Where it began
The Sunday School work started inside a congregation, at Good Samaritan Church in Lahore, where the children’s class still meets every Saturday afternoon. A city church class is the most ordinary form this ministry takes, and the most important, because it is where everything else is proved before it is sent out.
What a city class looks like
One room, often the same room the adults use, with the chairs pushed back. A wide range of ages together, because there is rarely a second room to divide them into. A volunteer teacher who has worked a full day already. Thirty children, sometimes more, and no equipment beyond a Bible, some paper and a voice.
That room is not a compromise. Many of the children in it come from families who work as sanitation workers, factory hands and domestic staff — families who are looked down on all week. For two hours on a Saturday somebody knows their name, expects something of them, and tells them they are loved by God.
The teachers
Almost every Sunday School teacher in Pakistan is a volunteer, and most have never been trained. They took the class because somebody had to, and they teach from memory. The city churches are where that changes: teachers are trained here, they practise here in front of other teachers, and they carry what they learn out to the kilns and the villages.
Older children are given real work in the class — leading the singing, hearing the little ones’ memory verses, helping with the craft. Nobody announces it, but that is how the next generation of teachers is made, and it costs nothing.
Beyond the class
A weekly class means a teacher notices things. A child who has stopped eating. A child who has stopped coming. A family in trouble that would never ask for help. Because the Sunday School sits inside a congregation, that concern has somewhere to go — to the pastor, to the church’s compassion work, and to Maranatha Christian High School, where more than 500 children are taught without paying a single rupee in tuition.
Please pray for the volunteer teachers of the city churches, who prepare a lesson after a full day’s work, and for the children who come to them each week.