112 / The Rise of the Sunday School

the various churches had grown in common activities and in harmony.

The Role of Brenneman and Funk

Before tracing the spread of Sunday schools throughout the Ohio Amish Mennonite churches the beginning of Sunday school in the Mennonite churches deserves attention. This beginning was in Allen County and the initiative came from John M. Brenneman, the aggressive and influential bishop of the area. It is of interest that Brenneman called on John F. Funk from Elkhart, Indiana, to help organize the school. John F. Funk, as a young lumber dealer in Chicago, had been a fellow worker with Dwight L. Moody, the evangelist. Moody and Funk had worked together as Sunday school teachers and Funk was later to attribute much of his own zeal to the inspiration he caught from D. L. Moody.:

Funk came to Elida in Allen County in August of 1868 and on the sixteenth of that month the Sunday school was organized. Fortunately a thorough report of this is preserved in the September 1868 Herald of Truth. In the report Funk gives the reasons for this Sunday school:

If we desire to see our churches grow, and our young people, as they come to years of maturity and responsibility, gathered into the fold, we must use means, we must labor, we must teach them early, to love the Savior, to go to the house of the Lord, to reverence and keep holy the Sabbath day, to have a love and respect for Christian people, and for all the services of the sanctuary. Thus, through faithful instruction, we may lead them in the narrow path that leadeth to eternal life. "Train up," says Solomon, "a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it."

Though teaching German was one of the primary reasons for launching the Sunday school in the Allen County churches, English soon became the language that was used." By 1890 the Salem and Pike congregations were enjoying growth. The evangelistic work of Christian B. Brenneman and the pastoral labors of Moses Brenneman, together with the new teaching ministry of the church, bore fruit. Each year a large group of young people were baptized into the church. In 1891 the Pike Sunday school became "evergreen" and it is thought that Salem did so also at about the same date.

The Zion Church (also known as Riley Creek) near Bluffton, Ohio, started a Sunday school as a result of John F. Funk's visit in 1868.`' Bishop John Thut had died in 1867 and the congregation was