What does the Bible say about Sunday School?

Teaching the Bible to children and praying and singing with them is also a proper and valuable service for women. Such work begins in the home and is continued in the Sunday School and in children's meetings. The Sunday School in the Assembly is simply an enlargement of a family gathering, removed from the home to larger and more convenient quarters. Therefore, it would be quite proper for sisters to teach Sunday School classes of children or young women, especially when they are in charge of brethren under whose direction they serve. When young brothers or any brethren are part of a Sunday School, we believe it would be against Scripture for any sister to be the superintendent of the School, for that would be exercising authority over the man.

What we have learned of the truth, we are to abide in; and are to value all the truth, whether learned from Paul or from the other Scriptures. Timothy had known the Old Testament Scriptures from childhood. This should encourage those engaged in Sunday School work to teach the children the Holy Scriptures, which make those who listen wise unto salvation, through faith in Christ Jesus. And how very important it is that our own children, in our homes, should be brought up to know the Scriptures, and to love them as the sacred letters.

While we do not read in the New Testament of a specific meeting of the early Christians for the purpose of studying the Bible together or of their having Reading Meetings, as they are sometimes called, there are many Scriptures which would encourage the having of such a regular meeting of an assembly of believers. God's people need instruction in the truth, the lambs and sheep of Christ need to be fed and built up in the faith. An informal meeting for the study of God's Word and the reading together of the Scriptures affords opportunity for the meeting of these needs in a happy and simple way. We must not expect in this dispensation to find definite directions in the New Testament as to details of meetings, etc., for the Holy Spirit is here to guide us and He is to be unhindered in His activities and in the channels which He employs. If a practice is in accord with the general principles of Scripture and is for edification, we need not require further authorization for it.

And, secondly, we have to weigh the fact that the children were to be gathered before the Lord to hearken to His word. Both these facts are full of weighty instruction for all the members of the church of God — instruction urgently called for on all sides. There is a most deplorable amount of failure as to these two points. We sadly neglect the assembling of ourselves together for the simple reading of the holy scriptures. There does not seem to be sufficient attraction in the word of God itself to bring us together. There is an unhealthy craving for other things; human oratory, music, religious excitement of some kind or other seems needful to bring people together; anything and everything but the precious word of God.

Most of these details should be taught the children at their homes. Many a happy season can be spent with them thus, and our own memories be refreshed as we hear them recite the list of the Bible books with perhaps the number of chapters in each, or engage in a competitive test in finding and reading a half-dozen references.

Speaking of the children, tender memories will arise of how we have sought to make the Bible a familiar and revered book to which they could turn, even for relaxation as well as instruction. The description of some familiar scene without mentioning names; the formation of anagrams such as "God is light" by asking the names of various Bible characters. In this way, Scripture or Bible books at least become familiar to the young, and God can use these things later on.

Such meetings, where the children of God sit around together, each with a Bible and each able to read it, look up the passages referred to, with liberty of all brothers to take part in comment or questions, gathered for the purpose of reading a portion of Scripture and helping one another in the understanding and application of it, have been a means of great blessing to souls, in the past century especially. It was in such meetings of a simple, informal character, held in private homes, public rooms and halls, that precious truths, long lost to the Church, were recovered. These truths were first hammered out and afterwards embodied like shining jewels in the expository writings that have been available in the past years and have so greatly enlightened hundreds and thousands of readers in the Word of God.

A. When Christians come together ἐν ἐκκλησίᾳ (i.e., as an assembly), there is an entire openness for such action as the Spirit may direct in prayer and singing, blessing and thanksgiving, reading, speaking (subject of course to the regulations of the Lord in 1 Corinthians 14). This is not at all the character of a scripture-reading, whether stated or occasional, at a public meeting-room or in a private house. One point of value in it is to afford an opportunity for questions and explanations which would be out of place in the assembly. The nature of a meeting depends not on the fact of who are present, but on its aim and character. Thus, a lecture or a preaching of the gospel, like a reading-meeting, might have all the saints of a place present; but its own character is quite unaffected by such a circumstance. Nevertheless, a social character is, I think, desirable for a scripture-reading, so as to make it expedient, as well as lawful, for a woman to ask a question, if she wished. There are cases as when many men are present, where nature itself would teach her to prefer silence. 1 Timothy forbids not this, but teaching and the exercise of authority. Prophesying (according to 1 Corinthians 11 compared with 1 Corinthians 14) was lawful for women, not in the assemblies but at home; where, as I suppose, Philip's four daughters exercised their gift unobtrusively and with decorum. So too Priscilla, with her husband, helped Apollos in private.

From their earliest history it is evident that reading meetings, so called, have been a mode of teaching which has been universally practised; and, beyond a question, they have been greatly used of the Lord for giving both an accurate and an extensive knowledge of the divine word. Many Christians both in the Establishment and among Dissenters who would go to a friend's house it might be in the forenoon or the afternoon, to read and study the word of God, would object to enter any place of public worship save what would be considered their own. In this way the word of God is closely read by small companies of twenty, thirty, or more; and, any one being free to ask a question, difficulties are removed and the true meaning of the scripture more clearly seen. Such being also considered instruction (not church) meetings, all are free to state what light the Lord may have given them on the portion under meditation.

Christians may gather for a useful and blessed purpose without being gathered on the ground of the Assembly. A father may gather his family, a master his household, a brother young people to meditate on the Word or study the Scriptures. Elder brethren may assemble for the same end. A brother, gifted of the Lord as an evangelist or teacher, may exercise his ministry before an audience convoked to this end, whether it be in the meeting-room of the Assembly or elsewhere; this same brother may have it on his heart to expound a subject or a portion of the Word consecutively in a series of lectures; and with the consent of the Assembly; these meetings might perhaps take place during the week on the ordinary meeting day. The Assembly would attend these addresses, of which the responsibility rests upon him who exercises his gift; it would profit by them; there would be light granted, effects produced by the Holy Spirit on the conscience; he who thought he did not need such help would suffer loss; but none of the cases that we have just enumerated are Assembly meetings.

In addition to this, the saints may come together to hear whatever a servant of the Lord may have to impart to them in the way of addresses on Scripture; but such meetings being entirely on the responsibility of the individual teacher do not properly come under our subject. The same may be said of the evangelist's meeting for preaching the gospel. But of that later.