When Simple Church was published, I became curious about whether simple churches were actually employing Sunday School as a step 2 strategy. With Dr. Rainer’s encouragement, coauthor Eric Geiger and I analyzed the 400 churches identified as vibrant in phase 1 of the research (which included only Southern Baptist churches; phase 2 surveyed non-SBC churches). This sampling of churches was chosen because each had grown by at least 5 percent for three consecutive years, a hurdle that clearly separated these churches from the comparison group. With the list of these churches in hand, I was able to obtain information on the Sunday-morning schedules of 376 of the 400 churches. I was surprised to learn that among these vibrant churches, 87.5 percent employed Sunday School as their step 2 strategy. (The other 12.5 percent utilized off-campus small groups or a mixture of off-campus and on-campus groups, at least for adults.) Even more surprising was the fact that half of these simply called the program Sunday School. Vote for Sunday School for step 2!2

David Francis, Great Expectations.