I am an older servant. I have served as a youth and children's director, assistant pastor, pastor, church planter, and missionary. I grew up understanding and believing what this book teaches as a boy. I believe in using Sunday School to grow your church. We should evangelize all we can. Let's reach all the souls that we can. This book by Ken Hemphill, Revitalizing the Sunday Morning Dinosaur: A Sunday School Growth Strategy for the 21st Century, is excellent. I challenge you to read it, study it, and think through how you might reach more souls through your Sunday School program. 

Sunday School is the critical ministry in our churches. It deserves our study and time investment. Read the following quotes. Meditate on them. See how they make you think. Work through them in your mind and do as the Holy Spirit directs you.



It is my conviction that the beginning of the so-called demise of Sunday School can be traced to a time when denominations and local churches failed to use the Sunday School with evangelistic intentionality and purpose. When the design was forgotten, the Sunday School became a maintenance tool rather than a growth tool.

While holding growth conferences in diverse settings, I have asked participants, “What is the role of the Sunday School?” I usually get two answers: “Fellowship” and “Bible teaching.” These are important, but fellowship and Bible teaching are not to be the stated purpose of the Sunday School if it is to function as a growth tool. The purpose of the Sunday School is to fulfill the Great Commission.

In reading some of the Southern Baptist periodicals from the early 1960s, it appears to me that the emphasis in Sunday School changed first from evangelistic outreach to fellowship, then to quality Bible teaching. I agree that we should use Sunday School to build fellowship and provide quality Bible teaching, but when the focus of Sunday School moved away from evangelism, it ceased to function effectively as a growth tool. I believe that Sunday School is a simple-to-use, familiar, and effective, integrated church growth tool when used with Great Commission intentionality.

Because none of these churches had a clear strategy for organizing the Sunday School for growth, most of the small groups had plateaued or declined over time, accurately displaying the condition of the church as a whole.

Piland stated that any adult Bible study class that had not attempted to lead anyone to Christ during the past year had missed their purpose for existing. He then affirmed that Sunday School must first be an evangelistic tool. Sunday School and outreach evangelism! I had never really connected the Sunday School with evangelistic outreach. I knew that it was effective for conserving the results of evangelism, but I had never seen a Sunday School designed for outreach.

The Sunday School must be plugged into a passion for evangelism; otherwise, it will settle into the comfort zone of a maintenance organization. By ignoring the evangelistic potential of the Sunday School, we have reduced Sunday School to a stagnant pool of introverted groups that look primarily to their own needs and interests and ignore the plight of the unsaved.

The Six Principles of Sunday School Growth

1. The Process Principle: Church growth is a process, not an event.
2. The Pyramid Principle: If you want to grow, enlarge your base.
3. The Receptivity Principle: Invest the most resources where they will return the best evangelistic results.
4. The Homogeneity Principle: The gospel witness often travels with greatest receptivity through a kinship or friendship unit.
5. The New Unit Principle: New units that enlarge the organization bring growth.
6. The Leadership Principle: To sustain meaningful growth, a church must have plenty of Great Commission-conscious leaders.