Sunday Schools

It’s not easy to find out how and when Sunday Schools as we know them began. What is clear, though, is that as long ago as the mid 1700s, British innovators began to teach poor working children to read and write on their only free day, Sunday. “Robert Raikes (1735-1811) is traditionally credited as pioneering Sunday Schools … 'in fact teaching Bible reading and basic skills on a Sunday was an established activity in a number of eighteenth century Puritan and evangelical congregations'. … The idea of the Sunday School caught the imagination of a number involved in evangelical churches and groupings.” (http://www.infed.org/walking/wa-raikes.htm)

Here are some random examples from a quick internet search:

“There are places of worship in the parish for Baptists, independents, the primitive, Wesleyan, and new connexion of methodists, and the Roman Catholics - all of which have Sunday schools attached. There are, besides, a national school, and a free grammar school for a limited number of boys. [From: Pigot & Co's 1841 Directory of Staffordshire]” (http://www.thepotteries.org/church/history_burslem.htm)

“In the late nineteenth century when the Rector started to take up residence, a Sunday school was begun.” (From a history of St. .Mary’s Church, Hardwick, at http://www.hardwick-cambs.org.uk/church/history.htm)

“The first Pastor of the Chapel was the Rev. Joseph Walker, who was appointed in 1797. In 1798 he drew up rules and articles for the conduct of the Chapel and its members. In the same year Rev. Walker founded a Sunday School.” (From a history of Peppard Congregational Church, Henley-on-Thames, at http://www.alan.thomas30.btinternet.co.uk/Church_History/church_history.html)

“In 1808 the first church was built on that site and served a thriving cause until 1870. Part of the work of this fellowship was concerned with running a large and flourishing Sunday School. In those far off days it was customary for the Sunday School to organise classes in reading on other days of the week too and so it was that the church extended their grounds westward by buying a bit of land from Messrs. T. & E. Ricketts. In 1858 a schoolroom to be used for both Sunday School and day school was built.” (From a history of Eastington Methodist Church at http://www.pikelock.co.uk/emchurch/history.html)

“Mr. John Thompson started a Sunday school in his own house, in the High Street, Wetherby on Sunday 23rd August 1833 … at a later date the Sunday school was held on the Church premises … at one time as many as 230 children regularly attended the Sunday School. The Sunday school met at 9:30am and again at 2:00pm every Sunday. The morning session was usually in the form of a bible study, and then the children would proceed into Chapel for the morning service. After many years, they were permitted to leave just before the sermon.” (From a history of Wetherby Methodist Church at http://www.wetherbymethodist.org.uk/history/index.html.)

That last quotation is telling, as it shows how, over time, Sunday school evolved from rudimentary education of children to a way for churches to teach children (and adults) about the Bible and denominational beliefs through standardised lessons.

Perhaps this is speculation but …

What if, by creating separate classes for children at the same time as adult worship, the churches (unknowingly) began to create a culture that expected adults and children to be separated?

What if the creation of Sunday Schools led to children no longer being welcomed or accommodated in ‘adult’ church?

What if, as a result of the children no longer being present, adult worship evolved into something
much more cerebral and ‘wordy’ than it had been?

What if we adults have become so ‘comfortable’ with a form of worship that excludes children that we can’t imagine them worshipping with us, or us worshipping with them?

What if we all scrapped our Sunday Schools and learned to worship together?

‘Child-friendly’ Churches?

“In a small local restaurant in Bologna my younger daughter noticed the wide age-range of the other diners – some seven decades must have separated the oldest and the youngest. Two young couples occupied a neighbouring table; at another there was a family celebration. Of course, you can see several generations of one family eating out in Britain, too, sometimes in the same restaurant as young couples, but what was different was that all of them were eating the same food. The words ‘child-friendly’ were nowhere to be seen.’

