By Charles Gallaudet Trumbull, Editor “Sunday School Times,” Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
There are more than thirty million persons reported in the enrollment of the Sunday Schools of the world. But if all these persons, and all church members as well, knew what the Sunday School is really for, the enrollment would leap upward millions upon millions.
The Sunday School is often spoken of as the child of the church, or the church of tomorrow, or a branch or department of the church. It is more than any and all of these.
The true Sunday School is the Church of Jesus Christ engaged in systematic study and teaching of the Word of God for three great purposes: to bring into the body of Christ those within the membership of the Sunday School who are not yet members of the church or of Christ; to train up those who are in Christ into a full-grown knowledge and appropriation of the riches which are theirs because they are Christ’s; and to send out into the world fully equipped, victorious soul-winners who shall be Christ’s living epistles to those who do not yet know Him.
The whole superb work of the Sunday School centers about its text-book, the Word of God. Bible study in the Sunday School is made the means of the three-fold purpose of the Sunday School. The Sunday School is the great organized movement of the Church of God for Bible study which has for its end salvation, character building, and equipment for evangelism. Or to describe the work of the Sunday School partly in theological terms, the purpose of the Sunday School is Bible study for justification, sanctification and service.
Whoever needs to know what the Bible has to say about next-world freedom from the penalty of our sins, and this world freedom from the power of our sin, together with the supernatural power of God as the equipment of the full grown man for service, may properly be in the Sunday School. Only those who do not need the fullest possible message of the Bible on these subjects can logically stay outside the Sunday School.
And that means that few can logically or safely stay outside the Sunday School. The true Sunday School is the whole Church of God engaged in systematic Bible study to ascertain the whole will of God as revealed in His Word for their lives. With the cradle roll at one end of the age limit for non-attending members and the home department at the other end for non-attending members, there is little reason today for anyone to remain outside the membership of the Sunday School. It is not necessary to attend the Sunday services of the Sunday School in order to be a member in full and regular standing. Literally the entire church membership can with great profit be enrolled: babies, invalids, shut-ins, traveling men, mothers tied down by home duties, railroad men, telegraph or telephone operators, - the Sunday School welcomes the representatives of every walk in life. Blessed stories are told of the home department, such as of the engineer miles from his Sunday School, safeguarded in the cab of his locomotive by his nearness to his Lord, and rejoicing in his privilege of studying the same Sunday School lesson that the boys and girls in the home school are poring over. Or about the telegraph operators who, miles apart from each other, compare notes over the wire about their Sunday School lesson. Cradle roll members don’t do much reading or studying for themselves; but when the enthusiastic, tactful, loving cradle roll superintendent hurries around to a home in the neighborhood and asks for the name and enrollment of the baby not yet twenty-four hours old, you may be sure that that household, especially the father and mother, are not offended at this show of interest in the little life which is all the world to them. And stony hearts that may have seemed hopelessly remote from the Gospel have been warmed and won to a wide-open acceptance of the love of Jesus Christ because the littlest member of the family first entered the Sunday School through the cradle roll.
Thus it is that, from any way we look at it, the true Sunday School is a mighty evangelistic agency. If the Sunday School isn’t evangelistic, it isn’t the Sunday School. It may bear the name of the Sunday School, but that does not make it one. The true Sunday School of the Church of Jesus Christ exists solely to make the whole wonderful reach and splendor of the Good News better known, both to those within and without.
A young crockery merchant in New York State who rejoiced in Christ as his Saviour had found that when he flung himself in conscious helplessness on his Lord and asked to be used for the saving of others, his Lord took him at his word. Saving souls became his great joy and interest. He wanted to do more systematic work in that line, and to know the Bible in a more systematic way. The city in which he lived numbered one hundred thousand people; but he found that there was not a men’s Bible class connected with any Sunday School there numbering as many as ten members. Yet there were sixteen thousand young men in that city.