📈 Church Growth — Unit 10: Sunday School and Small Groups

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One of the distinctive marks of the way many of our churches were built is the idea of growing a church through the Sunday School. A good many church-growth specialists have said flatly that it cannot be done — but they have not really studied the churches that did it. What follows is less a system than a testimony, drawn from years of watching it work.

1. Open enrollment. On any given Sunday, only forty to sixty percent of those enrolled in Sunday School will actually attend. So stop fretting over attendance and work instead on enrollment — anywhere, anytime, any place. In some churches it is harder to get on the Sunday School roll than to join the church itself, and that is exactly backward. I carried enrollment cards with me everywhere, and would simply say, “We believe everyone ought to be enrolled in Bible study somewhere. Would you mind if we enrolled you in one of our classes?” One year in South Dakota, that single question added a hundred to our enrollment.

2. No pruning. Once a person is enrolled, his name stays — until he dies, moves away, or asks to be removed. The roll is not a brag sheet of who attends; it is the prospect list of who can be reached, and the moment you strike a name you lose touch with that soul. At my first church the Sunday School director felt names had to be pruned when people missed a few weeks. He was busy and said he didn’t think he’d serve as director the next year. I accepted his resignation — with regret — and we put in a director who would not prune the rolls. By the time I left, average Sunday School attendance had climbed from about thirty-five to over ninety, and worship and giving rose right along with it.

3. Contacts. This is the key to the whole thing. We tried to contact every person enrolled, every week — a visit, a card, or a phone call — and not only the absent but the present too. Without contacts, open enrollment is meaningless; the roll just gathers dust. The contacting need not all fall on the teacher; it can be shared by the class, and every class should have an outreach leader to see that it happens. People do not drift from a church that keeps reaching for them.

4. Inspiration. People have to believe something can happen. Part of the pastor’s task is to help the teachers catch a vision, for almost any method has merit once the people are sold on it — and none works while they are not.

So Sunday School, rightly run, is not merely a teaching hour; it is a growth engine — a structure of small classes, each one enrolling widely, pruning no one, and contacting everyone. And that points to the deeper principle beneath it, the one this unit is really about.

The cell, the small group, the church grown small. The genius of Sunday School was never the curriculum; it was the small group — a circle small enough that a person could be known, enrolled, missed, and reached. That same insight runs underneath every healthy church: the church must live at every size at once, the great celebration of corporate worship and the intimate cell where life is actually shared. In the cell the key number is not the hundreds in the auditorium but the ten or twelve around the room — and on that small base a church’s growth becomes, in principle, unlimited, because you can always start one more group. The crowd can only grow so large in a room; the number of small circles can grow without end.

Where We Are Now (2026)

In many churches the Sunday School hour itself has given way to the small group meeting in homes through the week — but make no mistake, the principle did not change; only the room did. And here is a quiet irony worth seeing: the open-enrollment, never-prune, contact-everyone discipline that built those old Sunday Schools is almost exactly what the dechurching crisis now cries out for. We learned that most of the great company who left did not storm out over doctrine; they drifted — they moved, life shifted, the drive got long — and no one reached for them. A church that had kept the old rule — keep the name on the roll, and contact every soul every week — would have caught many of them before they were ever gone. What looked like an old-fashioned Sunday School method turns out to have been a re-churching strategy invented decades ahead of its time. The tools have multiplied — a church can now track every member and automate the reminder to reach the one who has slipped from view — but the discipline is the same, and the discipline is everything.

The cell, meanwhile, has grown all the way up into its own movement. The small group that was once a department of the church has, in many places, become the church itself — the house church, the dinner church, the micro-church, a congregation of ten or twenty around a living room or a supper table, often gathered in a network of such cells rather than under one large roof. This is the old metachurch vision come of age, and it has two great strengths for our moment. It is the New Unit Principle set loose — for it is far easier to start a new circle than to build a new building, and new units tend to grow faster than old ones, so a church that multiplies cells multiplies endlessly at the tips. And it proved resilient exactly when the large gatherings could not meet: when the doors of the auditoriums were shut, the churches that survived were the ones that had never neglected the small, the simple, and the personal. The largest congregations on earth, in fact, are built this way — vast not because the room is vast but because they are honeycombed with tens of thousands of small praying cells.

One caution, carried over from our principles. Growing small is not magic, and a new site is no cure for a sick church. The point is never bigness or smallness for its own sake; it is that life is shared in the small and celebrated in the large, and a church needs both. But if you must choose where to begin in a wary, scattered, dechurching age, begin small — for it is in the small circle that a stranger is enrolled, that an absent one is missed, that a name becomes a face and a face becomes a friend, and that a spectator is at last formed into a disciple. The church grows small in order to grow large. That has always been true. It has never been more true than now.

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