The first sermon I ever preached outside of my home church was to 10 people(3 adults and 7 children). That was not all the congregation it was just all attending at the time. The congregation was trying to decide when to close the church down, so you can imagine the level of excitement I encountered. I filled the pulpit from August until January and they decided to call me as pastor and keep the church going. We went from 1 service per Sunday to 2 and added a Wednesday night prayer and Bible Study service. They were not giving anything to missions and we took on a 2 independent missionaries giving each of them $25 per month. In a few months we had seen 8 people saved and baptized.
Soon we had to add on to the church because we had run out of Sunday School space. While doing so we added restrooms, dug a well, and built new Sunday School space. Excitement began to grow. I preached through books of the Bible, visited every church family, visited nearly every home in the community, loved the people and tried to model what God wanted them to do. The most important thing I taght them was to love Jesus and to live a thankful life. It was some of the greatest days of my ministry. I loved that ministry and those people. They are still my friends and in a way I still feel like I am still their pastor. Every church I have pastored whether there were 10 or 2,000 has been a gift God blessed me with. Even though I have had my share of dissappointment in churches I have never left one that I regretted going to or serving in. They all became my family.

Pastor Dannie

You are kind in your comment. The truth is these people made the growth possible by responding to the vision God has given me. What a privilege to pastor such awesome people.

From the time I became pastor of First Baptist Church of Lyons, Georgia we have been experiencing growth in our Sunday School. My first Sunday our attendance was 125. I immediately began to promote Sunday School. I met with our leaders early on and shared my testimony of how after 15 years of ministry, having pastored 2 growing churches, I became passionate about growing the church through the Sunday School. I asked for the privilege of taking the first 4 Sundays of the new Sunday School year to teach all of our youth and adult members the foundational principles for growing the church using the Sunday School. They agreed and it was tremendously successful. We reorgainzed the entire SS. We age and gender graded every class from the 6th grade up. We listed all our members in one list made up of female members and a list made of of male members. We started with the oldest member and came down the list by age. We determined that a healthy class would be approximately 8 members. Our oldest attending man was 90. That meant that to have 8 attending members the class would start at age 75. We did that throughout our youth and adults. The first prospects that I challenged them to go after with loving passion was the non-attending church members. Overnight our attendance increased from 125-150. Before the year ended our SS was averaging 175. The first 5 years we consistently averaged an increase of 50 new SS attenders per year. At present we are averaging 350 in SS and have had as many as 459. Our worship attendance presently averages about 400 so we are withing 50 members of having 100% SS attendance.

At a point we had to go to two worship services and ultimately two Sunday Schools to accomodate the growth. Since building a new children’s building we have freed up space and have again reorganized our classes with new age groupings, new teachers and more units. As of today we only have 4 classrooms without a class. We have hosted Georgia Baptist Conventions Sunday School conferences, local Associational conferences and recently had Josh Hunt and Missy Hunt for an all day Sunday conference that has greatly inspired our teachers and people. I just wish you could hear our members give testimonies of how they value their Sunday School classes. Someone has said that a great worship service swings the front door of your church open wide to recieve the crowd but a great Sunday School shuts the back door to make sure you don’t lose them. I have found that to be experientially true. Sunday School work is hard work but it is worth the effort.

For the vast majority of congregations which haven’t grown and have actually shrunk over the past few decades, the question is “why has the percentage of members attending Sunday School SHRUNK relative to the size of our membership, and how can we turn that around?” There are lots of research stats out there about the competition for time churches are facing. One comprehensive article is at http://www.sundaysoftware.com/stats2.htm