In the history of Christianity, Sunday schools, youth groups, and children’s church are a relatively recent phenomena. All of these programs find their origin in well-intentioned, sometimes helpful, but often pragmatic approaches to discipleship.

In this message, the evolution of the Sunday School Movement (SSM) is traced from its early days as a well-intentioned “Social Gospel” outreach to children without Christian parents, through its nineteenth century response to the feminization of Christianity, and ultimately to its various twentieth century manifestations—often as a spiritual band-aid for male abdication of responsibility within the home. Careful distinctions are drawn between age-segregated, peer-based, discipleship models, with their origins in evolutionary social theory on the one hand, and discipleship models which find their origins in biblical principles of local church-trained, family-based, parent-directed discipleship on the other hand.