Should You Teach Sunday School?

 The Sunday School Teacher 5

I do not believe every Christian is cut out to teach Sunday School. I do believe every Christian is cut out to teach. Paul makes the latter point here quite clearly. For when for the time ye ought to be teachers, ye have need that one teach you again which be the first principles of the oracles of God. (Hebrews 5.12) Every Christian should teach someone else what they have learned and are learning about the Lord. As we have already mentioned, parents and soul winners are both examples of this, and neither position is a gifting; they are responsibilities.

Having said that, it does not then follow that since every mature Christian ought to be teaching in some way that every mature Christian should be teaching Sunday School. Teaching is, after all, a spiritual gifting. (Romans 12.6-7, I Corinthians 12.28, Ephesians 4.11) Think of a choir, if you will. Should every Christian make a joyful noise to the Lord? (Psalm 81.1) Of course. Should every Christian sing in the choir? Of course not. If you are not gifted in that area, the best thing for all involved is for you to enjoy their music ministry from your pew in the sanctuary.

The answer to the question posed in this chapter is two-fold, I think. There is first the need to discern whether teaching Sunday School is the direction in which your gifting lies. The second is how to develop that gifting once you have discovered it. Let us examine each in turn.

To discern this, I propose five questions and three ideas. I want you to first ask yourself whether you have evidenced the gift of teaching in other areas of your life. Are you a trainer at work? Do you have a natural knack for teaching young men how to do car maintenance or young women how to make sourdough? Do you find yourself readily explaining complex concepts to those around you? Is this something you have already done to some extent, even if only instinctively?

The second thing to ask yourself is whether teaching Sunday School is something you want to do. One of the marks that a man is genuinely called to the ministry is this very thing. This is a true saying, If a man desire the office of a bishop, he desireth a good work. (I Timothy 3.1) I am not talking about a fleeting thought, a passing fancy. I am talking about something more continual. "You know, I would kind of like to try teaching a class someday." And the thought comes back to your mind repeatedly.

The third question is this: Are you patient in dealing with young people now? When you are handed a class roll book and a "Go get 'em, Tiger," you are not going to get patience automatically thrown in on top. Most Sunday School classes are children's classes. Almost every Sunday School teacher has taught children at some point. If little people get on your ever-loving last nerve simply by breathing, it might not be the ministry for you.

The fourth question to consider here is whether you are willing to meet your church's requirements for the position. I will speak more to the specifics of this in a later chapter, but suffice it to say, if you bristle at maintaining a specific standard or two, then perhaps you should limit your teaching to other venues.

The fifth question can only be asked further down the line. After you have been teaching for a bit, ask yourself, "Is there any evidence that God is blessing this work on my part?" Such evidence can be as simple as the class listening to you with apparent interest. In plain language, you do not bore them. Beyond that, however, and more importantly, are any of the students showing any signs of applying what you have been teaching? Is anybody's life being changed for the better? For that matter, is your own life being changed? Are you growing as a person and as a Christian in this process?

The three ideas I have for you include two practical and one spiritual. The first idea to help you discern whether teaching Sunday School is suitable for you is to enlist as a teacher helper first. Almost every Sunday School teacher could use an aide to do such things as help keep rowdy children quiet, take someone to the restroom, or help the teacher act out a Bible story. This will put you in a classroom on a regular basis. Your desire for a class of your own will either grow or shrink. Either way, it will be enlightening.

The second idea is to enlist as a teacher in a limited way, in a format that has an end date. Teach the Junior Boys class for four weeks about Joseph, and then analyze how it went. Think of this as a trial run or a shakedown cruise. Offer yourself as a substitute teacher for the summer. You can cover a number of teachers who are gone for a Sunday or two on vacation. It will be a good taste of what having your own class will be like. Give it a whirl.

The third idea has probably already occurred to you. If you think the Lord may want to use you in this area, ask Him to show you. I do not mean to ask Him for a specific miraculous sign. Just tell Him you are willing to do what He wants, and ask Him to confirm in your heart that this is what He wants. In all things spiritual, it is always appropriate to pray about it.

Let us turn now, briefly, to the second part of the question at the core of this chapter. If you have determined the Lord would have you teach Sunday School, that you are gifted at it, and you have undertaken it, how can you develop that gifting? Having set out to become a teacher, how do you become a good one?

          I offer you four suggestions here. First, teach. One of the most important things I did when I surrendered to preach the gospel 38 years ago was to begin preaching immediately. I preached my first sermon a week later, and I kept hoovering up every possible chance to preach that I could. Children's Church? Check. Youth group? Check. Nursing homes? Check. Street corners? Check. Church bus rides on the way home? Check. I preached at the drop of a hat and carried a hat with me everywhere.

