Set Your Heart: A Pastor's Guide to Leading Sunday School Out of Exile

In a pastor’s world, there are few words that bring as wide of an array of emotions as these two. For some, it is the enigma that cannot be solved; for others, it is the dead horse that people keep trying to ride. Sunday school is one of the few mainstays that has weathered decades of change in the way that churches are conducted, yet for many pastors, it has become something to stand off from and let others deal with, with the hope that it does not come back to bite the pastor unexpectantly. When Sunday school is functioning well, it is one of the most powerful vehicles a church has to help it carry out the Great Commission and to engage members in doing Christ’s work. While many churches have moved away from the name “Sunday school,” the heart of the ministry remains the same: it is a group that is open, ongoing, and employs a plan to study the Bible. Gene Mims (2003) describes these open groups as person-centered (meaning they focus on bringing people into a transforming relationship with God), lay-led, and Bible-based, concluding that open groups fulfill the Great Commission by making disciples of all men. Though they are often called classes because of the Sunday school name, Mims called this a misnomer, explaining, “They are classes in the sense that the Bible is studied, but they are much more. They are kingdom entities built on the five functions of the church. They are living organisms built for the people who attend” (p.135).But this sounds nothing like what most pastors hear from the Sunday school or small groups that take place in their churches. Any pastor would get behind a strategy that would help him assimilate newcomers into a group of believers, study the Scriptures each week, connect believers together to care for one another, and mobilize believers to share their faith and take the gospel throughout the world. Sunday school was designed to be that strategy, but in our day, it has fallen into disrepair. In many churches today, Sunday school sits like an old rusty car, shining in places with a bit of its past glory, but by and large a lawn ornament. To make matters worse, pastors are often given the keys to this car with no instructions on how to start it, how to make it run, or even how to drive it. The goal of this book is to give you, as a pastor and leader, an owner’s manual of sorts to help you dust off the wear and tear of Sunday school in your church and prepare you to not only get it started again, but to hear it hum and purr again as a vehicle to carry Christ’s disciples in their Great Commission work.One of the struggles for pastors is that there are simply not many resources available today to guide a pastor in leading Sunday school. While the market is filled with works on how to lead an individual group or on the importance of groups, little attention has been given to practical steps that pastors can take to help Sunday school in their churches. But this is not the market’s fault, but rather, a reflection of the emphasis given to Sunday school; it is often neglected in seminaries and Bible colleges tasked with training pastors and is rarely used in churches as beginning training for prospective pastors. Steve Parr (2010) laments over his experience of talking with a large group of master of divinity graduates, those who have been trained for the task of pastoring, who had been given no academic training at all concerning how to lead Sunday school, leading him to conclude, “if the pastor does not have the tools and the knowledge, neither will the members. The result is that many pastors go into a church that has the basic Sunday school structure… but the Sunday school is lifeless and cold” (p. 21).Further, with the many other tasks that occupy a pastor’s schedule and thinking, Sunday school is often placed on the back burner. In trying to understand why pastors were not more involved in Sunday school, Rainer (1999) found that pastors focused their atten