How my church revived our Sunday school
Christianity Today
October 8, 2026
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Unsplash / Edits by CT
Sunday school was nearly empty.
Our teachers prepared lessons every week and announced them in the church newsletter. Yet three years after the pandemic, adult attendance averaged about 15 in a church with over 300 members. And sometimes, there were no children.
“Zero kids?” I asked the children’s minister. “How often does that happen?”
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She thought. “Thirty percent of Sundays, there are no kids in grades one through five.”
When my own kids were that age, the church offered classes for kindergarteners, first and second graders, third-to-fifth grade girls, and third-to-fifth grade boys. The chatter of busy children spilled into the hallway. Now it was quiet, though the number of kids in our church hadn’t changed much. They just weren’t going to Sunday school.
“What do you think families are doing instead?” I asked the children’s minister.
She shrugged. “I think they got out of the habit during COVID,” she said. “It’s too bad. The youth group is close-knit because all the kids grew up together in Sunday school.”
I did some informal polling. Why weren’t families showing up? A few had kids on intensive sports teams. A few had vacation homes. One scheduled video calls with grandparents early on Sunday mornings. Another said that they didn’t like rushing for the 9:15 a.m. start time; it was too much like a weekday. And one mom told me that her toddler was too little to be in the nursery for both Sunday school and the worship service, so she usually just chose worship.
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None of this was surprising or unreasonable. But the dwindling of Sunday school still struck me as a problem.
Almost 250 years ago, the first Sunday school opened in England to serve child laborers. Founder Robert Rilkes, a clergyman and philanthropist, had observed local children working 12 hours a day, six days a week, with no opportunity for education. He held classes on their only day off, teaching reading and Christian doctrine.
The Sunday school movement spread quickly across England and the United States. By the 1840s, Sunday schools equipped both adults and children to learn the Bible and faith fundamentals. By 1960, 37 million pupils enrolled in the US alone.
Currently, 56 percent of churches offer some kind of Sunday school, but attendance across congregations is at an all-time low. Most weeks, most Christians do not attend church at all, and data shows that fewer than 20 percent show up regularly to a worship service and to a study or prayer group, either on Sundays or during the week.
This combination of larger-group worship and smaller-group formation, for both kids and adults, is crucial for discipleship. But it’s no surprise we’re skipping both. Americans are also spending less time seeing friends, dining out, eating together, visiting the gym, dating, and partying compared to in 2003. When it comes to showing up, we’ve mostly given up.
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“We want to try something new at 9:15,” the children’s minister told me. “For six weeks, kids have Christmas pageant rehearsal. We’re doing a book group for parents at the same time.”
“That’s a great idea,” I said. “Who’s leading?”
She raised her eyebrows. “You?” she asked. I blinked.
My loyalty to Sunday school runs deep. As a child, my family wasn’t religious. (When I was baptized at 12, I was shocked when both my parents came.) But my mom did take me to a local church’s morning class for kids. This was the one hour a week where I could hear about God.
I’ve since attended all kinds of Sunday schools in different denominations, even when I worked in rural Mexico and frequented a tiny escuela dominical. These classes have been dynamic and dull. They’ve functioned as formal lectures and informal discussions. But in each one, I’ve thought theologically alongside other believers at all stages of life and seen our learning play out in our life together.
Once I became a parent, I saw my children benefit from Sunday school. I remember what it was like getting squirrelly kids out of the house on chilly mornings, the little skirmishes over clothing and eating and buckling up. I remembered the relief I felt when my children were welcomed by kind teachers, then settled in half-size chairs with crayons and lesson sheets and snack cups arranged on the counter for later.
What is it, I wondered, that makes a class worth coming back to when there are so many opportunities to opt out? The teaching is important, of course. But my church’s problem didn’t seem to be the quality of the teaching. It was getting over the hurdle of getting together in the first place.
What if the renewal of Sunday school started with getting better at getting together?
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I agreed to the book study and asked eight other people to form a core group of leaders and attendees. They all said yes. We chose Justin Whitmel Earley’s book Habits of the Household as our text.
I wanted to get the details right, especially for people who hadn’t attended Sunday school for years (maybe never!), so I turned to Priya Parker’s popular book The Art of Gathering. Know exactly why you’re meeting, Parker advises, and then “Don’t be a chill host.” Non-chill hosting for our parent study meant arriving early to check the seating, greeting each person warmly, and passing out name tags. Each week, the host (not always me) followed a predictable pattern: interesting icebreaker, content summary, group reflection. The host held necessary silences, redirected persistent talkers, and ended right on time. In other words, the host took care of the group so everyone else could be at ease.
Parker believes that groups are more successful when each person “[keeps their] best self out”—when participants are willing to risk sharing shortcomings and regrets. In the parenting book study, that meant being open about our mistakes and disappointments. If we gave only pat, “Sunday school” answers, we’d cheapen the conversation. Honest talk about our weaknesses helped us realize that we weren’t alone in our parenting failures and gave others the chance to spur us on in love and good deeds.
For that first book, over a dozen parents consistently came to class. When the Christmas pageant was over and done, everyone wanted to keep meeting. We chose a second book, and then a third. While the adults met, their kids attended Sunday school, where they sang through the books of the Bible. We met until mid-June, then took the summer off.
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This September, our church prepared for our upcoming classes, printing bookmarks with the book study chapter schedule. One young mom, whose little boy had just turned 1, stopped by to pick up a copy of the book.
“I’m glad that you think you can come,” I said to her.
“I’m looking forward to it.” She smiled slowly. “Last year it helped my husband and me and our baby feel like a family unit. And feel connected to other families.”
Last Sunday, we held our first class on Parenting: The Complex and Beautiful Vocation of Raising Children. In the introduction, the author asks questions that have shaped my fondness for Sunday school from the start.
“What would it look like,” she writes, “to invite [each other] into shared sorrow, shared joy, shared meals, shared life? What would it look like to meet [each other] in the hard places, the beautiful places, in every place?”
It might just look a little like Sunday school: Welcoming, paying attention, reading the Word, talking about our Father and his work among us.
Last week, our church hosted 25 people in the main adult Sunday school and 22 people in our book study. The kids played Connect Four and read a Bible story. For next week, we’re ordering more books, brainstorming icebreakers, and resupplying the name tags. I can’t wait.
Wendy Kiyomi is an essayist who writes on the trials of faith, complexities of adoption, and delights of friendship. She lives in Tacoma with her family and is a 2023 winner of the Zenger Prize for journalistic excellence.
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