The Sunday school movement and the wings churches built

You walk past them on nearly every downtown block: the long, low additions tacked onto the back or side of a sanctuary, a row of windows and a separate door facing the parking lot. In Waco those additions are often the largest change a congregation ever made to its building. They were not built for worship. They were built for the Sunday school.

The story behind those rooms starts in England in the 1700s, and it is told in detail on the en.wikipedia.org page for the Sunday school movement. Christians had taught children the faith long before that. What was new in the eighteenth century was scale, and a curriculum that taught reading and writing as well as doctrine. The rooms that Waco churches put up in the twentieth century are the American end of that same road.

Sunday school was not always a room in a church

The earliest Protestant Sunday schools were charity schools. In 1751 William King started one in Dursley, Gloucestershire, and Robert Raikes, editor of the Gloucester Journal, started a similar school in Gloucester in 1781. Factory and farm children worked six days a week, sometimes more than thirteen hours a day, so Sunday was the only day they could attend. The Bible was the textbook, and the pupils learned to read and write from it. The Sunday School Society, founded in 1785, printed the textbooks and helped bring together nearly four thousand schools. By 1831, about 1,250,000 children in Great Britain, roughly a quarter of those eligible, attended weekly.

Why did the churches build separate wings?

Because the classes outgrew the sanctuary. In the earliest years adults sat in the same classes as the infants, each being taught basic reading, and the schools were financed by subscription so that large buildings could go up to hold public lectures as well as classrooms. Some towns saw the Methodists withdraw from a shared Sunday school and build their own. The Anglicans set up National schools that served as both Sunday schools and day schools. The separate classroom wing, in other words, was a solution invented long before any Waco congregation needed one.

What the movement looked like on this side of the Atlantic

The first organized and documented Sunday school in the United States was founded in Ephrata, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, by Ludwig Höcker, a German immigrant who joined the Sabbatarian Ephrata Cloister in 1739 and created a school for the area's impoverished children there, publishing a full textbook on the Ephrata Press. A Seventh Day Baptist Sabbath school was organized at Ephrata around 1740, forty years before Raikes began his work in Gloucester. Baptist, Methodist and Presbyterian congregations carried the pattern west and south, and by the time Waco's downtown congregations were raising brick sanctuaries in the early 1900s, the Sunday school was simply what a church did.

Reading the wing from the outside

An educational church wing is usually easy to date against the sanctuary it serves. The sanctuary has the tower, the Gothic Revival tracery and the stained glass; the wing has a flat roof, a plain brick wall and a rank of identical windows sized for small rooms. The Sunday school page notes that churches of many Christian denominations have classrooms attached to the church used for Sunday school, so the arrangement you see in Waco is a denominational commonplace, not a local invention. Look for a second entrance: classes often met before the service, and a side door let children arrive without crossing the worship space.

What went on in those rooms

Classes usually preceded the Sunday morning service and served as catechesis for children, teenagers and sometimes adults. Many ran on a set curriculum, and some taught attendees a catechism. Members often received certificates and awards for participation and attendance. The rooms could also feed people: Sunday school classes may provide a light breakfast, though on days when Holy Communion is celebrated during worship, some denominations encourage fasting before receiving the Eucharistic elements. In some traditions, particular grades, the second or the eighth for instance, used the class to prepare young people for a rite such as First Communion or Confirmation. The doctrine of Sunday Sabbatarianism, held by many denominations, encouraged Sunday school attendance on the ground that the whole of the Lord's Day belongs to God, which is why children and teenagers often came back to the church in the late afternoon for youth group before an evening service.

When the school took over the building

By the 1920s Sunday schools in the industrial cities also promoted sports and ran Sunday school leagues. They became social centres that hosted amateur dramatics and concert parties. A church that added a wing in that decade was not only adding classrooms; it was adding a hall, a kitchen and a stage. By the 1960s, the term Sunday school could refer to the building itself and rarely to the activities inside it, and by the 1970s even the largest Sunday school had been demolished. That turn matters in Waco, where several congregations merged or consolidated between 1900 and 2019 and left wings standing after the sanctuary closed.

The rooms that outlasted the classes

The education role of the Sunday school ended, in England, with the Education Act 1870, which provided universal elementary education. Sunday schools carried on beside the new public schools, and new forms appeared, among them the Socialist Sunday Schools movement, which began in the United Kingdom in 1886. In the United States the pattern was gentler but similar: as public schooling took over reading and writing, the Sunday room kept the catechism and lost the alphabet. The long wing behind a Waco sanctuary is a record of that shift, and it explains why so many of those rooms now hold something other than classes.

From Sunday class to weekday preschool

That is the most common afterlife of the wing. A room built for a circle of children and a teacher on Sunday morning needs little to become a weekday preschool ministry room from Monday to Friday: child-height tables, a sink, a door to the playground, a closet for supplies. The Sunday school page does not publish a history of how American congregations made that conversion, so the local record is what you have to go on. In Waco, the preschool years are often the last period in which the whole wing is in daily use.

Where the evidence lives

You can trace a wing without a single photograph. Church property files hold the building permits, the floor plans, the contractor's correspondence and the insurance schedules that name each addition and its date. A plan drawn for a Sunday school will show a row of small rooms off a central corridor, sometimes with sliding partitions so that two classes could become one assembly. Compare that plan with the sanctuary drawings and you are reading the congregation's own account of why it built.

What the numbers cannot tell you

The movement's early statistics survive well. In 1785, 250,000 English children were attending Sunday school, with 5,000 in Manchester alone; by 1835 the Sunday School Society had distributed 91,915 spelling books, 24,232 New Testaments and 5,360 Bibles. In Sweden there were 29 Sunday schools in Stockholm by 1871, and by 1915 the country counted 6,518 Sunday schools with 23,058 officers and teachers and 317,648 students. In Finland the first Sunday schools were run by the Evangelical Lutheran Church, the first founded in 1807, and were often for those who had not become literate. None of those figures will tell you how many children sat in a particular Waco wing in 1925. For that you need the attendance rolls, if they survived, and most did not.

A building you can still read

Next time you pass a downtown sanctuary, walk around to the side with the plain windows and the second door. Count the windows and you are counting classrooms. Check whether the wing is narrower than the sanctuary and set back from its front wall, which usually means it came later and was fitted to the lot. If the congregation has closed, the wing may be an office, a studio or a storage room now, and the classrooms may have lost their partitions. The dates, the architect and the cost are in the property file; the reason is standing in front of you.