5.

The Rise of the Sunday School

The years between the close of the Civil War and the end of the century saw no innovation in the life of the Ohio Mennonite and Amish churches more important than the coming of the Sunday school. While the middle of the nineteenth century saw no organized Sunday school in any of the Amish, Mennonite, or Swiss Mennonite congregations, yet before the century closed most of these congregations had a vital program of Sunday schools. During a time when schisms threatened the churches and when traditionally minded persons resisted new things-luring these decades there were men of vision and faith who brought into being a program of Christian education that grew to be one of the strong features of the Ohio and Eastern Mennonite Conference.'

The First Attempt

The first Sunday school in any community of the Ohio and
.Eastern Mennonite Conference was apparently organized in 1859.2
It was held in the Gerber Valley schoolhouse in Holmes County
and was originated by Amish laymen who wanted to keep their
boys and girls from attending other Sunday schools in the neighbor
hood and who wanted also to give Christian instruction and build
moral foundations. The school lasted only a few years, however,
and was open only from spring to fall when roads were passable.
The first permanent Sunday school in the conference churches
(and the first permanent Sunday school of the Mennonite Church
in America) was established in 1863 at an Amish meetinghouse in
Logan County, Ohio.' David Plank, a forward-looking young minister of the congregation, had attended a union Sunday school in
the neighborhood and was much impressed by the religious
instruction it brought to children and youth. Why could not this
same type of instruction be given to the children and youth of his

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