Publisher’s Pen: Sunday School’s Firm Foundation

illustration by Viktor Miller-Gausa

Dale Mason
Publisher

Six days each week, these children toiled inside. Most of them worked in dangerous manufacturing plants, such as Gloucester’s pin factories,2 while others were compelled to squirm up into tight chimneys and brush toxic ash from the suffocating flues.3 From dawn to dusk six days each week, the poverty-stricken children were kept busy eking out an existence and doing so out of sight. However, this was Sunday.

On the Sabbath—the only day most of the children were not working—such kids often ended up in trouble. Their rowdy play frequently became vandalism. Illiterate and unaware of the gospel, they needed transformation that came through knowing Jesus and living by the Bible. What could be done to help and reach the children of Raikes’ city?

Taking boys and girls off the streets on Sundays led to a movement whereby impoverished and illiterate children learned to read and received other basic education and moral training.4 The Bible was the primary text in the Sunday-only educational effort that was soon known as “Sunday school”—and the movement spread. After America’s Revolutionary War, in the 1790s England’s Sunday schooling movement jumped the Atlantic to the United States.5

General literacy among the masses of child factory laborers and eventually among farm children greatly increased. In the process, the gospel of Christ penetrated the hearts of students and teachers alike. Within two generations, tens of thousands of mostly rural Sunday-only schools eventually gave way to weekday schools. Many of those were also the foundation for churches. And both general literacy and biblical literacy exploded.

What began as an effort to evangelize and educate illiterate and at-risk children6 gave millions on both sides of the Atlantic a solid foundation in the truth of God’s Word.

Today, virtually every church has a Sunday school, but most children who attend end up walking away from the faith. Sunday school is an invaluable tool when it equips children to truly believe and defend the Bible. Conversely, Sunday school can be dangerous when it incorporates false or weak doctrine.

In our Bible & Culture section this issue (page 35), see Amber Pike’s article on how to watch for faulty doctrines that might be lurking in your child’s Sunday school.