Why Sunday School?

 The Sunday School Teacher 4

Why do we have Sunday School? Why does it exist? Why is it a thing? If we cannot answer those questions, it goes a long way in explaining why so many churches are dropping it. Alternatively, we could ignore the questions and just holler more loudly that every church should have one. I find both of those approaches far from satisfactory. If you will allow me, I would like to give you answers to those questions that have helped me over the years.

           My favorite subject as a child in school was history. Decades later, it is still my favorite academic subject. History teaches us how to avoid mistakes that show up in each generation. In addition, by revealing how and why something began, we can trace the DNA and identify the underlying concepts that drive it in the modern day.

Robert Raikes' statue, Victorian Embankment
Gardens, London, England

Robert Raikes (1735-1811) was an 18th-century newspaper publisher. As a religiously minded humanitarian, Raikes' attention was drawn to the disastrous state of English prisons. After a tangle with a particularly unruly gang of boys on the rough side of Gloucester one Sunday afternoon in 1780, he came to think that crime was better prevented than prosecuted, and the best criminal reformation was to avoid producing criminals in the first place. This led directly to his desire to work with the boys running the streets in his city.

A life of learning led him to educate them as a means of improving their lives immediately and permanently. Yet many of those boys held full-time jobs Monday through Saturday. Ergo, Sunday was the best option. As a religious man, he instinctively understood that the Bible was the best textbook, as it best tells boys how to live. In some cases, he even had to teach them to read first before he could teach them the Bible. And teach them the Bible, he did. In his own words, "The children were to come after ten in the morning, and stay till twelve; they were then to go home and return at one; and after reading a lesson, they were to be conducted to Church. After Church, they were to be employed in repeating the catechism till after five, and then dismissed, with an injunction to go home without making a noise."

In this, Raikes found his pastor, Thomas Stock, a great encouragement and help. Together, they enlisted lay people as teachers for the rapidly growing group. After several years perfecting the program, he began to publicize Sunday School as a concept in his newspapers, and point to it as a potential solution for what had become an England-wide issue. Amongst other people, it caught John Wesley's attention. Latching on to it, he declaimed, "There must be a Sunday School wherever there is a Methodist society." By 1784, organized Sunday Schools enrolled 225,000 English children. Twenty years after Raikes' death in 1811, a statue to his memory was erected in London and financed by the gifts of 1.25 million British Sunday School students.

It was not long before the cousins across the pond noticed. William Elliott launched the first American Sunday School in 1785 in Oak Grove, Virginia. It spread rapidly up and down the Eastern seaboard. In each town, as a newly started Sunday School drew children from all kinds of churches, those churches, in turn, began their own Sunday School departments. By the early 1800s, the American Sunday School Union spearheaded a massive push to organize Sunday Schools all over the Mississippi watershed. They sent out eighty missionaries, involved such luminaries as Daniel Webster and Francis Scott Key, and circulated a million books in small libraries. To give one particular example, a little girl named Mary, attending a Sunday School in Illinois, wanted to get a star for bringing a visitor. She persuaded her father, Stephen Paxson, to attend. He came to Christ and was fired with a passion to establish Sunday Schools. Before the tale of his life was told, he had traveled 100,000 miles all over the Midwest, started 1,300 Sunday Schools, and was directly responsible for seeing 83,000 converts come to Christ. Between 1824 and 1874, 61,229 Sunday Schools were launched in the United States. Those Sunday Schools were being staffed by over 400,000 teachers and contained a cumulative attendance of 2.6 million children.

Sunday School Parade, Dubuque, Iowa
c 1900

As the 19th century drew to a close, American Sunday Schools were stronger than ever. The International Sunday School lesson was born, and entire curricula were circulated replete with homework assignments and grading systems. Enormous Sunday School conventions were held yearly. Sunday School parades marched down Main Street in many a town. Conservative estimates in 1884 reported 9 million children enrolled out of an entire United States population of 22 million under the age of fifteen. That is not quite one out of every two children in the country.

What happened? Because there certainly are not one out of every two American children attending Sunday School now. The short answer is liberalism happened. Just as it killed seminaries and through them, their denominations, it also killed Sunday Schools. As Methodists and Presbyterians and Congregationalists and Lutherans lost their theological moorings, their Sunday Schools died or turned from teaching the Word of God to an embrace of the social gospel and community activism. The great historic Protestant denominations withered just as Catholic immigration exploded. By the mid-20th century, fewer and fewer American children were being taught the Word of God.

Independent Baptists are not theologically perfect, but our movement is marked by a fervency for souls long missing in other religious expressions. Following World War II, Sunday School as a local church ministry experienced a resurgence, led by the giant independent Baptist megachurches of the era. Popularized by Elmer Towns, long associated with Jerry Falwell, men such as Lee Roberson, Jack Hyles, and John Rawlings organized massive churches primarily around the Sunday School. In the process, they elevated it again, rekindling a love for boys and girls in the hearts of churches all across the country.

As this is penned in 2025, the Sunday School is proving remarkably hard to kill. The contemporary church movement has largely abandoned it, but that movement has its own deep problems. Small groups as a concept are having a hot minute. I will discuss that in the following chapter. On the other hand, there are still hundreds of thousands of Sunday School classes meeting each Sunday morning all over the country. Indeed, the world, if you factor in growing independent Baptist missionary movements in Asia, Africa, and Central America.

We come back then to the question at the heart of this chapter. Why Sunday School? Well, it was founded to offer hopeless boys and girls the only trustworthy source of hope there is – a life built on Jesus Christ and the Word of God. The obvious follow-up question is, are there still hopeless boys and girls, children growing up without an understanding of the Gospel, without any biblical foundation?

To ask the question is to answer it. The need in our day is just as staggering as it was in Robert Raikes' England. In our generation, very few parents teach their children the Word of God. For most parents, it has never occurred to them to do so. They are unsaved themselves. If they are saved, they are often carnal and have little to no appetite to read and apply God's Word to their own life, let alone to their children. Other parents, a bit more spiritually mature, instinctively understand the need to teach their children, but do not know how to do so. Though they have a direct biblical responsibility to do it themselves (Ephesians 6.4), the only way they practically fulfil that instruction is to bring their children to church. Thus, if these children are not taught the Bible at church, they will not be taught it.

Additionally, in our generation, very few schools teach children the Word of God. In previous centuries, even public schools did so, and I could furnish whole swathes of evidence that they did so. But as American culture was hijacked by paganism via materialism in the 1950s and rock music in the 1960s, the Bible as a textbook was shoved out of the public school system. In 1962, in Engel v. Vitale, the Supreme Court kicked prayer out of schools. In 1963, in Abington Township School District v. Schempp, the Supreme Court ruled that public reading of the Bible in schools was unconstitutional. In 1992, in Lee v. Weisman, the court prohibited clergy-led prayer at high school commencements. Lee v. Weisman, in turn, was the basis for Santa Fe ISD v. Doe in 2000, in which the Supreme Court extended the ban all the way to school-sanctioned student-led prayer at high school football games. If you want to learn about Jesus Christ from the Bible, you are not going to do it in an American public school. It is true that in some school districts, moments of silence are held daily. It is also true that in some school districts, classes about the Bible as literature are offered as electives. But in the main, if American public school children are not taught the Bible in church, they will not be taught it.

Why Sunday School, beloved? Because boys and girls by the millions need to hear about Jesus, need to be taught the Word of God. And it is as true now as it has ever been.