Christian Education Department

The birth and growth of the Sunday School Department in Christ Apostolic Church has been an established concept from inception. At the dawning of the industrial era in the late 1700s (about the time of the United States’ Revolutionary War), England had a large underclass of poor people who had moved from the countryside to the city to work in factories. There was at least one factory in Gloucester that manufactured pins. Children, as young as eight years old, worked six days a week, in gruesome surroundings, for a pittance. When their tiny hands (which helped them as workers) got caught in the machinery and got cut off, the children were simply dumped on the streets and new workers were hired. There was no free schooling at this time. Education was considered a family (not a communal) purchase – if you had enough money, you send your children to school. If you were poor, your children did not learn to read and write and were probably destined to a life of poverty. So, they could not even read. In the growing factory society, the poor never seemed able to rise out of their abject poverty.

Sunday was the one these children got off. Many blew off steam, wandering around the town, breaking windows and robbing homes, while the upscale parishioners attended church. The street urchins of the day survived miserable conditions at work and learned how to be pickpockets and thieves at a young age. There was no way out of the poverty cycle for these children.

These gangs of street urchins sparked a vision and burden in Robert Raikes who was at that time the editor of the Gloucester Journal. He saw their lack of education, their dead end life of poverty, and their turning to crime as something Christian folks should be concerned about. So, he got an idea. His idea was simple: Why not start a school on Sundays for these poor children where good Christian people would teach them to read and write, teach them the Ten Commandments, and instruct them in moral living? Maybe with a basic education they might be able to escape their dreadful life.

So Raikes started a Sunday School for these poor children. Their parents could not pay for school like other better-off people could, so Raikes paid for the first school himself and recruited others to contribute. He became obsessed with reforming the morals of the poor children and the lower class. In 1780, he started this first Sunday School and paid the teacher himself. She (the teacher) quit soon after but he hired others. Since he was a printer, Raikes published large sheets with the Ten Commandments and other scripture verses on them so the children could use them for his double-duty aim of learning to read and write, and at the same time learning moral principles to live by. These printed sheets were in a sense the first Sunday School curriculum. Raikes was a devout member of the Church of England.