Well-Versed in Sunday School Lessons

It will take a few minutes, but Claire Klint will climb the stairs this weekend one measured step at a time to get to the second-floor Sunday school class she teaches each week.

Next Saturday, she will return to Grace Community Church in Sun Valley to celebrate her 100th birthday with friends and family. Senior Pastor John MacArthur will honor her the next day at two morning services that together draw about 7,000 worshipers.

Klint has spent 70 years teaching second-graders in Sunday schools--the last 20 at Grace Community--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’s pastor of children’s ministries, visited Klint at the hospital after the hip operation, she said 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,” Shannon said. At the church, preschoolers have classes on the first floor and school-age children are taught on the second floor.

Klint lives in Glendale on a steep Verdugo Hills street at the home of her son Will, 70, a retired Lockheed engineer. His older brother, Dale, is a pastor in Visalia, and younger brother Ron is a teacher in La Crescenta.

Claire Klint’s husband, a meat salesman also known as Will, died 51 years ago when they lived in Chicago, forcing her to find jobs to support the family. But she 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 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.

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 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 instructional aids and printed work sheets 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.