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To, For, With: A Brief History of Children’s Sunday School Curriculum
Each week we sat in plastic chairs around a folding table. We’d open our Bibles, read the passage out loud, look at posters with Bible illustrations, and fill out colorful preprinted worksheets while Mr. Mixon taught the lesson. Some weeks we’d get candy if we could answer his questions. I can remember our grade school class reciting the books of the Bible in order. Then, back at home, my dad taught me to sing that list of books to the tune of two old hymns. At vacation Bible school, we learned to follow the “stand up” and “sit down” chords on the piano. And I remember practicing for Bible drill competitions with my mom and Mrs. Edwina.
That was children’s ministry in the 1980s and ’90s Southern Baptist churches where I was brought up. If you grew up in the same era and region I did, you may have similar memories. But if you’re from a different place or denominational tradition, or if you’re a decade or two older or younger than I am, your experiences may have been different.
Some have memories of flannelgraph; others watched teaching videos. Some attended catechism classes; others went to scouting-style midweek programs; still others served as acolytes. When you grow up in church, it’s easy to think what you experienced is the norm everywhere, but children’s ministry models and curricula differ from church to church. Due to the influence of shifting cultural and educational movements, they’ve also changed over time.
Scottie May, professor emerita of Christian formation and ministry at Wheaton, maps American children’s ministry through three major phases. Though her study doesn’t engage with curricula explicitly, it’s not hard to notice how each phase has influenced the prepackaged lessons children in evangelical Sunday school classes work through each weekend.
Let’s look at each of May’s phases and consider its influence on evangelical Sunday school broadly, then on Sunday school lessons taught in Reformed churches in particular. As we do, we’ll discover that the future of biblical children’s curricula is both global and rooted in the church’s past.
Three Stages
1. Ministry to Children (Industrial Revolution–1965)
The Sunday school movement began in the 18th century through the efforts of British philanthropists like Robert Raikes (1735–1811) who wanted to teach poor children to read Scripture and recite the catechism set forth in the Book of Common Prayer.
After the Education Act of 1870 expanded access to elementary education in England (and legislation in subsequent decades made it compulsory and free), parachurch Sunday school programs as they originally operated gradually transformed into the church-based Sunday schools for adults and children we know today. But though Sunday school adapted, its focus in this early period on discipleship that gives instruction to learners remained.
Conservative Protestants have always emphasized the transcendent nature of absolute truth, God’s self-revelation in his Word, and the Bible as our authority for teaching (2 Tim. 3:16–17). In keeping with this heritage, American evangelicals have gravitated toward content-focused discipleship strategies like Awana Clubs’s Bible knowledge and Scripture memory programs, which began in North Chicago in 1950.
We’ve often viewed children as sponges or empty vessels to whom a teacher, as the authority in the classroom, imparts knowledge. When kids are young, we want to pump them full of truth so that, as J. D. Greear once said, “when you shake them, they just throw up Bible.”
Perhaps no American church leader has seen success with this instructional Sunday school model like Henrietta Mears (1890–1963). Mears moved to L.A. in 1928 to become education director at Hollywood Presbyterian. Under her leadership, the church’s Sunday school grew from 450 to more than 4,000 children and adults in weekly attendance. Mears later founded Gospel Light Publications and wrote the influential Bible handbook What the Bible Is All About.
In addition to being influenced by an instructional education model and revivalist Keswick theology, Mears was influenced by the “best practices” emphasis of the efficiency movement. As a result, she age-graded her Sunday school scope and sequence to maximize learning for each life stage from cradle to grave.
You can still see the influence of her age-graded Christian education model on evangelical Sunday school materials today. Though Mears never wavered from her conviction that Sunday school should mainly instruct in biblical content, in many ways, her stage-by-stage model foreshadowed modern developmental theory.
2. Ministry for Children (1965–90)
In 1933, German-born child psychologist Erik Erikson (1902–94) moved to Boston, where he was offered a position at the Harvard Medical School and had a private practice in child psychoanalysis. As his reputation grew, he joined teaching faculties at Yale, UC Berkeley, and later the University of Pittsburgh.
What does Erikson have to do with children’s Sunday school? More than you might think. He published influential books like Childhood and Society (1950) and Young Man Luther (1958), a psychoanalysis of the reformer. In these writings, he reframed Freud’s developmental theories in biblical language, using terms like “trust,” “guilt,” “shame,” and “wisdom” to describe developmental stages. Later, children’s television pioneer Fred Rogers and pop psychologist Benjamin Spock—with whom Erikson worked at the Arsenal Nursery School in Pittsburgh—brought Erikson’s ways of describing child development into the mainstream.
