Penetrating power
The Sunday School is wonderful in another respect also. Nothing ducks under the devil’s defences like the old-fashioned Sunday School. Notice how it gets round the fortified walls of Satan. In communities where there is a high degree of drug abuse, alcoholism, crime, and hatred of the things of God, it is immensely difficult for church visitors to get into homes, and to speak in a credible way to adults. How can we reach such homes? What can we do? How may we overcome the barriers and the antagonism in many communities? The fortifications of the devil are seemingly impregnable.
Yet the marvellous thing about an old-fashioned Sunday School is that its influence goes right under the walls which Satan has erected. Sunday Schools may reach into all kinds of homes. When we visit for the children we are often successful, and they come enthusiastically out to attend the house of God.
Parents who would slam the door if the visit was an effort to reach them, will send their children, and then the parents will gradually become more sympathetic. Older brothers and sisters, even those unreachable through addiction to current teenage idols, or even to drugs, may one day be touched, because the church cares for the little ones, and has developed a credible contact with their homes.
How often we have heard testimonies to the unique and remarkable agency of Sunday Schools. Today, the Sunday School is still the greatest spiritual and social blessing to needy children. In our toughest urban communities there are some children whose only contact with genuine kindness, sympathy and affection, is at Sunday School.
This is the greatest social work we can be engaged in. We have children today who are cursed, never loved, and even abused, and whose lifeline to sanity and to people of character is through the child evangelism ministry. In their Sunday School, Bible Class, and weeknight meeting staff, they have friends who relate to them and are concerned for them. May God help his people to see once again the wonderful merits and opportunities of Sunday Schools.
Can we not draw the teenagers into our church? Is it impossible to attract them in any number to the Gospel services? The reason is, we have no ‘fishers’. And we have no fishers because we have no effective Sunday School ministry to outside children.
It is the fruit of the Sunday School which provides enthusiastic teenage fishers, and just one such keen, zealous youngster will fill a room. May God grant us such fishers, so that young people of Bible Class age, and up into late teens and early twenties, may be found in our congregations, seeking the Lord.
Aside from its soul-saving, soul-protecting, and soul-warning ministry, the Sunday School also blesses the adult church in a deeply significant way. It does this, firstly, by providing important avenues of service for all.
The writer was saddened and surprised some years ago to read in a Christian magazine an article by a Christian woman who complained that there was nothing for women to do in evangelical churches. Yet, as Luther pointed out, a woman has more wisdom and power for teaching and handling children in her little finger than the average man in his whole body.