The Missionary Era · 1780-c. 1900 · Britain, N. America
The Sunday School & Bible-Institute Movement
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About This Movement
In 1780 a Gloucester newspaper proprietor named Robert Raikes hired four women to teach the town's factory children to read on Sunday — their one free day — and then publicized the results in his own paper. The idea travelled with extraordinary speed, and by the middle of the nineteenth century Sunday schools were teaching literacy along with religion to millions of working-class children in Britain and America, staffed overwhelmingly by unpaid women volunteers and organized by unions that supplied lessons, prizes and books at industrial scale. A century after Raikes the same instinct produced the Bible institute: schools like D. L. Moody's in Chicago, opened in 1886, that took ordinary lay people rather than university graduates and trained them in a year or two as evangelists, teachers and missionaries. Together they are the machinery by which most ordinary Christians of the industrial age actually learned the faith.
Sources
- The founding and institutional layer: Raikes's Gloucester Journal notices (1783-) and correspondence; Sunday School Union (1803-) and American Sunday School Union records (incl. the Mississippi Valley Enterprise, 1830); the Uniform Lesson records (1872) (primary) — This is lay religious formation carried out at industrial scale, documented in its own institutional paperwork.
- Teachers' and students' memoirs: teachers' periodicals and memoirs; working-class scholars' recollections in laboring autobiographies; women teachers' predominance as structural fact (primary) — The students' own voice survives mostly through memoirs written later in life, so treat it as retrospective rather than contemporary.
- The Bible-institute layer: Moody Bible Institute founding records (1886) with Emma Dryer's founding work and letters; Moody's sermons and correspondence; YMCA and convention records (primary) — Emma Dryer's role in founding the institute is a woman's institutional founding voice that is only thinly documented.
- Anne Boylan, Sunday School: The Formation of an American Institution 1790-1880 (Yale, 1988), with Thomas Laqueur, Religion and Respectability (Yale, 1976) (secondary) — Boylan is the American standard and Laqueur the British standard; Laqueur centers the working-class students themselves rather than the institutions.
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 8, 'The growth of voluntary religion' (Bebbington) with ch. 22 (Noll - number verified) (reference) — This reference volume has no dedicated chapter on religious education; the Bebbington chapter's exact number could not be confirmed.