By Lydia Kaiser

For some people, it’s hard enough to get back to church in person let alone go to Sunday school too! But if your family isn’t going to Sunday school, let me tell you why you’re missing out.

The church service is great, for all the reasons listed in Teach Kids Why We Attend In-Person Church, but Sunday school has the extra benefits of in-person interaction. Your kids and you need fellowship with other believers. Fellowship is more than just visiting with each other about life, it’s discussing how to apply Bible truths to everyday living. It’s digging deeper on a personal level, where the rubber meets the road. Your children should be engaged in their Sunday school class to interact on child-level examples of sin and of obedience to God.

Another aspect of fellowship is praying for each other. Corporate prayer in the worship service is more general and doesn’t allow time to pray for each person. Sunday school classes provide smaller groups that allow people to share on a more personal level if they wish. Your child can have his peers and teacher pray for him and he’ll see that other people in the body of Christ care about him.

Fellowship of course, is not only a warm feeling that comes with acceptance in the family of God. It’s being included in the work of God. Sunday school classes can participate in special ministry projects together, like food pantry or Good News Club.

Sunday school helps bond our commitment to one another. When someone in our class has a need, we don’t wait for the benevolence committee to pitch in, we come alongside first. When someone in Sunday school class is absent, we ask if they’re OK. It’s easy to get lost in a crowd at church and not be missed. When someone in your Sunday School class helps you out in some way, make sure your kids know this is a friend you wouldn’t have if it weren’t for Sunday school.

Taking an interest in others and ministering to them is an important concept to teach your kids. Help them learn the names of the other children in their Sunday school class. Help them pray for their classmates during the week and figure out ways to encourage them, like calling to say they were missed if they didn’t come.

We often overlook the significance of children in the body of Christ. For example, as adults, when someone we know has a death in the family, we take it on ourselves to give condolences, but what about our children? If you teach your child to reach out with condolences, you’re teaching Christian love and empathy, and the grieving child is ministered to by her peers.

Sunday school is where children can become comfortable leading in prayer and praying out loud in front of others. As a parent or teacher, you’ll want to ask children to pray for your needs. Kids should know their prayers are heard by God just as readily as yours. Report back to them and thank them for their prayers. Let these little Christians know they are needed in God’s great plan of evangelism and discipleship.

All these principles—fellowship, prayer, service, help a child recognize that they are part of the Body of Christ.

And finally, we come to a really important reason for children to attend Sunday school. They need a lot of instruction in the Word of God. They just can’t get enough. A Sunday school teacher who has been trained by Child Evangelism Fellowship prepares lessons that give teaching for both the saved and the unsaved child. They feed your children with the meat of the Word from well-rounded curriculum that systematically teaches solid doctrine about the persons of the Trinity, what we can learn about the character of God from Bible stories, man’s sin and need for a Savior, how to obey God out of love, and many more wonderful truths and practical life applications. Imagine the amount of solid teaching a child will absorb into his heart if attending Sunday school his entire growing up years and can get his questions answered as they occur to him!

If your church doesn’t have enough Sunday school teachers, you can become capable by getting CEF training either at your local chapter office (chapters.cefonline.com), or from CEF online courses (cefcmi.com). See you in Sunday school!