So begins an article by Anne Karpf in Saturday’s Guardian (24/3/07). And it got my mind working overtime about the way we feed children spiritually in our churches. We separate them from the adults, reject them from the main worship event, in order to teach them sanitised Bible stories and get them colouring, cutting and gluing. We offer them a supposedly ‘child-friendly’ experience of church. But what if our child-friendly Sunday Schools (or whatever we call them) are, as Karpf suggests, just “a euphemism for unhealthy ... reconstituted gunk.”

In Western societies (and in Western churches, I suggest) we have “cut children off from the blood supply of adult culture and immured them in a ghetto of children.” We think that we’re doing them a favour, looking out for their interests. We think they will be bored, unstimulated, if we offer them the same menu we give the adults in church. (And perhaps they would be – but then perhaps some of the adults are, too!) But then, when the children are in church for some special service or event, we complain that they don’t know how to behave, that “they don’t know how to get on with all age groups or respect old people.”

Karpf says: “The best advice I ever received about feeding children was to get them eating the same as you as quickly as possible … Instead of cordoning off kids into child-friendly menus and restaurants, we need to induct kids into adult culture, and make it a place for all generations to meet.”

Is it possible that our ‘child-friendly’ Sunday Schools are precisely the reason why we are losing children from our churches? Is it possible that the default separatist position of most of our churches is what is responsible for the decline in numbers of children (and adults)? Can we even imagine church without junior church?

I have a dream … of a church where all are fed together. A church where old and young love and respect one another, and are willing to learn from each other. A place for all generations to meet together and with their God.

children and faith

“Children have little awareness of travelling time or the stress of preparing for the journey but they do travel with us and have a unique and dynamic understanding of God’s love … People often say that children are the church of the future. This is wrong. Children belong to the church of today, but will be adults in the church of tomorrow. How children experience their membership of the church now will form their participation in the church in the future.”

- Lake, Let the Children come to Communion (2006, SPCK), p.x

children and church: more quotes

“There are those who … argue that in order for there to be any teaching of substance separate age groups are a necessity. Usually the assumption behind this attitude is that ‘proper’ teaching takes the format of a traditional sermon and that this is the most effective way for adults to engage with Scripture. Those unable to sit still for the duration of a twenty-five minute exposition are removed to activities that are supposedly more appropriate for their age.”
- Mountstephen & Martin, The Body Beautiful (2004, Grove Books Ltd.), p.23-24

More often than not, on a Sunday morning, “the children are in a classroom, not a sacred space – a classroom, moreover, that is likely to be small, unattractive, and untidy … Even the most basic act of worship, participation in the eucharist, is usually closed to children … [We] operate on the unspoken assumption that children must learn how to be Christians, in an academic setting, before they can actually begin to do any of the things that Christians normally do together in the community of faith: pray together, celebrate the sacraments, share their faith and their lives, cherish the hope of things unseen, and bear witness in love and service in the world. … the usual time for Sunday School is during the time of the main worship service. Adults come to church on Sunday in order to worship; children come to Sunday School to acquire information.”
- Wolff Pritchard, Offering the Gospel to Children (1992, Cowley Publications), p.140-141

“A procedure for Christian education which consists only or mainly of formal instruction by way of an address from the front, the audience remaining at best receptive, at worst passive, heavily stresses the transfer of information at the cost of a failure to develop aesthetic or any other feelings or value commitments. It …fails to feed the emotional or other dimensions of personality, or to represent a biblical and Christian understanding of human nature. Such a method is therefore at fault on theological and social as well as on educational grounds.”
- Being God’s people (1987, Methodist Division of Education and Youth and the National Christian Education Council), quoted by Sutcliffe (ed.), Tuesday’s Child (2001, Christian Education Publications), p.168

Children's Bibles?

“Studies of so-called ‘Children’s Bibles’ or ‘Bibles for Children’ reveal a substantial problem. They reflect prevailing fashions and worldviews, and an adult gate keeping or selection of what is felt to be suitable for children. One myth is that adults understand the whole Bible whereas children can only understand certain adult-selected parts! … We have sold children short.”
- White, Continuing the Search (www.childtheology.org)

“We carve up the Bible into “Bible stories,” so that few children even suspect that the story of God’s people – our story – is not a collection of object lessons or heartwarming anecdotes, but a long story of unbearable loss – and unbearable hope.”

