Across New Castle County, churches have quietly phased out age-graded Sunday school in favor of neighborhood home groups. Supporters love the relational depth; critics argue the loss of structured Scripture teaching shows up in shallow theology from the pews.
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Add your commentThirty-one years teaching third grade Sunday school at a church near the Brandywine. I gave it everything I had. When the program ended I cried in my car for an hour. I'm not against small groups. But I will tell you that watching a child's face when they finally understand that David was actually terrified and still chose to trust God — that's not something you replicate around someone's kitchen table with adults talking about their week. Different things happen at different ages and we underestimated what we were walking away from.
Fun fact: Robert Raikes started Sunday school in 1780 specifically because kids were running wild on Sundays with nothing to do. So technically we've come full circle because my neighbor's kids are absolutely feral on Sunday mornings again.
Born and raised at Calvary Baptist off Silverside Road, and I'll say it plainly: we lost something real when Sunday school went away. My grandmother could recite chapter and verse for anything. Ask the average person in our small group what the book of Hebrews is actually about and you'll get a lot of polite silence. Relational depth is wonderful, but it doesn't replace doctrinal formation. These things are not mutually exclusive and we acted like they were.
Counterpoint: our church tried small groups for three years. Three. Years. Half the groups quietly dissolved by month eight because nobody wanted to host anymore, scheduling was a nightmare with shift workers and parents of young kids, and the theological conversations were whatever the most dominant personality in the room believed that week. At least with a trained teacher upfront there's some accountability to the text.
Both can coexist. I don't understand why New Castle County churches treated this as either/or. Keep a 45-minute structured Scripture class Sunday morning for people who want it, run home groups during the week for relational community. Why are we acting like this is some zero-sum theological cage match. Some of us have schedules that make weeknight groups literally impossible.
The premise of this whole debate is flawed. Sunday school was never a biblical institution to begin with — it originated in 18th-century England as a literacy program for working-class children. We are not abandoning Scripture by abandoning a man-made Victorian structure. What matters is whether your small group is actually opening the Bible or just sharing feelings over coffee cake. Ours does both, at a house off Marsh Road on Thursday nights.
my honest experience: our small group in Pike Creek spent about six months doing deep verse-by-verse study of Romans. genuinely changed how i read scripture. then a new family joined and slowly it became more of a prayer request circle and a little less Bible study every week. not saying that's wrong but i do notice the drift happens real easy without structure. somebody has to guard the content or it just sort of evaporates
ok so i just moved to Wilmington from Lancaster PA last year and joined a home group in Brandywine Hundred and honestly? it's the first time church has ever felt like actual community to me. i grew up in Sunday school and mostly learned how to color pictures of Noah's ark. maybe the problem isn't the format, it's what we're willing to bring to the table ourselves
Anyone who says shallow theology is new to Wilmington-area churches hasn't been paying attention. People were sleeping through perfectly structured Sunday school lessons for decades too. A bad small group and a bad Sunday school class are equally useless. A great small group beats a mediocre classroom every single time. Format is not the variable we should be optimizing.
I want to push back on the people in this thread acting like Wilmington churches all made this switch for lazy reasons. Our leadership at our church in Newport spent two years in prayer and study before transitioning. Attendance among 25-40 year olds went up 34 percent afterward. You can care about biblical literacy AND rethink the delivery method.
I actually read somewhere that John Wesley invented Sunday school in the 1700s as a Methodist program. So it's always been central to Wesleyan tradition specifically. Not sure other traditions were ever as committed to it. [REPLY from another user would note: Actually Wesley championed small accountability groups — class meetings — and Robert Raikes is credited with Sunday school. Easy to mix up but the irony here is Wesley's model WAS basically the small group format being praised today.]
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