In the 1960s, after children’s television and developmental psychology were widespread, Christian publishers picked up on the larger culture’s child-centered focus. They first paid closer attention to developmental concerns in their curricula—teaching Bible truths and spiritual habits appropriate for each age and stage. Then, under the influence of the church growth movement of the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, publishers made their materials more attractional, seeing kids as participants, explorers, and even consumers. In this era, to paraphrase Sam Luce, many children’s ministries became less like the formation-focused Fred Rogers and more like the showman Walt Disney.
I’d be overstating my case if I said Sunday school teachers in this era merely entertained kids. But the media-driven and attractional curricula developed by seeker-sensitive churches regularly encouraged teachers to ask child-targeted questions like “Are we doing the kinds of things children really enjoy?” or “Would a child describe this as fun?” The goal, as Sue Miller and David Staal explained, was for a boy or girl to experience weekend Bible classes and think, “This is for me!” At its best, this meant learning environments crafted for each stage of development; at its worst, it was merely entertainment for consumers.
Description
Key Figure
Key Influences
Key Emphasis
Ministry to children
(late 1800s–1965)
instruction to learners
Henrietta Mears (1890–1963)
Christian educators
believing (orthodox doctrine)
Ministry for children
(1965–90)
learning environments crafted for each stage of development
Erik Erikson (1902–94)
psychologists and church growth missiologists
becoming (through age-appropriate spiritual-formation habits)
Ministry with children
(1990–present)
growing with children on their spiritual journeys
George Barna
(b. 1954)
sociologists and other Christian academics
belonging (to a loving church community)
3. Ministry with Children (1990–Present)
Christian educators developed early children’s Sunday school curricula. Psychologists and church growth missiologists ruled the next phase in its development. But more recently, sociologists have been the key influencers. George Barna (b. 1954) published his best-selling Transforming Children into Spiritual Champions in 2003. Appealing to his sociological research, Barna rightly argued it’s critical to help children develop a biblical worldview from their earliest years.
Christian educators developed early children’s Sunday school curricula. Psychologists and church growth missiologists ruled the next phase in its development. But more recently, sociologists have been the key influencers.
The best and most significant sociological research on children’s and family ministry makes a similar case today: what the next generation needs isn’t attractional gimmicks or programming excellence but orthodox doctrine (believing), faithful shepherding in spiritual-formation habits (becoming), and a loving church community (belonging).
The “believing” pillar seeks to keep the best from the ministry-to stage, and the “becoming” pillar seeks to keep the best of the ministry-for stage—while jettisoning the earlier eras’ focuses on efficiency and entertainment. The third pillar, “belonging,” is the new emphasis: the church community growing with children on their spiritual journeys. This pillar finds strong support from two streams of Christian academics.
First, family ministry movement researchers like Timothy Paul Jones (SBTS) and Kara E. Powell (Fuller) have appealed to the Bible and sociological studies when they’ve stressed the importance of both church and home play in child discipleship. The D6 curriculum and Awana’s Brite weekend curriculum line are two examples of the good fruit that’s developed as publishing houses have built on the family ministry movement’s key principles.
Second, evangelical scholars in the children’s spirituality movement like Mimi L. Larson (TEDS) and Robert Keeley (Calvin) have rightly emphasized the important roles children can play in adult believers’ growth in Christ. The Godly Play and Catechesis of the Good Shepherd ministry models, produced by more mainline and ecumenical organizations, build on the children’s spirituality movement’s key principles.
Influence on Reformed Churches
How have these three stages influenced the children’s Sunday school lessons taught in America’s Reformed churches?
Ministry-to. In the 1980s, the conservative Presbyterian publishing house Great Commission Publications released their Show Me Jesus! Sunday school line. This curriculum (with contributions from Christian educators Allen Curry and Susan Hunt) is a paragon of the ministry-to/instructional approach that also incorporates key insights from developmental theory.
Ministry-for. Most Reformed churches never got on board with the attractional aspects of the ministry-for stage. In 1998, when church growth influence had reached its height, Baptists David and Sally Michael started Children Desiring God (now Truth78) with a curriculum that provided a God-centered alternative to the child-centered offerings in the broader evangelical marketplace. But the response to the ministry-for emphasis wasn’t all reactive. Today, even publishers like Lifeway and Crossway (see below) include video components in their curricula and shape their lessons in light of developmental categories.
