Connecting the Christian faith with Children (part seven)

7. Robert Raikes and the Sunday School Movement

The way many of our churches currently operate their ministry to children owes much to the work of Robert Raikes. During the 1780s, Raikes was “concerned with the plight of individuals – especially children – within society and with the crime to which this led.”[1] So, he began “a school for the poor” with a focus primarily on “teaching reading, writing and … manners; but catechetical instruction, reading the Bible and attendance at church were regarded as central from the outset.”[2]

These Sunday schools were established “more for the benefit of those children of parents who did not attend church or chapel than for the benefit of those children who were brought up in practising families.”[3] But “with the founding of weekday day schools, … from 1830, the Sunday Schools came to concentrate more on Bible reading, the formation of children in Christian belief and their ‘habituation’ to regular worship. This shift to a more exclusively religious emphasis – a focus on Sunday rather than school – was accompanied by a move from professional (or, at least, paid) teachers to voluntary helpers.”[4]

Even so, Sunday school came to be seen as being “linked more closely with the idea of school than with the idea of church. Growing up meant leaving behind both school and Sunday school.”[5] With the result that Sunday school, in this form, was “unable to survive the secularisation of Sunday and unable to compete with the growing body of alternative attractions available to young people.”[6]

During the 19th Century, “as mothers took on more responsibility for the care and the moral and spiritual development of children … religious education itself became ‘feminised’ and was seen as somehow ‘beneath’ the job of the serious systematic theologian.”[7]

By “the second decade of the twentieth century both Sunday School and church membership were in decline … Sunday afternoons – the preferred time for most Sunday schools – became unsustainable and the schools began to meet on Sunday morning, at the same time as ‘adult’ church services.”[8]

This meant, though, that numbers were increasingly “restricted to children whose parents went to church.”[9] Another difficulty was that the children “experienced Christian nurture, worship and prayer in separation from the main act of communal worship and away from their parents.”[10] It has been argued that “excluding children from the main Sunday service (or even a part of it) splits the church and puts a question mark against the Christian identity of children as a full part of the body of Christ.”[11] Not only do children “learn best what it is to be an adult worshipper by seeing and hearing other adults worship,”[12] but “adults also have a lot to learn from children.”[13] And some claim that “the decline of the Sunday School is probably a blessing in disguise!”[14]

[1] Francis & Astley, Children, Church and Christian Learning (2002, SPCK), p.37
[2] Francis & Astley, Children, Church and Christian Learning (2002, SPCK), p.36
[3] Francis & Astley, Children, Church and Christian Learning (2002, SPCK), p.201
[4] Francis & Astley, Children, Church and Christian Learning (2002, SPCK), p.38
[5] Francis & Astley, Children, Church and Christian Learning (2002, SPCK), p.201
[6] Francis & Astley, Children, Church and Christian Learning (2002, SPCK), p.201
[7] Bunge, ‘Introduction’, in Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (2001, Eerdmans), p.12 (footnote 21)
[8] Francis & Astley, Children, Church and Christian Learning (2002, SPCK), p.38
[9] Francis & Astley, Children, Church and Christian Learning (2002, SPCK), p.38
[10] Francis & Astley, Children, Church and Christian Learning (2002, SPCK), p.38
[11] Francis & Astley, Children, Church and Christian Learning (2002, SPCK), p.39
[12] Francis & Astley, Children, Church and Christian Learning (2002, SPCK), p.39
[13] Francis & Astley, Children, Church and Christian Learning (2002, SPCK), p.39
[14] Francis & Astley, Children, Church and Christian Learning (2002, SPCK), p.40