As I mentioned in the previous blog about EMCC Sunday Schools, the United Mennonite merging conference in Bloomingdale, Waterloo County, Canada, in 1875, resolved “That Sunday schools shall be organized and supported by all our power.”¹ As early as the 4^th Canada Conference held in June 1878 at Nottawasaga, Simcoe County, the ministers and delegates reported 136 Sunday School teachers and 952 scholars, which I believe represented the enrollment, not the average attendance, in a Conference of 664 members. The number of preaching points (not quite congregations, as we would be used to counting them now,) grouped in fields, was not recorded precisely, but appears to be 9 “fields” serving 25 named “appointments.” Not all appointments had Sunday Schools, and some fields had more than one.²

A committee of the Conference reported on the question, “What can we do to promote the Sabbath School work?” I am not sure whether this was a committee appointed in 1877 or 1878, but I quote the whole report:

“That we choose an active christian as superintendent, zealous for the cause. If possible, converted teachers. To advise and encourage parents to attend the schools with their children. To encourage all who can to take an active part in singing. That we supply the schools with the best literature. Tracts and good Sabbath school papers recommended in preference to libraries. Recommend the International lessons to be used. Financially, recommend funds raised by collections and subscriptions, and that we close down all worldly schemes and gatherings for amusement, as a means of support; and that all our ministers visit the Sunday school as much as possible.”

Whoa! Several issues and attitudes to note here in the conduct of these Sunday Schools that are different from recent practices. Or are they?

1. Converted? Why would they say, “If possible, converted teachers”?! What situation were they facing to say that? I would have assumed an absolute requirement that the teachers all be experiencing “present salvation,” language that came from the Methodist movement.³ Every teacher should be a convinced, converted, living by faith day by day, holiness-seeking person. Shouldn’t they?

2. Parents? Despite the American Sunday School Union or the Canadian Sabbath School Association attempts to expand the Sunday School from its British roots as schools for factory children to students of all ages, the assumption by many adults that all schools are for children was still holding. This is the default thinking of many in 2025, as well.

3. Singing? Some did not try to sing: children? adults? Again, what situation were they facing? I know in any group there will be people who think they cannot sing and say so. Why would Christians, at least, not try, as we are exhorted to do in the Bible by the Apostle Paul (Colossians 3:16)? Revival piety always values joyful singing. “Is anyone happy? Let them sing songs of praise.” James 5:13

4. Libraries? What was the problem with Sunday School libraries? American Sunday Schools provided about 30,000 of the 50,000 known libraries in the USA at 1859.⁴ In Canada it was similar: in that same year, “Sunday school libraries were five times more numerous than all others combined and contained more than triple the number of volumes.”⁵ Canadian Methodists “by the end of the nineteenth century” had “more than 400,000 books and pamphlets in its Sunday-school-library system.”⁶ Was there something intrinsically “worldly” about libraries, that the United Mennonites would shun them? In 1900, Christian Raymer in an essay, “The Future of the S. School,” at the MBiC SS Convention at Bethel (New Dundee area) gave a clue: “But should the [SS] teacher become worldly…[and] place in the hands of their scholars the sickly religious novels and papers found in many S. School libraries of the present…” This is precisely the problem the Methodist literature wished to avert according to Semple: “…a moral alternative to trashy novels and the secular press.”⁷ Nevertheless, Chris Raymer, from Markham Township in York County, ON, obviously thought SS libraries he knew were failing.⁸ Good literature from a holiness-Mennonite point of view was maybe hard to come by? Or was it the expense that made the MBiC avoid SS libraries? Eventually most MBiC churches would have church libraries, so how did attitudes change?

5. Curriculum? The International Uniform Sunday School lesson plans were fairly new (introduced 1873) so the United Mennonites were being up-to-date and co-operating across organizational lines in accepting them in 1878. It is a bit amazing to me they were willing to make use of them. The IUSS offered strictly Bible outlines for every age in the Sunday School. The Churches had to fill them out by their own doctrinal lens. Examining curricula in the EMCC now could be a study on its own.

6. Worldly schemes? Raffles, strawberry socials, lectures, concerts, auctions, jumbles, rag or flea market (“yard”) sales were all used by “worldly” churches. Methodists in the later 19th-century certainly, while being almost like the plain and holiness churches in some ways, compromised their testimony, in the Mennonite view.⁹ All majority churches did some sort of fund-raising these ways. Positively, donors should be cheerful givers (2 Corinthians 9:7), not commercial peddlers. Raffles should be recognized as a species of gambling. I’m with the committee there!

