When to have Sunday School

Sunday School was a time of classroom education/learning to read, ie, a "school" for illiterates in the slums of London (aka "Raikes Wild Geese" because they were so unruly).

For some reason some churches began to think such education for already literate children was needed, teaching them (we hope) Bible truths.

There is NO precedence or foundation for Sunday School in the NT. It is the parents' duty to teach/train the child. It is the church's duty to meet for worship.

Answer to op - we do not have Sunday School. Period. We have a 2.5 hr unified service with all ages together the entire time. We supply study material for the fathers to teach the children at home. All of our families home-school with rich Bible curriculum; conventional SS materials would be at best a weak review.

And we have horror stories of what has gone on in conventional Sunday Schools - well-meaning old ladies teaching heresies with parents abrogating their responsibility and letting the training of their children left up to others.

 

Doctrinal fidelity is the "requirement" for membership. Salvation testimony, obedience in immersion as a believer, faithful testimony before the world, commitment to the Body, and upholding the oldest English Baptist confession of faith.

It is just a statement of fact that all of our families opt for parental education rather than secular education of children, not a requirement.

Most parents do not feel that government education is in line with biblical teaching. When we had children in our home we had them in the best Christian School in America (not a joke) thru 6th grade, then home-schooled them in the teen years.

 

Robert Raikes was born in 1735 in Gloucester, England, where his father published the Gloucester Journal. When the elder Raikes died in 1757, Robert, 22, inherited the newspaper, and immediately used it to crusade for moral reform. English prisons, for example, were inhumane places of misery where prisoners, crowded into tiny compartments with no ventilation or sanitary facilities, died of “gaol fever.” Raikes visited them, raised money for them, and taught them to read. His penetrating newspaper columns repeatedly called attention to their plight.

One Saturday afternoon in 1780, Robert discovered another cause to champion. He entered a slummy suburb of Gloucester to interview a prospective gardener. Swarms of children surrounded him, and Raikes recoiled in horror at their fighting, profanity, stench, gambling, and filth. He returned home shaken and almost immediately conceived a plan for Sunday schools. Such schools had already been tried, but without widespread backing. Raikes hired four Christian women to open schools on Sunday. Why Sunday? Children worked in the factories the other six days of the week, but on Sunday they ran wild.

The portly Raikes, primly dressed and carrying an elegant snuffbox and tasseled cane, ambled through the ghettoes day after day recruiting pupils. The children began calling him “Bobby Wild Goose.” But in his Sunday schools, they were taught to read, then they learned the Bible, the Catechism, and other subjects.

Three years later, after the schools were clearly working, Raikes used his newspaper to promote them. On November 3, 1783 the Gloucester Journal published an article on the success of Sunday schools. To Raikes’s surprise, London papers picked up the story and inquiries poured in from across England. The movement spread rapidly. And the rest, as they say, is history.

The form of Sunday school changed, yet millions of all ages find their way each week to Sunday school to learn of Christ.

[Morgan, R. J. "On this day: 365 amazing and inspiring stories about saints, martyrs & heroes" (electronic ed.). Thomas Nelson Publishers: Nashville 1997