- Wolff Pritchard, Offering the Gospel to Children (1992, Cowley Publications), p.4

We “violate the story … by telling it in snippets, out of order, and treating it chiefly as a source of themes and moral maxims.”

- Wolff Pritchard, Offering the Gospel to Children (1992, Cowley Publications), p.44

Sunday School?

“… the task of Christian education should not and cannot be left to a few individuals who are identified as teachers. All are teachers, whether they recognise it or not, and equally all are learners, whether they recognise it or not. … those churches which devolve their educational responsibility for the young as a burden on a few individuals not only neglect their responsibility but also fail to appreciate that church life itself is an effective educational medium.”

- Being God’s people (1987, Methodist Division of Education and Youth and the National Christian Education Council),

quoted by Sutcliffe (ed.), Tuesday’s Child (2001, Christian Education Publications), p.167

children and the church: more quotes

Here are another couple of good quotes. And one of these is from 1943

“Christian education is no substitute for real, living membership in the community of faith. [But] the church has continued to segregate children from the worshipping community where its own life is most richly lived.”

- Wolff Pritchard, Offering the Gospel to Children (1992, Cowley Publications), p.141

“Christian teaching is so often a predominantly intellectual lesson, a matter of words, not of experience embodied in the relationships of a group … the young are not being nurtured in a community which expresses right through its whole life a common set of true values …”

- from Reeves, Children of the Future (1943, The Kingsbury Press),

quoted by Sutcliffe (ed.), Tuesday’s Child (2001, Christian Education Publications), pp.34-35

all age church

Look at the date on this quotation! 1974! Why was no one listening?

“It has yet to be demonstrated that adults learn and perceive in ways which are decisively different from those in which children learn. … The generalisation that a person notices twenty per cent of what he hears, thirty per cent of what he sees, fifty per cent of what he both hears and sees, seventy per cent of what he himself says and ninety per cent of what he himself does is true, irrespective of the age of the person …

"The challenge to the church is that in its dealings with adults it will have to find the courage to move away … from an educational approach derived from ancient Greece and to develop the use of an experiential approach which has validity for both children and adults …

"The involvement of children in the total community life of the church might cause church leaders to take seriously how people of all ages learn … This could set in motion profound changes in church life."

- from Sutcliffe, Learning Community (1974, NCEC), quoted by Sutcliffe (ed.), Tuesday’s Child (2001, Christian Education Publications), pp.36-37

Children and Faith - a quotation

“The disciples (church) continued to argue about greatness. Even after the Sermon on the Mount, in which all our categories are flipped on their heads and everything is turned upside down, they were arguing over greatness. Even after Jesus had blessed the poor, the hungry, and the persecuted, the disciples were still fixated on greatness. Worldiness is a hard habit to break.
In response, Jesus called to Himself a child – the essence of one who is powerless, dependent, needy, little and poor. He placed the child ‘in the midst of them,’ as a concrete, visible sacrament of how the Kingdom looks. Jesus’ act with the child is interesting. In many of our modern, sophisticated congregations, children are often viewed as distractions. We tolerate children only to the extent they promise to become ‘adults’ like us. Adult members sometimes complain that they cannot pay attention to the sermon, they cannot listen to the beautiful music, when fidgety children are beside them in the pews. ‘Send them away,’ many adults say. Create ‘Children’s Church’ so these distracting children can be removed in order that we adults can pay attention.
Interestingly, Jesus put a child in the centre of His disciples, ‘in the midst of them,’ in order to help them pay attention. The child, in Jesus’ mind, was not an annoying distraction. The child was a last-ditch effort by God to help the disciples pay attention to the odd nature of God’s kingdom. Few acts of Jesus are more radical, more counter-cultural, than His blessing of children.”

Hauerwas & Willimon, Resident Aliens (1989, Abingdon Press), p.96