“Sunday School Classes for All Ages” - What-What?!

9/19/2024

In the 1780’s, Robert Raikes, a British Anglican, pioneered a new idea: help impoverished children in Great Britain by gathering and feeding them on Sundays. He focused on providing basic education and religious instruction to poor children who worked in factories six days a week. Teach them math and reading, and directly from the Bible while they are with you. Expose them to the truths and stories of Jesus while they are young, and might have remained unreachable in their impoverished neighborhoods without creative intervention. “Sunday School.”

Enter John Vincent, born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in 1833. Vincent was both a school teacher and a “Methodist Preacher.” And not coincidentally, grew up in the era of the “First Industrial Revolution” when textile factories and the like were humming now for 40 years, and systems and “methods” were the talk of the country.

Vincent decided “Bible School for all ages” — Sunday schools to spread his “Uniform Lesson Plan” across denominations with his printed doctrinal material and stories and techniques, school age by school age. He also created a Sunday School teaching institution and co-founded the Chautauqua Institution in 1874, an interdenominational training event for Sunday School teachers and “church” leaders.

As a reward for his creativity in merging the world system and Industrial Revolution into Sunday morning religion, having nothing whatsoever to do with the original Raikes idea to “reach the poor,” in 1868, Vincent became the “Corresponding Secretary of the Tract Society,” “Superintendent of the Department of Sunday-School Instruction,” and “Editor of the Sunday-School Journal.”

As with so many things, when we pull a religious mask over our heads and “assume” and “accept” whatever is handed down to us by religious generations, it turns out the mask doesn’t have eye holes cut out for us to see anymore. The concepts we’ve inherited, such as the literal factory system of “Sunday School for all ages” and “church buildings” being “attended” on “Sundays,” and MC VIP “pastors” or “pulpit ministers” giving “sermons” during a “service,” and “attenders” are “christians” because they grew up in that tradition and know the right words so they surely must “believe”—It’s all Biblically wrong.

But then, the religious mask pulled over our heads doesn’t have eye holes cut out. We have to do that ourselves.

Blind copycats mess things up again!

Ohhh, Father, unveil our faces in every way. We can’t be radiant with just eye holes. Transform us!

“And we, who with unveiled faces all behold the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into His likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.” (2Corinthians 3:17-18)