Over this summer, I have been researching the history of youth work. Here is an interesting quote from historian Martin E. Marty on the challenge of establishing Sunday Schools in America. His book is called, Righteous empire: The protestant experience in America. I was surprised at how recently Sunday School was frowned upon - being perceived as something that threatened traditional Christianity!
Here's what he says:
"The third great invention at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century was the Sunday School. Originally designed to bridge sacred and secular worlds, it came to serve the religious world in a private way. Originally born in an un-denominational context, by 1830 it had been increasingly aborbed into the denominational system and became part of the competetive pattern.
The Sunday School was born in 1780 in England where a philanthropist named Robert Raikes wanted to provide at least minimal secular and religious education to new classes of people, people who were victims of but potential agents in the rising industrial order. Just as the transformation of the territorial parish to competetive, local churches was instantaneously international, so was the Sunday School movement an immediate Anglo-American instrument. In 1785, William Elliott established one in Accomac County in Virginia. During the next several decades Sunday Schools spread rapidly, despite opposition.
Because they were new and because they represented a threat to conventional modes of church life, they were often frowned upon by ministers and church leaders and at the beginning thrived on what amounted to virtual persecution. Many ministers were threatened by every kind of innovation. Lay teaching jeopardized clerical preaching; religious and secular subjects were blended; women acquired new roles in the churches. We are told of ministers who chased female Sunday School teachers with sticks and brooms, calling them servants of Satan. In Nashville, Tennesee in the early 1820s, one congregation posted a sign, "No desecration of the holy Sabbath, by teaching on the Sabbath in this Church" would be permitted.
The Sunday School was destined to prevail, for it was an effective instrument of evangelical values and a useful means for inculcating agreed-upon virtues. One slightly jaundiced commentator remarked on the curriculum: it was made up of Bible, catechism, spelling books, readers, and 'dull, prosy biographies of unnaturally good children, who all die young." Many evangelicals advertised that the Sunday Schools were great democratizing influences. Children of poor and rich were alike welcome. Actually, they met on middle-class terms. The poor were welcome, but countless observers in the 1830s reported how much stress was placed on having children scrubbed up and starched for their appearance at Sunday School. There they were brought into the context of evangelical moral values, the ethic of production and aspiration, and the simple manners. Without doubt, the institution did help lead to the birth of the democratic public schools in America.
The rise of the public schools meant that Sunday Schools had to concern themselves less and less with the teaching of reading, spelling, and other secular subjects. In this way, too, the Protestant meaning-system was separated and segregated from the larger world. Subjects which related to daily decision were removed from this realm.
Dedicated laymen and laywomen, working outside the church organizations, were so successful that they churches adopted their efforts. In Boston, the Sunday School Union was formed in 1816; in Philadelphia one was organized in 1817. (In the early nineteenth century Sunday Schools were primarily urban institutions). In 1824 the American Sunday School Union was chatered. In 1830, it announced its intention to institute "a Sunday school in every destitute place where it is pracitcable throughout the Valley of the Mississippi.""
(Marty, Righteous Empire, 75f.)
I am very interested in how the earliest forms of Sunday School forged together both spiritual and social well-being. It wasn't really until the emergence of the public school that the Sunday School relegated itself to spiritual lessons. Historial theologians call this the 'privatization of Christianity.' This comes out of the historical period known as 'the age of enlightenment' where there was a divide in society between things which are public and private. Tangible, 'provable' things such as science, public education and work were considered suitable for the public sphere, while aspects of life that were subjective or dependent upon the opinion of only a few people (such as religion, family practices, etc.) were relegated to the private sphere.
I am wondering as there is an increased interest in renogotiating the relationship of youth work and ministry, if it is worth revisiting this history?
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