Sunday School and Secularization

Since the late 18th century, when the first Sunday schools appeared in Great Britain, a particular type of church education has been considered essential in many quarters for passing the faith to the next generation. Could it be that inattention to the Sunday school is a contributor to declining attendance in worship services, leading in turn to a general secularization of the larger culture? Experience living and working in two countries suggests to me the possibility of such a connection.

I grew up in Wheaton, Illinois, USA, located some 40 kilometres west of Chicago. During my childhood and youth, our family was part of two successive congregations in two different denominations. Both put great emphasis on Sunday school classes for the entire family. Due primarily to the presence of Wheaton College, one of the premier Christian universities in North America, the city of Wheaton became known as the centre of scores of conservative protestant enterprises. Few actual denominations were headquartered there, but a variety of parachurch organizations, such as foreign mission societies and publishing houses, called Wheaton home. The Scripture Press headquarters at the city’s eastern edge supplied Sunday school material for generations of children and youth in area churches.

The two congregations where we worshipped had this much in common: they held Sunday school classes for every age before the worship service, thus dividing our church experience into two complementary segments. The smaller children continued into the second part with their own worship separate from the regular service, but I was old enough to sit with the adults, even if I was not always paying attention to what was happening up front.

This persisted into early adulthood, during my undergraduate and graduate studies. The United Methodist church I attended in university followed the same pattern, as did the Christian Reformed congregation in South Bend, Indiana, where I worshipped alongside such well-known scholars as Alvin Plantinga and Nathan Hatch.

When I arrived in Canada, however, I noticed a different pattern. Sunday school was primarily for the children, who were herded out of the service after the scripture readings and the “children’s sermon” but before the adult sermon. Children might “graduate” from Sunday school around age 13, or they might continue to be separated from the adults into secondary school. Too frequently, graduating from Sunday school in effect meant, not joining the adults, but graduating from church altogether. Thus Canada has a vast, but slowly diminishing, army of inactive members whose church connections are vestiges of a lapsed childhood faith.

Although Canada once had a higher rate of church attendance than the United States, this has decreased significantly in recent decades, with Quebec’s Quiet Revolution skewing the statistics downwards. During that same time US church attendance largely remained steady, declining in some regions but kept aloft by the so-called Bible Belts of the South and Midwest.

There are undoubtedly many factors contributing to the diverging trends in the two countries. For example, in the US religion has always had something of an entrepreneurial flavour, with celebrity preachers and evangelists gaining personal followings in a competitive marketplace environment. Short of these more visible manifestations, the US is characterized by an extreme form of denominationalism rooted in a celebration of individual liberty nearly for its own sake. The church section in the old yellow pages volumes reputedly advised readers to “attend the church of your choice.”

By contrast, Canada is heir to an establishmentarian ethos imported from Great Britain, with the major protestant denominations once depending on generically protestant public schools to educate their young. With the dawn of an unofficial secularizing establishment in the 1960s, especially in the two largest provinces of Ontario and Québec, the social connection between respectability and church attendance was broken. As a result active membership in the Anglican, United and Presbyterian Churches is now a fraction of what it once was.

Another factor, and certainly the most significant in my view, is the substance of what is being taught in these denominations. Many so-called mainline protestant churches have effectively given up on the gospel message, substituting in its place pep talks on recycling, climate change and social issues. Because people can easily find such messages in the print and electronic media, getting up for church on Sunday mornings comes to seem rather pointless. Thus have the vastly reduced protestant bodies made themselves superfluous in Canada’s religious landscape, coasting ever downwards on the strength of a diminishing stock of spiritual and social capital.

Nevertheless, I cannot help but wonder whether changing the pattern of church education might have some effect in keeping young people in church. Without the gospel message, of course, there is little to be said for “doing” church or Sunday school at all. But if we continue to preach the gospel, refusing to water it down for the sake of currying the favour of the larger culture, an important secondary step may well be to establish and maintain a church education programme for all ages.

Canada, Church