Have you ever wondered where Sunday School came from, why we call it “school,” or what it was originally supposed to accomplish? You may remember Bible stories, gold foil stars, flannel-board figures, construction-paper crafts, and a teacher trying to keep everyone focused. Some of the first children in Sunday School came for a very different reason: they had spent the other six days of the week working.
In eighteenth-century England, many children from poor and working-class families had little chance to attend school. Sunday was often their only free day. Christians gathered them to learn to read, study Scripture, and receive some of the education they were missing. Many reformers also hoped education would keep poor children out of trouble and teach what they considered proper behavior.
These early schools could take up most of the day. Imagine telling children today that Sunday School starts in the morning, breaks for lunch, and continues into late afternoon. I suspect we might have a recruitment problem.
Robert Raikes, a newspaper publisher in Gloucester, England, became concerned about poverty, crime, and children growing up with almost no education. Around 1780, he supported Sunday schools for poor children and used his newspaper to spread the idea.
More than ten years earlier, Hannah Ball was already gathering children in High Wycombe. She was part of the early Methodist movement led by John Wesley. Beginning in 1769, she taught children about faith and helped educate those with few other opportunities.
Early Methodism relied heavily on ordinary church members teaching and leading small groups. John Wesley became an enthusiastic supporter. In 1787, he visited a Methodist Sunday School in Bolton with about 800 children and roughly 80 volunteer teachers.
Eight hundred children in Sunday School.
Apparently, recruiting Sunday School teachers has been a Methodist concern for a very long time.
Sunday School crossed the Atlantic quickly. Francis Asbury, an early leader of American Methodism, supported the idea, and by 1790 Methodist conferences were encouraging Sunday schools.
Sunday School soon became enormous.
In 1827, the Methodist Episcopal Church, one of the main ancestors of today’s United Methodist Church, organized its own Sunday School Union. Within a year, it reported more than 1,000 schools and about 68,000 students. By 1866, Methodist Sunday schools were serving nearly 918,000 students.
Women taught classes and kept local Sunday schools running week after week. African American Methodists built strong educational ministries too. In a country where racism and segregation restricted educational opportunities, Black churches created their own institutions and teaching materials. In 1882, the African Methodist Episcopal Church established a Sunday School Union to support that work.
Sunday School became important enough to change church buildings.
In the late 1860s, Methodist layman Lewis Miller worked with architect Jacob Snyder on a new Sunday School space in Akron, Ohio. A large central room was surrounded by smaller classrooms. Movable walls let everyone gather together, then separate into age groups for lessons.
Does that remind you of a sanctuary you may know? Hint: ours.
Look at the balcony and upstairs area of Groveport UMC. Our space shows many of the same ideas that made the Akron Plan popular. Movable walls could open so one person could lead singing for everyone, then close again for individual classes.
In 1874, Miller and Methodist educator John Heyl Vincent created a summer training gathering at Chautauqua Lake in New York. It eventually grew into the Chautauqua Institution, a major center for education and culture.
Over the next several generations, Sunday School gradually changed. As public schools became more common, churches focused less on basic literacy and more on Scripture, Christian teaching, relationships, and spiritual growth.
Family life changed too. Weekly church attendance became less automatic, schedules grew more crowded, and churches began offering more informal ways for children and youth to connect and grow in faith, including youth groups, children’s worship, camps, service projects, and weekday activities. Sunday School remained an important part of church life alongside these newer forms of ministry.
Some churches now use broader terms such as “Christian Education,” “Faith Formation,” or “Discipleship.” Faith Formation is a broader way of talking about all the places where people learn to live their faith, including Sunday School, worship, small groups, service projects, home, and everyday life.
Sunday School has always worked best when churches pay attention to the people in front of them and ask what will actually help them learn, belong, and grow in faith.
After more than 250 years, we are still doing what Hannah Ball and generations of Sunday School teachers did before us: figuring out how to help people keep growing in their life with God.
Blessings,
Pastor Rick
