Sunday School

Heard in the wild

The longer version

What it means

Sunday school is the church's teaching program, run on Sunday alongside worship. For children, it's an age-graded Bible class: preschoolers hear a story and do a craft, elementary kids memorize verses and sing, teens discuss. It may happen before the service (the traditional pattern) or during it, so parents can worship while kids are taught (often called "children's church"). For adults, Sunday school is a class — a Bible study, a topical series — often organized by age group ("the young couples' class," "the senior class") and, in many Baptist and Methodist churches, the primary place adults build friendships.

Why people say it

Christians are told to teach the faith to their children, and Sunday school is how the church helps parents do it. It's also where most Christians learned the Bible stories they know — Noah, David and Goliath, Daniel in the lions' den — and the songs they can still sing. Adult Sunday school exists because Christians never finish learning, and because a class of twenty is a better place to belong than a sanctuary of five hundred.

How to respond

If you're visiting with children, ask the greeter about kids' programs; you'll be shown a check-in desk, a safe and staffed room, and your kids will probably not want to leave. If you're invited to an adult class, it's a low-pressure Bible study with coffee; go once and see. If a Christian mentions a Sunday school teacher who shaped them, that's a common and sincere thing — the person who taught them at eight often mattered more than any pastor.

If you hear it in different churches

Baptist, Methodist, and many evangelical churches have Sunday school for all ages and treat adult classes as central. Presbyterians and Lutherans have children's Sunday school and adult education hours. Catholics call children's religious instruction "CCD" or "faith formation" and often hold it midweek; "Children's Liturgy of the Word" during Mass is the closest parallel. Anglicans say "Sunday school" for children. Non-denominational churches say "kids' ministry" and run it during the service. Orthodox have church school after Liturgy.

Where does “Sunday School” come from?

Deuteronomy 6 commands teaching children the faith; the synagogue school and the catechumenate carried it on. Robert Raikes, a newspaper publisher in Gloucester, England, started the first Sunday school in 1780 to teach reading and the Bible to working children on their only free day; within fifty years the movement had over a million pupils. The American Sunday School Union (1824) spread it across the frontier. As public schools took over literacy, Sunday school became purely religious instruction, and adult classes were added around 1900. The children's-church-during-the-service model dates to the 1970s–80s.

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