Avenues of service

In the Sunday School we have the most urgent and profitable ministry imaginable, and usually we have insufficient people to fulfil it on the necessary scale. Why have our Sunday Schools closed when they provide such important and fulfilling avenues of service for all the Lord’s people?

The Sunday School, as an employer of the gifts of saved people, is a most effective channel of personal assurance. Why do the people of God sometimes lack assurance of salvation? The reason, so often, is because the Sunday School is too small. What has this to do with assurance? The answer is that if God’s people were labouring in the work of the Sunday School, visiting the children, teaching the young, pouring out their hearts in intercession before the Lord for ever-increasing numbers and for conversions, and also praying for personal strength and blessing, they would be so much in touch with God, and receiving so many wonderful answers to their prayers, that they would no longer have an assurance problem. If we have a large Sunday School, then we have many of the members of our fellowship in service, and it is through such service that believers prove the Lord.

Training preachers

Sunday Schools also yield up many ‘incidental’ benefits to the churches. They are, for example, a most effective means of identifying (or disqualifying) and training future preachers. In fact, Sunday Schools are arguably the best schools for preachers which could possibly be devised.

Show us a man who wants to declaim importantly, but who is not interested in young souls. It is because he cannot speak plain, engaging, understandable English, and cannot adjust to different kinds of hearer. He has never struggled to address children or teenagers, or to put things simply and plainly. Such a man would be no use in the ministry, and the Sunday School will reveal that with almost ruthless efficiency.

On the other hand, the Sunday School will draw attention to those who are really apt to teach, and then prove them in endurance and largeness of heart.

Influencing a community

Think, also, of how the Sunday School commends a church to its neighbourhood. Even hardened cynics will often begin to think, ‘Well, they do a lot for the children,’ and develop a soft spot for the church, and greater openness to its approaches.

It is the writer’s experience of many years ago that even a powerful county authority may be moved to extend land and favours because a pioneer church has built a large Sunday School in the community.

Then, finally, who knows what blessing and instrumentality may be given to a church in its adult outreach on account of its faithfulness to the rising generation in its community? For did not the Lord say, ‘He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much’ (Luke 16.10)?

Sunday Schools, without doubt, are not only the best but generally the only feasible means of reaching large numbers of children in our communities, and they still have unique strengths. Have we allowed our appreciation of this ministry to become eroded? Have we lost sight of the opportunities and possibilities?