of crayons and Aqua Net, the overbright lights. I remember watching grown-ups show me how to cut out and arrange felt Bible figures, lead songs and prayers that made my heart soar. I remember love and damnation offered with the same hand. I remember wondering what went on in the other rooms at church, what illness or horror was being cast out, whether it would get us next, us kids in the Sunday School room with our paper cups of Tang, or our parents own the hall in Bible study, and what we would do, all alone, if we were spared and they weren’t.
I felt it all over again in “The Sunday School Project.” Davenport grew up in one of these churches; family ties are still present there. Her memory of this world is complex and bittersweet: comforting, scary, full of confusion, full of love and joy. “The Sunday School Project” honors that complexity by presenting the experience as purely as she remembers it, without irony or contempt or, for the most part, commentary.
photos by Alicia Chesser
All the elements of the show worked in a subtle, reflective, invitational way. Davenport divided up the gallery into several zones, which made it impossible to see the whole situation at once—a smart, simple way to render a certain whiplash between “what is presented” and “what is hidden.” Hal Lindsey’s pseudo-documentary The Late Great Planet Earth played out scenarios of end-times prophecy on one wall; on another, five huge panels announced the Biblical trek from “SIN” and “BLOOD” to “HEAVEN” and “GROWTH.” Some attendees made crafts out of pipe cleaners and tissue paper. Others paged through tracts about intervening with sin-prone friends so they didn’t end up in hell. Others chatted with performers playing Sunday School leaders, all of whom wore period-specific outfits and projected confidence, kindness, and cheer (“High five if you believe in Jesus! Handshake if you’re not sure!”).
After a while, “Children’s Pastor Sharon” (Davenport) gathered the crowd at the far end of the gallery for some praise and worship songs, a puppet show, and a full-on children’s sermon so long and full of Biblical language tics that I fell into the same sleepy haze I always felt during those lessons as child. Projections around us showed images from evangelical media of the era: cartoons of people in flames, a sexy Jesus cupping the cheek of a cherubic toddler, serious notes about the role of Israel in global affairs, the cover of The Way: The Living Bible, Illustrated. A praise band played and we sang—and reader, I can’t describe how creepy it was to feel songs like “This Is The Day” and “The Lord’s Army” and “Happy All The Time” rise out of my throat fully intact, though I haven’t sung them since I was in elementary school.
And yet there was joy in it too, the joy that’s there anytime a group of people sing together, which is what can also make singing as powerful an engineer of conformity as of transcendence. I remember, in childhood, feeling a powerful bond to those I sang these songs with and to what we sang about, a bond I maybe hadn’t quite agreed to but that felt so good in the moment: all those harmonies, those clapping hands, those lifted faces.
photos by Alicia Chesser
Davenport let the whole Sunday School situation unfold exactly as it would have at the time, with no exaggeration for effect, and accurate down to the minutest detail. The casual presentation of it all—the cheer and the fear—was effectively disconcerting and awareness-heightening. Only twice did the darkness in her own experience get an extra dose of amplification. As we sang “Rise And Shine (And Give God The Glory, Glory),” under the strum of guitar and ukulele, unseen speakers somewhere in the room started to play voices of children screaming, sounds of genocide or mass conflagration. The singing paused and the sounds faded out; then the song started up again, just as before. A little later, during “I’ve Been Redeemed (You Can’t Get To Heaven),” as a Bible passage about “abomination” appeared on the wall, there was another subtle lurch in the sound. Pastor Sharon moved into the crowd with panic in her eyes, saying, “You have to be SURE. Are you SURE?” Then the service resumed, perky and earnest. I wouldn’t have minded a few more of those “lurch” moments, which validated the feelings of dread and terror underneath the enforced exhilaration and exaltation.
The character in “The Sunday School Project” who did join me in bearing explicit witness to the surrealism of it all was, oddly, one with no face, no name, no language. “Figure A” has appeared in several of Davenport’s other performance works; it’s a very strange element that really, really works. Moving in slow motion at the edges and then into the audience, dressed in a white unitard that covered its entire body, lightly touching the tissue paper crafts and extending its arms in a reflection of the praise leader’s movements, “Figure A” (performed with eerie awareness by Michelle Kenny) was like the silent witness in the room, maybe even the unseen, unacknowledged child who’s nonetheless absorbing and processing everything. It was hard for me to sit in that room; "Figure A" made it easier.
photos by Alicia Chesser
A bolder affirmation that “yes, this was and is terrifying and even dangerous” might have strengthened an already strong piece. Part of me would have liked to see that, especially as I’m looking at the ways that elements of this strain of American evangelicalism have now metastasized in megachurches, prepper theology, “spiritual wellness” grift, and outright Christo-fascism, wreaking havoc on families and communities. But an approach like that would also have made for a very different, possibly less effective piece of performance art.
For those in the audience who might not have realized until halfway through that this was critically engaged performance art, the show might have been displeasing; I was told that some audience members at opening night walked out. Others might have expected it to turn into a condemnation of a faith tradition that seeded fear into the imaginations of a whole generation, and been disappointed when it did not. I can’t imagine how weird the experience must have been for an audience member who was totally unfamiliar with the world the piece depicted.
For me, Davenport’s re-creation allowed me to acknowledge, at my own pace, that both the joy and the fear I experienced over those poorly Xeroxed coloring pages, under the surface of those songs, was—and is—real. Memory is strong; so is faith; so is indoctrination; so is trauma. With a gentle touch, a commitment to listening with accuracy, and an invitation into a complex experience, “The Sunday School Project” negotiates walls like that not by knocking them down, but by inviting people to simply see them.
