Of Raikes and Ragamuffins

Sunday schools turn 200 and are showing their age

Two centuries ago, a plumpish, well-dressed man went about the slums of Gloucester, England, inquiring "if there were any decent, well-disposed women in the neighborhood." The man was Robert Raikes, a rich philanthropist and newspaper publisher. He was looking for women who were "well disposed" to teach reading, and he found four of them. For a fee of a shilling, he later recalled, they agreed to take "as many children as I should send them upon the Sundays."

The children met in private homes. They studied the entire day, starting at 10 in the morning, with an hour's break at noon, followed by church worship and classes until 5:30 p.m. If they used the Bible it was as a means to learn reading. And if they met on Sunday, that was because it was the only day they had free. For Raikes' proteges were children of England's new industrial poor. They had no schools. Six days a week, starting at age seven, they worked in the local pin mills, sometimes for 15 hours a day.

Raikes hoped that a little bit of learning might help these "ragamuffins" to better themselves in life. Yet his attempt at social progress was criticized in the press as subversive to the "peace and tranquility which constitute the happiness of society." Even churchmen excoriated the new schools as a violation of the Sabbath. One clergyman, however, a Methodist named John Wesley, took a different view. "Who knows," Wesley wrote in 1784, "but what some of these schools may become nurseries for Christians."

One half of Raikes' humane idea eventually grew into the English free school system.

The other half fully lived up to Wesley's prediction. Especially in America. Into the 1950s, some 90% of the Protestant Church's new members came from Sunday schools.

Millions of Americans can recall weekly church-basement Bible sessions, with their choruses of Jesus Loves Me, Christmas pageants acted by angels with dusty bathrobes, and piggy banks crammed with pennies for the poor.

These memories are not always happy, of course. One person may remember only that in the first grade he thought the books of the Bible were named after four odiously well-behaved Sunday school classmates named Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. A second can still summon up the sense of majesty and magic that came upon first hearing of the escape from Egypt and the miracle of the loaves and the fishes. William Willimon, now teaching at Duke University's divinity school, fondly looks back on a "church that still believed that Christians were made, not born, and that someone had to get with you, for at least an hour on Sunday morning, or you would not make it."

Today the National Council of Churches likes to boast that Sunday schools are still the nation's biggest volunteer enterprise, with a total enrollment of 35.6 million (27.1 million Protestant, 8.5 million Catholic). Still, if Wesley were alive, he would be glum. Except for conservative churches like the Southern Baptists, who are doing well, Sunday school participation has dropped by almost 25% in the past ten years. "Mainline" Protestant churches--Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopal, have been worst hit. Says California's Institute for American Church Growth: "The Sunday school is in a desperate struggle for its very existence."

The reasons cited are familiar to anyone who has wondered about the decline of U.S. education generally. Teachers are inadequate. Children distracted by television are not interested in book learning. And there are the accumulated influences of modern life, ranging from divorce and the decline of the family to lack of religious conviction and the desire to sleep late on Sunday. Some feel that watered-down liberalism has driven serious parents away. Yet modern attempts to replace Bible stories with complicated theology can confuse young children. A five-year-old girl, wrestling with the concept of transubstantiation, asked: "If I eat the wafer, will it bleed?" Some churches have given up on teaching teenagers. Even in the lower grades, when children love storytelling and are at their most impressionable, Sunday school programs sometimes degenerate into weekend playpens whose inmates kill time filling in biblical coloring books. Offering "one cheer for the 200-year-old Sunday school," Church Historian Martin Marty describes the prevalent stereotype, parents who drop their children off for a "weekly spiritual pit stop."

All manner of experiments are being tried. Some churches have switched Sunday school to Wednesday evening so it will not interfere with the weekend. Classes are held in private homes instead of in church, a throwback to Raikes' original idea of setting up a school wherever the students are. Perhaps more significant, in Brookline, Mass., Rector W. Christian Koch has quadrupled Sunday school attendance at All Saints Episcopal Church by integrating the school with the regular Sunday service: children sit with their parents, then depart during the sermon for 45 minutes of instruction. They return for the offertory, prayer of consecration and Communion. "Being included," Koch insists, "teaches the children more than 10,000 Sunday school lessons could." Koch's program, like the practice of the thriving Baptist Sunday schools, seems to bear out one fact: lesson plans, visual aids, outings are all well and good, but Sunday schools cannot flourish if parents do not go to church with their children. Worship has to be a family experience. -

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