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The History of Sabbath School

by Gary B. Swanson, 2013

Somewhere along a dusty country road, James Springer White stopped the horse-drawn carriage in which he and wife, Ellen G. White, were itinerating from Rochester, New York, to Bangor, Maine. It was sometime in the year 1852. White pulled into the shade of a tree for lunch, tethered the horse nearby where it could graze, and took out pen, ink, and paper. Using the lunch box as a desk, he began to write. It was on this journey that James White, a certified teacher, wrote some of the initial Sabbath School1 lessons,2 the first four of which were published in August of that summer in the inaugural issue of The Youth’s Instructor.

This, for Seventh-day Adventism, was the very genesis of what is today still known worldwide as “Sabbath School” or its equivalent in translation. But the concept of a weekly approach to Bible study—most commonly called “Sunday School”—derived from an earlier ministry of outreach among Christian churches that began almost a century before—on another continent.

Several such efforts were initiated in England and its colonies in North America, including one by John Wesley in Savannah, Georgia,3 and another by seventh-day-Sabbathkeeping Swiss and German immigrants and their descendants in Ephrata, Pennsylvania.4
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1. This article contains inconsistencies in style pertaining to the term “Sabbath School.” Through the more than two centuries in which this term has appeared in print, its capitalization and hyphenation have varied. The General Conference Sabbath School and Personal Ministries Department has adopted “Sabbath School” as the approved style (in the English language), but in this paper accuracy of original capitalization and hyphenation has been retained in quotations and publication titles.
2. Life Sketches, p. 146.
3. Elmer L. Towns, “Robert Raikes: A Comparison With Earlier Claims to Sunday School Origins,” Evangelical Quarterly, vol. 43 (1971), pp. 69, 70.
4. Edwin W. Rice, “The First Sabbath School,” Pennsylvania School Journal, 1875, pp. 342, 343.

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