Ministry-with. Since the 2010s, two themes have been evident in the curriculum offerings most broadly used by Word-centered Sunday schools. In sets like New Growth’s Gospel Story, Lifeway’s Gospel Project, and Crossway’s Biggest Story, you’ll first find a strong Reformational emphasis on teaching children the Bible’s grand narrative of redemptive history.
These three curricula are also deeply influenced by the family ministry movement. Each is organized so the different age groups within a church’s Sunday school all study the same Bible passage each week. The goal of this unified model is to promote family discipleship. When parents use the curriculum’s “at home” devotional resources, they review and reinforce lessons learned by both their preschooler and their fifth grader.
Lifeway’s Gospel Project line went a step further in unifying their youth and adult offerings with the children’s curriculum to promote church-wide intergenerational relationships. The goal was to encourage the senior saint who studied Joshua with her peers during the Sunday school hour to later ask the teenager down the pew what she thought of how God made the sun stand still.
Where Will Curricula Go from Here?
After looking back over the history of children’s Sunday school curricula, it’s hard not to also look toward the future. Are we heading in a healthy direction? Who will be the next Mears, Erikson, or Barna? How will children’s Sunday school curricula change in the future? I’m no prophet, but I want to suggest a few trends you can look for on the horizon.
1. We’ll keep recovering catechesis.
I’ve been largely positive about sociology’s influence on evangelical children’s discipleship, but U.K. scholars Robin Barfield (Union/Oak Hill) and Gareth Crispin (Cliff College) observe some dangers.
When mainline proponents of the children’s spirituality movement emphasize belonging/ministry-with exclusively, they can venture into strange territory unmoored from orthodoxy. Some have understood Sunday school teachers’ roles in terms of helping children “encounter God’s presence within themselves,” or further, they see “children as ‘thin places’ and holy sacraments . . . where adults can encounter God.”
What the next generation needs isn’t attractional gimmicks or programming excellence but orthodox doctrine (believing), faithful shepherding in spiritual-formation habits (becoming), and a loving church community (belonging).
By contrast, orthodox Protestants want to help children encounter God’s presence outside themselves in God’s Word. The most important tool the historic church has employed in this work is catechesis.
Recently, The Gospel Coalition’s New City Catechism resources surpassed a 500,000 sales milestone, and the more recently published FatCat book series from Lexham Press has also done well. With many evangelical seminaries now emphasizing a recovery of creedal orthodoxy and classical theism, I don’t see publishers’ focus on catechesis slowing down. I predict the scope and sequence covered in future evangelical Sunday schools will closely follow a catechetical outline, regularly covering the Ten Commandments (Christian ethic), the Apostles’ Creed (Christian theology), and the Lord’s Prayer (Christian devotion).
2. We’ll recover moral formation.
Recently, a family pastor reached out to me with this observation: “I can find great resources and curriculum for kids on theology, but fewer on spiritual disciplines/holy habits or Christian virtue.” He’s right. There are great children’s books on moral formation like those in the TGC Kids series or CCEF’s Good News for Little Hearts series from New Growth, but it’s harder to find a good curriculum on Christian virtue and character that goes beyond mere do-more-and-better moralism.
Since the publication of the successful Jesus Storybook Bible in the early 2000s, most children’s Sunday school curricula have emphasized Christological readings of Old Testament narratives. “Instead of seeing ourselves as the heroes of these narratives,” Joe Carter observes, “we began seeing Christ as the ultimate fulfillment of every figure.” This was a healthy development, but seeing Jesus as the hero of redemptive history shouldn’t keep us from learning moral wisdom from the Bible’s narratives. I suspect future children’s Sunday school will increasingly recapture this important emphasis.
3. We’ll be led by the global church.
Another healthy result of sociology’s belonging/ministry-with emphasis has been that updated illustrations in most children’s Sunday school curricula now accurately represent ancient Near Eastern ethnicities. Jago’s groundbreaking illustrations in the Jesus Storybook Bible aided this development, and with the American church growing more diverse, there’s thankfully no going back.
Today, with global Christianity’s center of gravity shifting away from the West, I anticipate that in the future, it won’t just be the illustration work in our children’s Sunday school curricula that’s “representative.” The next Henrietta Mears or George Barna likely lives in Africa, South Korea, or Brazil. The day is coming (and we should welcome it) when children’s discipleship materials from the global church will be translated into English and used here in the States.
Children’s Sunday school curricula have changed a lot over the decades. As you consider how we’ve been shaped by the past, be both sobered and grateful: Sober enough to evaluate each new trend in light of God’s standards for commending his truth to the next generation. Grateful enough to give God thanks for the men and women who taught you whenever or wherever you were trained up in the faith.
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