Sunday School Movement

Background

A Sunday school is an educational gathering held at church on the Lord's Day to teach the Bible and the Christian faith. The institution is generally traced to 1780 in Gloucester, England, where Robert Raikes gathered and taught the children of laborers. These children had been left without schooling during the Industrial Revolution, and every Sunday Raikes taught them the Bible along with reading and writing. The movement later grew into an international one centered on the World's Sunday School Association.

The missionaries who came to Korea had been raised in an American church tradition that placed great emphasis on Sunday schools, and from the outset they regarded Sunday schools as an important part of mission work.

Development

In Korea, the movement developed through the following stages:

• 1888: Under the leadership of Mrs. Scranton, a group that included twelve children gathered in a small room at Ewha Haktang. This is generally regarded as the beginning of Sunday schools in Korea.
• 1905: A Sunday School Committee was formed within the General Council of Protestant Evangelical Missions, a cooperative body of the mission boards. At first it consisted solely of foreign missionaries.
• 1908: Representatives of the World's Sunday School Association visited Korea, and a Korean branch was organized.
• 1911: Five Korean members joined the Sunday School Committee for the first time.
• 1913: During a visit to Korea by H. J. Heinz, a leader of the World's Sunday School Association, a Sunday school convention attended by more than 14,000 people was held in Seoul.
• 1921: The First National Sunday School Convention was held, and participants agreed to form a united organization.
• 1922: On November 1, the Korea Sunday School Association was organized in the conference room of the Bible Society. Twenty-seven representatives of ten bodies, including Presbyterian and Methodist churches and various mission boards, took part. Its first president was Oh Cheon-gyeong.
• 1925: The association's first three general secretaries were missionaries. That year the Reverend Chung In-gwa and the Reverend Han Seok-won became associate general secretaries, bringing Koreans into the association's day-to-day work.
• 1929: At the Third Convention, the Korea Sunday School Promotion Society was established in an effort to move away from dependence on missionaries.
• 1938: Japanese colonial pressure intensified after the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War. It was reported that the association would withdraw from the World's Sunday School Association and join the Japan Sunday School Association, and that same year the association ceased operations.

Results and Influence

Over roughly sixteen years, the Korea Sunday School Association carried out a variety of programs:

• It developed curricula for Sunday schools and vacation Bible schools and trained leaders.
• It held a national convention every four years.
• Beginning in 1927, it published an age-graded curriculum, the Graded Lessons (Gyedan Gonggwa), as well as magazines such as Sunday School Magazine and Children's Life (Ahui Saenghwal).
• It introduced the International Uniform Lessons and maintained ties with the worldwide Sunday school movement.

Early Korean Sunday schools devoted considerable effort to educating adults as well as children. By also teaching Korean reading and writing to children from families that did not attend church, they served as a channel for evangelism.

After Korea's liberation, the association was reestablished in 1947, and its legacy continues today in the Korean Christian Education Association. In Korea the term "Sunday school" was gradually replaced by "church school." In the mid-1950s, the National Sunday School Association was organized with the support of the Presbyterian General Assembly. This body now operates within the Presbyterian Church in Korea (Hapdong) as a federation of Sunday school associations organized by presbytery.

Assessment

Scholars of Korean church history assess the Sunday school movement favorably, noting that it contributed significantly to the growth of the Korean church and that it was an interdenominational cooperative movement in which Presbyterians and Methodists worked together. They also point to its limitations. In its early years it depended heavily on missionaries and foreign curricula, and Korean leadership grew strong only in the late 1920s. In addition, Japanese colonial control severed its international ties. In 2022, marking the centennial of the association's founding, the Korean Society of Church History and the Korea Evangelical Historical Theological Society held a joint academic conference.