In music and sports, we call this practice. In the speaking arena, we do not for the simple reason that the people sitting in front of you are real people. But the effects are quite similar. It is impossible to improve in any area solely by watching other people do it. You have to get out there and do it yourself.

The second suggestion sounds immediately contradictory, yet it is not. Find a good teacher or two and watch everything they do. When you have a question – and always come up with a question – pull them aside and bounce it off of them. Do this often enough, and you will have developed a mentor, someone who will pour into you all they know. As I have just made clear, this alone is not sufficient. But if you pair the second with the first, I can almost guarantee that your progress will be rapid.

Third, commit yourself to a course of continuing education. This can be as formal as enrolling in an actual class on teaching or as informal as reading a book about it. (Hey, I wonder where we could find a good book? <grin> ) If books are not your thing, put your earbuds in and dial in a podcast about teaching. YouTube University can be an absolute waste of time, but the amount of good content on there is staggering. Find some. Watch some. Try some of what you see in your class.

The point here is not the particular means of educating yourself but rather the importance of the decision to always be learning. The vast majority of Sunday School teachers plateau because they are satisfied with the status quo. Do they want a bigger class? If a few more came in, that would be fine, but there is no passion to see it grow. Do they want to see lives changed? Of course, but not at the cost of fasting and prayer and hours spent with that student one-on-one outside of class. Would they like to be a better teacher? Sure, if you could wave a magic wand and make it happen. Curiously enough, it never happens. Through desire a man, having separated himself, seeketh And intermeddleth with all wisdom. (Proverbs 18.1) To the extent you want to be a better teacher, you will be. To the extent you can live without it, you will not.

Lastly, I cannot close without again mentioning prayer. In prayer, we live by faith, depending on the Lord to help us. This pleases Him. If it is right to pray when we are trying to determine whether we should teach, it is absolutely right to pray once we have launched our frail craft upon the waters. Pray for the Lord to help you as you decide what to teach. Yield yourself to Him as you sit down to write your lesson. Take each student in your heart one at a time, and lift them to the Lord. Ask Him to bless them, help them, grow them, meet their needs, and move them to yield to the Spirit's work in their life. Speaking of the Holy Spirit, plead with Him to empower your teaching. Ask Him to give you a clear mind and a passionate heart as you teach. Ask Him for the heart of those young people. Park out in front of their house late at night and weep. While the tears roll down your cheeks, beg the Lord to raise up a generation that will love Him and serve Him and bring Him great glory.

Jesus was the best teacher the world has ever seen. The more time you spend with Him, the more like Him you will be.

If the Lord wants you to teach a Sunday School class, you should. Further, you can. And you can do it well. Tell Him yes, and you will never regret it.

 

 

 

         

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

Huzzah for the Traditional Sunday School

The Sunday School Teacher 3

    In any honest examination of the modern Sunday School, one of the first things we notice is that the traditional Sunday School as a concept seems to be dying a slow death. Increasingly, churches of all types and sizes have shifted from the long-followed schedule – Sunday School followed by a morning worship service, chased later in the day by an evening worship service – to a more contemporary type of weekend with the same service being repeated multiple times. In this latter style, Sunday School got left on the chopping block. At the same time, such churches realized they needed a smaller teaching venue. Cue the massive rise of small groups.

I make no secret of the fact that I prefer the traditional Sunday School model over the more recently popular small group model. I intend to make just that argument in this chapter. It does not then follow that I am against the small group model. I am most definitely not. I have spent thousands of hours teaching in such settings, and I intend to continue to do so. And they have been highly beneficial hours.

I believe in the power of personal investment, in the power of time spent one-on-one or in slightly larger groups. For example, just last week I awarded a New Testament to a young man in our church whom I had trained how to witness. We completed that training together, sitting across a table, one hour a week for eight weeks. I have trained nearly a hundred soul winners over these years in the same manner. Our church practices discipleship in a similar manner. New Christians are paired with mature Christians and undertake a set of eight small-group Bible studies over a two-month period. I have done hundreds of these myself. Members are only added to our church after a meeting with me in a small group setting. Additionally, I have spent an enormous amount of time mentoring younger preachers in a similar setting, one-on-one at a table working through a book or concept or doctrine or practice essential to the Christian ministry. Indeed, I hope some will use this book in a similar manner, a mature teacher coming alongside an inexperienced one, helping them to grow into all they can be for the cause of Christ.

The small group model has some genuine strengths. It often increases participation and thus thought and personal ownership of thought between the learner and the teacher. Small groups help people to become involved and feel valued. They often do a better job of building relationships between students than the traditional Sunday School model does. Church plants can emerge from small groups. And when they are done right, a properly led small group can eliminate many, if not most, of the weaknesses inherent in the model.

