April 13 - Ring the Bell

April 13 – Ring the Bell!

Every Sunday morning, I sat in Sunday School doing myriads of projects, singing songs, reading Bible stories, acting in little plays, doing different things that teachers hoped would anchor my faith.

This beginnings of this tradition looked nothing like what we recognize as Sunday School today.

In 1780, a newspaper editor named Robert Raikes couldn’t bear to see what was happening to children in Gloucester, England. The street urchins were stuck in dark, dank mills for six days out of the week and on Sundays they turned into terrors on the streets.

He paid a woman to bring the children into her kitchen, feed them, teach them how to read and recite the Bible. The children didn’t shape up, but he refused to stop. After terrorizing the first woman, he moved them to another home and they were there for seven hours a day, learning. He required that they wash their hands and comb their hair and before long, the children couldn’t wait to learn. He started with twenty kids but soon there were ninety children attending Sunday Schools around the city.

Raikes had been trying to reform the prisons for quite some time, but realized that at some point, rehabilitating adults was nearly impossible. He recognized that poor children might be able to move past the poverty and loss of life if they just received some education. After three years, he figured that his experiment was a success and began writing about it in his newspaper.

The idea caught on. John Wesley incorporated it into his Wesleyan groups. Merchants began supporting the idea (it kept their shops safe on Sundays when the children were free). The Queen caught the vision and helped with fund-raising. By 1787, 250,000 children were attending Sunday Schools and fifty years later there were more than 1 ½ million around the world.

Teachers were paid at first, but soon became volunteers. While early Sunday Schools taught everything, public education soon grew to the point where they were able to focus more on Bible teaching.

There were many benefits of the Sunday School program. While the Great Awakening was occurring in England and America, the religious fervor was sweeping across both countries. Many believe that this spared England a bloody civil war. At the same time, wealthy Christians began to understand their responsibility to the poor and to the children that worked terrible hours in hideous circumstances.

This was the beginning of public education and the revolution of religious education.