Sunday School Paused During the Pandemic. Will It Come Back?

A new report shows dramatic disruptions to religious education classes as fewer attend or volunteer.

When Tracey Fixen volunteered to serve as the Sunday school superintendent for her church, she had a clean slate. There had been no religious education programing at Our Savior’s Lutheran in Colefax, North Dakota.

“I started saying, ‘We’re going to watch videos so we have some sort of adult education,’” she said. The 200-person church now offers lessons during a coffee hour prior to the Sunday service each week.

Many of the materials they have are “outdated,” Fixen said—it’s not in the budget to invest in new ones right now—but putting on some kind of Sunday school is more than a lot of churches are doing.

As US church attendance remains stagnant and congregations move toward a focus on Bible studies or small groups, religious education classes on Wednesday nights or Sunday mornings have largely fallen away.

Plus, those extra gatherings were put on hold during the COVID-19 pandemic. Will they ever come back? Read More

Before the COVID-19 pandemic a number of surveys of Americans who identified themselves as Christians found that a large number of them were biblically-illiterate, theologically-illiterate, and poorly-discipled. Among the reasons for this state of affairs was the disorganized, scattershot approach of many churches to the discipling of new believers and the ongoing formation of church members and attendees. The pandemic's disruption of religious education classes has exacerbated the problem. Churches have also not given enough emphasis to spiritual formation for youth and adults. A pastor's sermon, as important as it may, be cannot by itself carry the weight of forming church members and attendees as disciples of Jesus.