(By Dale Hudson) Sunday School. Some churches still use this term for their Bible study hour at church. But a large percentage of church leaders would say the term is an ancient relic that has been lost in the progressions of change. Is Sunday School an ancient term? Well, it is over 230 years old. It originated in Britain in the 1780s. During this time of the Industrial Revolution, many children spent six days a week working in factories, which resulted in them being illiterate. Christian leaders of the day wanted to do something to change that.
Sunday was the only available time for these children to gain some education. Robert Raikes, an English Anglican evangelical, was a key leader in starting the Sunday School movement. The first “Sunday Schools” were literally schools. They were places where poor children could learn to read. Soon Sunday School spread to America. Churches everywhere began to create Sunday Schools and the movement became so popular that by the mid 19th century, Sunday School attendance was part of most children’s lives. READ MORE
This subject isn’t even worth discussing and the comments are nauseatingly rhetorical. Presently, the “Adult Services” are teaching the people as if they are in children’s “Sunday School”. I am also not sure how a “study on growing churches” across American can be done when they are doing nothing but shrinking. The growth of the fake chuches, perhaps? Curiously, the average person, would first ask, “Why didn’t the church of that day, fight to at least get the kids a five day work week, since they should not have been enslaved at all?” You can bet the little rich kids were not in the factories working six days a week. Parents today do not want the conveinance of a “one hour deal” because most of them are home in bed while the chuch bus picks up their kids, they want you to keep them all day if possible. The parents attending church, who want the “one hour deal”, have been bored stiff for the last two hours of their own and just want to get home. Studying and discussing, what it is called, is a classic example of wasting time that should be spent reaching the lost on the streets, figuring out why the church is failing at drawing people in and why it cannot answer the basic questions the lost continue to ask and receive no concrete Biblical answer. Matthew 23:27 “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for you are like unto whitewashed sepulchers, which indeed appear beautiful outwardly but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness.” Romans 1:22 “Thinking themselves to be wise, they became as fools.” The atheist and the lost get no answers because the majority of churches do not have the answers, they are stuck in time still nursing on the milk as baby “Christians”. The Christaians who researched for years, who dare to go deeper into the Word of God are considered too, “out there” for the church leaders of today, who just want to remain in their comfort zone and do not want to appear any crazier than the world already labels them. It does not have anything to do with what theological school you graduated from or how many religious degrees you have in front of your name, if the Word of God is not revealed to you by His Spirit, your education and degrees are garbage because you read and teach His Word in your “Own Carnal Interpretation.” Not only is “Sunday School” dying a slow death, so is the entire “real church”. What we have today is a cheap immitation of what the true church used to be.