Does Sunday School Really Work?

I can remember when I became the pastor of the first church I served in that position. Our church was in a rural setting in a small village along the Ohio River. The church had a parsonage and I could literally look out a bedroom window and see the church building less than 70 feet away. When the dust settled from moving in our furniture, I remember looking out a window to admire the church building. Then my eyes wondered past the building to the community around it. A sudden realization hit me. I was now responsible to organize and guide our church to reach the people in our community. Frankly, my formal training did not really prepare me for that part of my job and I began to feel some anxiety about how to help the church reach out to the lost and unchurched.

As I began to pray, my mind began to go back to a Sunday School conference that my home church had hosted for our Association in Columbus,Ohio. A dynamic preacher named Leon Kilbreth had taught us that following good Sunday School practices would reach the lost and grow the church. I bought Mr. Kilbreth’s sermon tapes and began to put his teachings into practice. In the first five years we saw our attendance grow from 107 to 139. Nine years later, in the second church I pastored, we also used Sunday School as a primary tool for reaching our community. We saw our average attendance grow from 30 people to 230 people in 11 years. Naturally, I am convinced that the Sunday School really works, but I am not the only one.

Steve Parr researched the growth of the Georgia Baptist Convention and put some of his findings in a book entitled, Sunday School that Really Works. He researched the top 100 fastest growing Sunday Schools based on percentage growth. He had churches of all sizes in that group and found that in three years, these churches averaged 58% more baptisms while the entire convention had 1.6% fewer baptisms. The bottom line is this, when the Sunday School grows in a church, more people are saved and baptized.

Thom Rainer is the president of LifeWay Christian Resources—formerly the Baptist Sunday School Board. He researched churches of various denominations and made a surprising discovery about the “keeping power” of the Sunday School. In his book, Surprising Insights from the Unchurched, his research shows that 83% of new converts stay connected and faithful to the church when they are involved in the Sunday School, while only 16% stay faithful in church attendance if they are not immediately connected to a Sunday School class. That tells us that being in a Sunday School class nearly guarantees that a person will not backslide into unfaithfulness! What other program can make that kind of claim?

Let me give you some of my own “research.” Nearly all of the people who attend a Sunday School class do so because they were invited by someone now active in Sunday School. That is more common sense than hard research, but we all know it is true. People return to Sunday School because they have a good experience when they come—the teacher is prepared and interesting and they are well received by class members. People will attend Sunday School regularly when they develop relationships with the people in their class. They develop relationships to a certain level when they attend the class, but the relationships grow deeper when they meet outside the class in an atmosphere of fun and fellowship.

Does Sunday School really work? It does as long as we are willing to work it!