How to Choose an Adult Evangelism Curriculum

A church that orders seventeen copies of a workbook before anyone has read a lesson in it owns seventeen unread workbooks. Adult curriculum is the one purchase an education committee makes that a whole class has to live inside for a year or a quarter, and the choice is usually narrowed too late, by price and habit. This guide walks through what a Sunday school class actually is in the mainline churches, what a curriculum has to hold, and how a small congregation can judge one before the first session.

The details cited in this entry were checked on the Wikipedia article on Sunday school.

Start with the shape of the thing you are buying into. According to the Wikipedia page on Sunday school, a Sunday school is an educational institution or weekly activity in a place of worship, usually Christian in character, and it has been known as a Sabbath school in some sabbatarian denominations. Classes usually precede the Sunday service and exist to provide catechesis, for children and teenagers and sometimes adults too. Keep that last phrase in view: adult classes are not an afterthought bolted onto a children's program. They sit inside the same institution, with the same purpose, and they deserve the same care in selection.

What adult Sunday school is not

Two centuries of history get in the way of clear thinking here. The page notes that the locution today chiefly refers to catechism classes for children and adults held before, after, or during the church service. In family integrated churches, Sunday school is always held before the service of worship so that families can attend worship together. That detail matters for scheduling before it matters for content: if your congregation expects adults and children to arrive and leave together, a curriculum that runs long will lose the room.

The historical drift is worth naming because committees often argue about the wrong period. By the 1960s, Sunday school could refer to the building and rarely to the activities inside. By the 1970s even the largest Sunday school had been demolished. What remained, and what remains now, is the class, not the institution that once ran leagues, amateur dramatics and concert parties. Adult curriculum is a classroom decision, not a building program.

Does your class expect a catechism?

The page records that many Sunday school classes operate on a set curriculum, with some teaching attendees a catechism, and that classes may prepare youth for a rite such as First Communion or Confirmation in certain grades. Adult classes rarely end in a rite, but the question of a fixed body of teaching does not disappear. A congregation that has always used a printed quarterly is choosing a curriculum with a doctrinal spine, whether or not anyone calls it that. A congregation that has used rotating DVD series is choosing the opposite. Decide which one you are, and write it down for the next committee.

Members often receive certificates and awards for participation, as well as attendance, and Sunday school classes may provide a light breakfast. On days when Holy Communion is celebrated, some denominations encourage fasting before receiving the Eucharistic elements. Those are small administrative facts with large consequences for a curriculum: attendance record keeping, a coffee setup, and the prayer book's calendar all brush against the lesson plan each week.

Reading the history as a warning about scope

Sunday schools in Europe began with the Catholic Church's Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, founded in the sixteenth century by the archbishop Charles Borromeo to teach young Italian children the faith. Protestant Sunday schools were first set up in the eighteenth century in England to provide education to working children. William King started a Sunday school in 1751 in Dursley, Gloucestershire, and Robert Raikes, editor of the Gloucester Journal, started a similar one in Gloucester in 1781. That first wave taught reading, writing, arithmetic and knowledge of the Bible, because the children in the factories had no other school.

The educational role of the Sunday schools ended with the Education Act 1870, which provided universal elementary education. Read that as a warning about overloading a lesson. When a curriculum arrives promising Scripture, church history, spiritual formation and a book discussion in forty-five minutes, someone has written a prospectus rather than a session. Ask what a single week is supposed to accomplish, and whether the leader can name it in one sentence.

What the numbers say about materials

The page gives figures for one society's distribution, and they are a useful standard for how seriously print was once taken. By 1835, the Sunday School Society had distributed 91,915 spelling books, 24,232 New Testaments and 5,360 Bibles. Compare that ratio with the cost sheet on your own table: a curriculum that supplies a leader guide but not a participant book, or a participant book no one can afford to replace, is a curriculum with a hidden line item.

What the society distributed by 1835Number


Spelling books91,915
New Testaments24,232
Bibles5,360

Three books, one purpose. When you cost a curriculum, count what each person physically holds and writes in, not what the brochure includes.

Can one leader carry a whole quarter?

Preparation is where adult curriculum succeeds or fails in a small congregation, and the pattern is old. Robert Raikes opened a school in the home of a Mrs Meredith, operating it on a Sunday, because that was the only day the boys and girls working in the factories could attend, and the children learned to read and write using the Bible as their textbook. Lay teaching was normal from the start. The Sunday School Society was founded by the Baptist deacon William Fox on 7 September 1785 in Prescott Street Baptist Church of London, and in Sweden, visiting Methodists' Sunday schools, Ehrenborg and the Palmqvist brothers found classes taught by laypeople and including literacy training in addition to Bible lessons, singing and prayer, with over 250 children and 20 to 30 teachers.

Twenty to thirty teachers for 250 children is a ratio of roughly one to ten. Most mainline adult classes run a single volunteer with a full-time job. A curriculum that requires outside reading no one will do, or a leader guide that assumes seminary Hebrew, will collapse in week three. Flip through the leader guide and ask whether a layperson with an ordinary week of work can prepare Thursday evening for Sunday morning. If the answer is no, the price of the book is irrelevant.

You can read more about Sunday school's long history for the parts this guide leaves out.

Which teachers will the class actually get?

Denominational variety in the adult room is not a modern problem. The Sunday school movement was cross-denominational, financed through subscription, and in some towns the Methodists withdrew from the large Sunday school and built their own, while the Anglicans set up National schools that acted as Sunday schools and day schools. Those were the precursors to a national system of education. Many of the divisions were about control of teaching, not doctrine. Expect the same in your own building. An adult curriculum that leaves no room for the class to disagree with the printed page will produce a class that quarrels with the leader instead.

Whose Sunday is it for?

The doctrine of Sunday Sabbatarianism, held by many Christian denominations, encourages practices such as Sunday school attendance, as it teaches that the entirety of the Lord's Day should be devoted to God; as such many children and teenagers return to the church in the late afternoon for youth group before attending an evening service of worship. Whether or not your congregation holds that doctrine, the pattern tells you who is in the building and when. An adult class scheduled opposite the youth group loses its parents. An adult class scheduled before worship gains the adults already there.

Committee members weighing this alongside other congregational work may find the comparison of discipleship curricula for mainline adults and the congregational practice hub for witness and outreach useful for keeping a single decision in proportion to the year's plan.

Which traditions held the class together?

History offers reassurance about durability. By 1831, 1,250,000 children in Great Britain, about 25 per cent of the eligible population, attended Sunday schools weekly, and the schools provided basic lessons in literacy alongside religious instruction. In Stockholm alone, there were 29 Sunday schools by 1871, and by 1915 there were 6,518 Sunday schools in Sweden among a number of denominations, with 23,058 officers and teachers and 317,648 students. No single curriculum produced those numbers. A syllabus that survives is one that a local congregation can teach with the people it already has.

None of this settles the doctrinal questions a committee will argue about, and it is not meant to. What it settles is sequence: name the class you have, name the leader you have, and price the books each person will hold. Then open the leader guide to week seven, not week one, and read it as the tired volunteer who will teach it. If that reading holds up, the curriculum is worth the order. If it does not, the page on Sunday school will still be there next year.