At this year’s Third National Conference for Uniting Church and Family, I presented a message entitled: “Feminism, Youth Culture, and the History of the Sunday School Movement.” The first purpose of the talk was to offer perspective concerning the historic foundations of some of our most popular extra-biblical, family-fragmenting, modern church traditions. The second was to encourage believers to be more self-conscious of the theological presuppositions behind practices widely embraced by the modern church.

The talk built upon foundations laid previously in the conference by Dr. Voddie Baucham’s message, “The Centrality of the Home in the Evangelism and Discipleship of the Next Generation,” and my message: “Semper Reformanda: The Reformation Roots of the Movement to Unite Church and Family.”

“Feminism, Youth Culture, and the History of the Sunday School Movement” traces the historic battle between relationship-based discipleship and efficiency models of education. The Hebrew vision of covenantal discipleship was contrasted with the Greek emphasis on youth and the Platonic program to separate children from their parents. Related issues were addressed in the context of Tertullian’s dialogue pertaining to the schools of Jerusalem and Athens.

Distinctions between the early American Puritan vision for family-integrated Sunday training and the Sunday school as a family-fragmenting and evolutionary theory-influenced late nineteenth century proto-feminist movement were examined.

The evolution of the Sunday School Movement (SSM) was traced from its early days as a well-intentioned “Social Gospel” outreach to children without Christian parents, to its twentieth century manifestation as an unfortunate substitute for father-directed discipleship of the children of Christian parents. I examined the noble vision of Robert Raikes in the late eighteenth century to create a para-church Sunday school movement as an outreach to the illiterate children of chimney sweeps and other socially and economically depressed members of English society. Also discussed were the early family-based “Sunday schools” conducted in northern England in the late eighteenth century.

Those attending the lecture were exposed to the methodological tension between the theology of the spiritual fathers of the Great Awakening, with the “new measures” of Charles Finney, the latter of whom probably did more than any other Christian leader of the nineteenth century to introduce pragmatic and man-centered notions of evangelism into the nineteenth century American church.

The SSM was examined in terms of four historic stages, each of which reflected the changing theology and ethics of its time. By the second or third generation of the SSM, the Sunday school played a key role in the transformation of the local church from the historico-biblical, male-taught and male-directed community of faith to a woman’s society. As Robbins has noted in The Church Effeminate (Page 238):

During the 19th century there were three major movements in American Protestant Churches that began the process of feminizing their leadership. The first of these was the Sunday school movement. The second was the foreign missions movement; and the third was the deaconess movement. Before the last quarter of the 18th century, Sunday schools did not exist, missionaries were men, and there was no such office as deaconess. During the 19th century the feminists, many of whom were not women and most of who were moderate by today’s standards, began their drive to control the churches. The drive began first with the Sunday school movement.

By the twentieth century, the SSM would go through its most revolutionary transformation. Having accepted the myth of methodological neutrality, the diminished role of fathers, the delegation of children to the state, and the feminized model of church life presented in the prior generation, the SSM of the American church was now ready for its most revolutionary transformation. Influenced by the educational methodology of evolutionary humanists like Darwin, Haeckel, Hall, and Dewey, the Evangelical church in America adopted the grade-based, age-segregated, adolescent theory-influenced training model of the government school systems, a model self-consciously designed by some of the most vigorous enemies of Christianity in the history of the West. In its final incarnation, the SSM would give birth to two other modern inventions: children’s church, and the church youth group.

As Otto Scott has pointed out in “The Invention of Adolsecence”:

Hall’s work provided a basis for segregating school children by age. Elementary school children were segregated from secondary schools along the lines of his “observations.” Twelve was the age of the break. The new fashion spread even into religion, and the clergy began to aim different lessons at special age groups: the Bible was too much for the young...There are many variations of this development — from youth gangs to the forced retirement. In fact, we have almost achieved a society nearly completely segregated by age in which the generations have been narrowed from the traditional thirty years to far fewer. Age now separates us more than ever before in any society; persons raised only a few decades apart find one another nearly incomprehensible.

I want to encourage anyone who is interested in studying the origin and transformation of one of the most influential movements of the modern church to please consider listening to this tape.

For the rest of the month, the conference CD, “Feminism, Youth Culture, and the History of the Modern Sunday School Movement,” is available for an online gift of any amount to support the work of Vision Forum Ministries.