7. Pastors? The extra-denominational character of early Sunday Schools is indicated by the final advice that pastors should “visit” the Sunday Schools. Often they were conducted at times distinct from the preaching service times and perhaps even at other locations on a field. Later, MBiC pastors for many years had to answer “How many Sunday Schools have you visited?” annually. Union Sunday Schools disappeared. Local churches integrated the Sunday Schools into their structures, with fewer or no other preaching points, and the presence of a pastor was assumed, perhaps teaching a youth or adult class. Now of course, if there is Sunday School, it is often during the worship time, for children, and pastors are not involved.

The position of Sunday School Superintendent was a major leadership position in the local fields. Except perhaps in union Sunday Schools, they had to report to the MBiC Quarterly Conference and be “passed,” that is, approved by vote of the (Methodist-style) class as performing the duties of a superintendent, just as the deacons, stewards, probationers and preachers were. When the Conference Sunday School conventions started in 1889, normally the superintendents would be delegates to the convention, but anyone could be elected to the position.

Most superintendents and delegates were men, but even in 1890, Anna Keller was the delegate for the Scott field.¹⁰ In 1894 at Stayner, Mrs S Moyer delivered an essay,¹¹ and when women preachers became common, they frequently attended and taught in the conventions such as Maude Chatham at Breslau in 1891 or Sarah Pool, at Stayner in 1894.¹² In 1903 at least seven women, not all of them Ministering Sisters, were noted in the minutes: Mrs Euphemia Guy, Sister Cornelia Pannabecker, Cora Sider, Sarah McQuarrie, Mary Steckley, Sister (Lydia Zeller?) Conner. Sister W[ebster] (Laura Moyer) Irish was not present but was to have taught a sample lesson. Mrs Guy was even elected Vice-President for the 1904 Convention in Toronto.¹³

The MBiC Sunday Schools were early conducted in English, though German remained in some congregations where the Pennsylvania-Dutch (ie German) speech was strong among the older generation, as in Berlin (Kitchener). English was introduced in the young men’s class in 1885 there.¹⁴ Most, if not all local church histories in the Missionary Church/ EMCC recall the work of the Sunday School as an important part of the life of the congregation. Preachers were involved, but a Sunday School needed strong non-ministerial leadership to persist and prosper. Many future leaders of the congregations and the district were taught, trained and shaped by the Sunday School system. At some point in the later 20^th century, the Missionary Church district Sunday School organization died out, and Sunday School departments no longer function locally.

Family memories. My real memories of Sunday School begin from the United Missionary Church and in the class of 11 and 12-year old boys taught by Robert Shantz. I had learned something somewhere along the line (we had family Bible reading as long as I could recall), and I thought I knew Bible stories better than my classmates. But one Sunday, Mr Shantz asked who had a testimony of knowing Jesus as Saviour. I knew I had never asked Jesus to forgive any of my sins that I knew of, which was strange considering I must have recited the Lord’s Prayer over and over in school.

My salvation experience came months later in the main church services, but the Sunday School class made me aware of the issue. A few years later, a grocery store manager (Jerry Hoerman) taught my class and asked the basic Protestant question: Are we saved by grace alone or by good works and grace together? My classmates hesitated, but favoured good works and grace. I had learned somehow that the Bible taught “grace alone” and that was the correct answer. For some reason, maybe having to do with pride in getting the right answer, the moment stuck in my memory. (Study since has confirmed the soundness of the teaching, by the way!)

Still later, I taught Sunday School classes myself (also 11 and 12-year olds) at St Clair Missionary Church, Scarborough; children’s and adult classes at Evangel, Kitchener; more Sunday School at Sudbury Missionary Church, and a youth class at Riverside Church, Toronto. Sometimes we used a publisher’s curriculum (Scripture Press, David C Cook), sometimes I wrote my own. In Nigeria we “home-Sunday-schooled” our children several years. On returning to Canada in 2010, I was a bit surprised to find no Sunday School for older children or adults in many churches. The “times” had changed again.