If I am so obviously for it, how then can I be against it? I am not against it so much as I am against small groups replacing the model traditionally used in Sunday School – a teacher standing up before a class and taking them through a planned course of study. When you replace the traditional model entirely with small groups, you leave good stuff on the table. Some things are taught better in the conventional model. In fact, I would argue that most things are taught better.

Consider the broader educational implications for society. In modern American culture, a child progresses from Kindergarten through Twelfth Grade over a thirteen-year span. He then often undertakes advanced studies at a college, university, or technical school for some years afterward as well. I may be mistaken in the following sentence, but I cannot think of a single example where all that education is conducted via a small group model. Are the secular equivalents of small groups used in schools, from kindergarten to a doctoral program? Yes. Are they used exclusively? Not on your life. In point of fact, the traditional model of a teacher delivering a lecture in a classroom is still found much more often than not. Why? Because there are some things that are taught more effectively via the traditional model.

I am not asking you to eliminate small groups. I am not on a crusade against the concept. I am asking you to realize the superiority of the traditional model in many instances, and to use small groups as a supplement to such classes rather than a replacement of them.

Having explained my point, let me now attempt to make it. To do so, I want to look at the negative risks one runs in a church context by shifting to small groups exclusively, and from this, highlight the unique strengths inherent in the traditional Sunday School model.

Small groups, by definition, cultivate commentary from everyone. While I believe a good Sunday School class includes much interaction, these two concepts are not the same. The former essentially places the opinion of the carnal Christian on par with the experienced perspective of the spiritual Christian. If a simple person (in the Proverbs sense of the term) comes to a passage of Scripture with a neutral mind, and thus hears two competing viewpoints in the discussion, he is left to choose for himself which one sounds good. This is problematic at best, and something you would find only rarely, if ever, in the traditional Sunday School model.

Put another way round, expressions of pooled ignorance are weaker than a carefully studied lesson in every context. I do not deny that small groups can be led well by carefully studied men or women, but the weakness inherent in a discussion format is that the thoughtful, prepared voice is put on par with all the voices around them. Leading a student to grasp a biblical truth always involves thought, but it does not always require discussion. Yet small groups only sometimes have the former, yet always have the latter.

The Bible is an authoritative book. It needs to be taught graciously but also with a sense of authority, an authority not inherent in the teacher but rather inherent in the Book because it is God's Word. If my chosen manner of transferring truth does not convey that authority, I am incorrect in how I handle the Word and in the inferences I leave in the mind of the listener. On the authority scale, the biblical emphasis begins with preaching, flows on to teaching, and finally descends to conversation and discussion. It is easiest to form the student's concept of doctrine and practice in the weakest of those three categories, easiest precisely because our culture has become so enamored of equalizing everyone's voice and pulling down anything that smacks of authority. But easier seldom means better.

In addition to the philosophical weaknesses inherent in the small group structure, any honest observer must also acknowledge the practical risk that any church faces in fostering small groups – a potential church split. The traditional Sunday School class model almost never splits a church; the small group model does so often, it has become cliché. In some sense, this is related to the authority concept discussed in the previous paragraph. The institution Christ founded to perpetuate His teaching in His absence was the church. Attempts to transfer scriptural truth on the edge of a church model and largely lacking church supervision are not wrong, per se; they are just wrong-headed. And if that sentence is too strong for you, roll it back in your mind and at least have the intellectual honesty to admit the risks run in a small group scenario.

"Sure, there are risks in the small group setup. I'll admit that. But there are just as many risks in the traditional Sunday School model."

I disagree. I do not disagree that Sunday School classes can and have often been poorly led, with the spiritual results negligible at best. In point of fact, this book exists in order to help combat that. But in the main, even a badly done Sunday School class still contains more potential for good and less risk of bad than the equivalently led small group. A poorly conducted Sunday School class is still held at church during a church service and is led by someone who carries the authority of the church and the Word of God. Attendance is taken, an unspoken practice which emphasizes the importance of the occasion.

Jack Williams, shortly before his graduation to
Glory earlier this year.

I can still remember each Sunday School teacher I had as a child. Mary Lou Tyree. Alice Reeves. Jack Williams. Joe Wetzl. Rick Bartel. Each one stood before me with an open Bible and taught a prepared lesson. Their intellectual, spiritual, and emotional capacities were different. Their ability to connect with me varied. Decades have passed since then, and the specific things they taught me have mostly faded from my memory. But their elevation of God's Word still rings in my heart, and their shining example of a love for God and His people still touches me all these years later.

I am not opposed to biblical discussions, nor to small groups gathering around a table to converse and learn about the things of the Lord. But few are the lives transformed by a discussion, while many are the lives changed by a teacher.

The traditional Sunday School model is still best.