The Rise and Fall of Sunday School
ceremonial brick laying, Christian education wing, 1960, First Presbyterian Church Edwardsville.
When we hear the scripture texts for today, we may be reminded of our personal experience of Sunday school. Your Sunday school may have been as familiar as your public school; it certainly was for me. To remind ourselves about that golden age we lived through, I’ll share two remembrances.
The first remembrance comes from Robert Wuthnow, former director of Princeton University’s Center for the Study of Religion, and recently retired dean of the faculty. A chapter in one of his books begins with a description of the annual Sunday school parade in Brooklyn, NY, one Thursday in June, 1946.[1] Churches led the effort, but city and state officials participated. Public schools were closed for the day so that children could participate. Wuthnow says that the highly coordinated event provides evidence of a widely held assumption at that time that civic duty included belief in God and support of a faith community.
The second remembrance is shared by Stephenie Perdew, a United Church of Christ pastor, who teaches part time at Garrett-Evangelical Seminary. [2] She has written a piece that informs much of this sermon, and from which I’ve borrowed the title. In this piece, she recalls the Sunday school rooms of her childhood, in the new Christian Education wing of her church. In her memories, the rooms and corridors are similar to what many of us remember. “The floors are speckled tile,” she writes, “with a vinyl baseboard. The walls are cinder block painted in pale yellow, blue, mint green, or off white. A rug designates the space for the Bible story circle time, which includes the beloved felt board for illustrating the stories with people and animals …. Posters … hang on the walls, depicting little children gathered around Jesus. There are Dixie cups for grape or apple juice, served with animal crackers or, later goldfish …. We heard and memorized scripture in those rooms. We made endless crafts – tangentially related to the day’s Bible verses – of popsicle sticks, paper plates, pipe cleaners, tissue paper, glitter, and glue. We sang songs, learned hymns, memorized the Gloria Patri and Doxology and Lord’s Prayer. We knew that Jesus loved us. We knew that here is the church and here is the steeple. We dressed for Christmas pageants in those rooms and wore our Easter finest after weaving palm crosses the week before …. “
“These Sunday school wings,” she says, “emerged in the 1950s and 60s in response to the baby boom. At my grandmother’s church, the 1920s era … building was equipped with a Sunday school addition by the 1950s.” (Soon, more space was needed).
These two remembrances give us some impressions about the rise of Sunday school eighty years ago, in the wake of World War II. As attention turned from defeating enemy nations back to the homeland, American Christians turned their energy to organizing the Church’s ministries with similar discipline and energy. Post-WWII was a period of renewed cooperation between church and state, and church attendance for many was not only a Christian duty, but also a patriotic duty. This was time of the baby boom, the time of everyone bringing their children to Sunday school, the time when church building programs boomed, and when our congregation’s CE wing at Kansas Street location was conceived and dedicated (in 1960).
Forty years ago, when I was a pastoral intern in training, many of us enrolled in at least one Christian education course. It might not have seemed so engaging as biblical studies or theology. But we all knew that in our career paths, whether as an associate pastor or a solo pastor, we likely would be in charge of Christian Education programs, and would need some general guidance about what we were doing. Indeed, my ministries in Wichita and Springfield involved major expenditures of time designing curriculum and building schedules. If you were to examine my recruiting logs from 30 years ago, then you’d see I would engage in telephone or in-person conversations with nearly 100 volunteers in order to staff Sunday School from Sept. – May with a different staff for summer Sunday school, and a third staff mix for Vacation Bible School.
Today, the world looks quite different. The support of Christian education by public schools is largely forbidden, whether you like it that way or not. Some churches enjoy a good relationship with school and community leaders, as this congregation historically has. But notions that school leaders are obligated to be present in Christian worship, or that Sunday extracurricular activities should be limited in order that students could participate in their faith communities, these seem to be outdated ideas. The old pattern of the church and community working together hand-in-hand is less common, and no longer exists in many places.
In Europe, there was a time when steeples were the tallest point of a city, an ever present reminder of the citizens’ primary allegiance. Today, a drive around our neighborhood would reveal a couple structures much taller than our steeple. Probably the tallest of all is a cell tower south of us, and second tallest is the set of driving range netting poles at the Park North Golf Club to the east. These tall structures are symbols of our contemporary devotion (and even addiction) to smartphones and sports. For some, they have supplanted devotion to God.
Faith Formation Sunday in the church once brought promotion of large classes to their new grades, distribution of new Bibles at various levels, prayers of dedication for a new staff of volunteer educators. I probably don’t need to tell you how different the landscape looks today. Many students of the age that would have made Sunday school classrooms feel teeming with life 40 years ago, today are at any number of school- or special-interest related activities, which places them nowhere near a church on Sunday. We are grateful for the ones whose families prioritize worship and Christian education!
Stephanie Perdew, the Christian education expert I mentioned earlier, says her current ministry involves visiting congregations where the change in circumstances is openly grieved. “They are asking,” she writes, “what failed in their curriculum or church life. After their efforts to adapt, with program after program, the empty classrooms haunt them. It’s hard for them to hear that they are swimming against big cultural and demographic tides ….”
“Those Sunday school wings were built at the height of American church attendance thus far. It was the spike in the curve, not the overall norm …. It is hard to remind people witnessing a death that there will be a resurrection. It took a while for the disciples to believe it too.”
Some of my fellow preachers would remind me – some of you might remind me – that what we experience here and now isn’t a sermon unless there is some expression of God’s good news. What is the good news in circumstances like we find ourselves today? I think there is good news each time a group of children – or adults – gathers to learn. Young and/or old; new people and/or familiar people: “Where two or three are gathered in my name,” says Jesus, “there I am in their midst.” And wherever Jesus is, there always is the possibility of resurrection.
Stephenie Perdew writes, “What the resurrection looks like is already becoming apparent in other parts of the world. In the United States, it may involve a faithful remnant of congregations, not every particular local church and its Sunday school wing. I see it happening on the ‘praygrounds’ springing up in sanctuaries where it has occurred to someone that children learn to worship by attending worship, not by being sent out to Sunday school during the worship hour. I see it happening in multi-age classrooms where the elders guide and the confirmands assist and the parents who need formation themselves, are free to go to their own class.”
Perdew thinks about this future in light of her retirement. She says that when she retires, she wants to run a new sort of Sunday school. “I’ll do it with whatever is left …. I’ll gather just a few children on that rug and maybe even pull out the flannel board instead of a Veggie Tales video. We’ve got centuries of faith formation up our sleeve for the few or the many who will gather. We will be able to share the gospel whether or not there is a Sunday school wing.”
May it be so among us.
NOTES
[1] Chapter one in Robert Wuthnow’s The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith Since World War II, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988.
[2] Stephenie Perdew’s writing, which is featured in this sermon and from which I borrowed the sermon title, may be found in her article, “The Rise and Fall of Sunday school,” The Christian Century, September 2025, pp. 32-33.
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