Nothing to boast about. Missionary Church Sunday Schools kept statistics zealously for decades, as records of closed churches in the MCHT show, or in the annual Conference Journals. From a high of 5,162 average Sunday School attendance in 1975 in Ontario, the district dropped to 3,180 by 1991¹⁵ and 1,290 in 2016.¹⁶ After the excitement of the Baby Boom, the numbers were not so thrilling and churches began having trouble reporting any statistics, let alone the Sunday Schools’. Numbers are collected but not published any more. This 2016 statistic was kindly supplied by EMCC national office staff when I asked. Fourteen out of 60 congregations in eastern Canada that did report, did not report any Sunday School numbers at all. Yet Sunday morning worship service attendance numbered 20,205 in just about 100 (out of about 140) congregations reporting nation-wide that year. Sunday School averaged 3,745 nationally.¹⁷ In 2005, the last year of the EMCC Canada East District, 11 (out of about 70 congregations) did not report any membership or Sunday School statistics for 2004 in time for publication, a situation that rarely happened for even one church before 1976. This reflects rising congregationalism on the part of the churches in Canada, I suppose, and the disarray of congregational Bible classes. Consequently, it has become almost impossible to track the Sunday Christian education institutions.

Plenty of people ridicule counting numbers, and many claim churches could grow in quality, instead of numbers and of course they can. Maybe there was always a bit of fuzziness in all the numbers recorded in all the district, but in fact everywhere engagement with the Bible and knowledge of the Bible has declined in North America, severely.¹⁸ Faith Today published some updated stats recently: 90% of Canadian Evangelicals responded they had “engaged” with the Bible “in recent years,” a rather wide net, compared to 39% as the national average. On this measure, even 29% of Muslims claimed they had engaged the Bible in recent years, which suggests “engagement” has suffered definition inflation.¹⁹ Small group Bible studies have not replaced the Sunday School for universality. Nor have all-generation worship services. Evangelical students, whom professors used to count on in Colleges and University classes to at least be acquainted with Bible stories and basic Christian doctrines, are fading out of view.²⁰ Although the Missionary Church provided itself a catechism in recent decades, to which able Canadians Eileen Lageer, John Hedegaard, Dr Tom Dow and Dr Ed Oke contributed, I doubt the EMCC will anytime soon adopt that old practice of catechizing youth and converts.²¹ Bible Colleges find it hard to get students to come for Bible knowledge.

One Canadian preacher is saying maybe 15 or 20 minute sermons are better; we don’t have to give lectures after all.²² I think that is a counsel of despair. The sermon certainly is, or should be, a major provider of Bible knowledge, but Evangelicals have never depended on it alone.

All is not lost! Jesus is still head of the Church, his Word endures, the Spirit still hovers over our chaos.

Banner: Bethany (Kitchener) girl’s class about 1905: Front (L to R): Ella (Hostetler) Sternall, Ella Sh?, teacher, Maggie D?, Ethel Musselman. Back: Norah (Shantz) Shuert, Olive (Troxel) Erb

1Jasper A Huffman, ed, History of the Mennonite Brethren in Christ Church (New Carlisle, OH: Bethel Publishing, 1920) p 54.

2Benjamin Bowman, ed, “Proceedings of the 4^th Annual Conference of the United Mennonites,” Gospel Banner Volume 1 issue 1 (July 1878) p 6-7.

3https://www.flumc.com/bishop_whitaker/present_salvation.htm (2003).

4 Daryl Busby (2013), “Does the Sunday School have a Future in Canada? Reflections upon a Little School with a Big Story,” p 9. https://www.academia.edu/19323119/History_and_future_of_Sunday_School_in_Canada

5John Webster Grant, A Profusion of Spires: Religion in Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988) p 103.

6Neil Semple, The Lord’s Dominion: The History of Canadian Methodism (Montreal, QC/ Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996) p 368.

7Semple, p 368.

8Christian Raymer, “The Future of the Sunday School,” Sabbath School Convention Minute Book of the Mennonite Brethren in Christ, Canada Conference,” p 137; Box 4006 MCHT.

9Review my EMCC History blogs on Non-conformity and worldliness.

10Sabbath School Convention Minute Book, p 8.

11Probably Sarah Ann (Disher) Moyer. Her husband Samuel was a probationer/local preacher. They were from the Twenty field; Sabbath School Convention Minute Book, p 44.

12Sabbath School Convention Minute Book, p 21 and 46, respectively.

13Sabbath School Convention Minute Book, p 195.

14Ward Shantz, History of Bethany Missionary Church (Kitchener, ON: Bethany Missionary Church, 1977), p 31.

15That year 26 Sunday Schools did not report.

16Canada East Conference journals, and EMCC national office reports.

17Courtesy EMCC national office.

18As noted in the first footnote in EMCC History Blog, “Early EMCC Sunday Schools: Background.”

19Faith Today (March/April 2023) p 10.

20Anecdotally.

21Wayne Gerber, ed, Foundations: Teacher’s Edition 2^nd ed (Fort Wayne, IN: Discipling Ministries, 2002).

22Mark Buchanan, “Preaching Now and Then,” Faith Today (July/August 2022) p 28-30.