An Answered Prayer : Nearing 100, Claire Klint Still Teaches Second-Grade Sunday School

SUN VALLEY —  It will take a few minutes, but Claire Klint will climb the stairs one measured step at a time to get to the second-floor Sunday school class she teaches each week at Grace Community Church.

Next Saturday, Jan. 31, she will return to the church to celebrate her 100th birthday with friends and family. On the next day, Senior Pastor John MacArthur will honor her at two morning services that together draw about 7,000 worshipers to the Valley mega-church.

Claire Klint has spent 70 years teaching second-graders in church Sunday schools, the last 21 at MacArthur’s congregation, and she doesn’t intend to stop yet.

“I’ve asked the Lord for one thing--that He would give me a clear mind as long as I live,” she said. “I’ve also promised the Lord that I will teach as long as I am able.”

Eleven operations over the years have threatened her endurance, especially in 1996 when she underwent three surgeries, the third one for a broken hip--usually a debilitating injury for people in their nineties.

When the Rev. Bill Shannon, Grace Church’s pastor of children’s ministries, visited Klint at the hospital after her hip operation, she confessed to him, “I won’t be able to get upstairs anymore.” Shannon replied, “We’ll move the classroom downstairs if we have to.”

But after often-painful therapy, Klint recovered and resumed her early Sunday morning climbs. “She doesn’t want any favors,” said Shannon. At the church, preschool children have classes on the first floor and school-age children are taught on the second floor.

“They offered to have a class downstairs,” Klint said, “but it wouldn’t be right taking the children out of the department.”

Besides, she said this week, “It isn’t hard; I just have to be very careful.”

In fact, “It would be better if I could do it everyday,” she said, referring to the value of regular exercise.

“But there is nowhere I can walk around here,” she said. She lives in the Glendale home of one of her three sons, Bill, 70, a retired Lockheed engineer, whose house is on a steep street in the Verdugo Hills. Bill’s older brother Dale is a pastor in Visalia and younger brother Ron is a teacher in La Crescenta.

Claire Klint’s salesman husband, known as Will, died 51 years ago when they lived in Chicago, forcing her to find jobs to keep the family going. But she also continued volunteer work teaching Sunday school at a Baptist church there.

When the Klints moved to Los Angeles in 1956, she taught youngsters at Fountain Avenue Baptist Church in Hollywood for a decade. She then switched to First Baptist Church of Van Nuys, for another 10 years until Pastor Harold Fickett left to take another position. In 1976, she and her sons moved to another theologically conservative church, the fast-growing Grace Community Church.

She stayed with teaching second-graders because they “accept what you tell them and they’re more attentive” than younger children, she said. “It’s important that they get the right perspective on the Bible.”

Although she misses the old Sunday school requirements for greater Bible memorization--of the 23rd Psalm and the Ten Commandments, for instance--Klint said that in general teaching Sunday school today is much easier because of the many teaching aids and printed worksheets available.

The only discipline problems she has with her 13 children are minor and infrequent, she said. “When they start talking and I’m teaching, I just stop--until they realize what they were doing,” she said. “Another thing: If there are two children that are chummy, I’ll see that they don’t sit together.”

Asked if her pupils have commented on her approaching 100th birthday, Klint said, “I don’t think they know. And I don’t think they realize what a hundred years is.”

She said she hasn’t readily told her age to others in the past, although the church did honor her on her 95th birthday.

“I don’t feel any different now than I did 10 or 20 years ago,” she said this week.

Any thoughts about nearing 100?

“No,” she said after a pause.

“I just take a day at a time.” Kind of like climbing stairs.