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12. Give some statement of your experience with these courses. what respects have you found these courses of study for adult classes satisfactory, and in what respects unsatisfactory? What suggestions do you have to make for revision or for the construction of new courses?

13. Do you have a pastor's class? What is its purpose? What is its enrollment?

14. What provision is there in your Sunday School for a systematic program of missionary education?

15. What provision is there for children's worship, either in church or Sunday School?

16. What provision is there for the expression of the religious life by the children in the way of social service, benevolence, and the like? Do you have a graded program for such expression? If so, please outline it.

17. What other organizations for children and young people are connected with your church? Give the membership of each.

18. What educational work do these organizations do? What relation, if any, do they sustain to the Sunday School and its work?

19. Is there any evidence of an inco-ordination of educational effort on the part of these organizations and the Sunday School? What suggestions toward better co-ordination would you make in view of the situation in your own church?

20. What administrative relation holds between your church and the Sunday School? Do you have a church Committee on Religious Education? If so, how are its members appointed, and what qualifications do you look for in them? Does the church appropriate funds for the maintenance of the Sunday School?

21. Do you have a director of religious education or a paid 'Sunday School superintendent?

22. How many boys and girls or young men and women united with your church last year, coming from the Sunday School? Is this number typical?

23. Do you have a definitely planned arrangement by which church or Sunday School seeks the co-operation of the home in the religious education of children? Do you have a parents' association or parents' classes?

24. What are the conditions in your community and parish with respect to worship and religious training in the home?

25. What is your church doing to encourage worship in the home? 26. How many young men and women in the last ten years went to college from your church? To what colleges did they go? Did they maintain connection with your church during their college life or transfer membership to a church in a college town?

27. How many of these have come back after their college life to take up useful service in your church?

28. How many college graduates exclusive of these have come into your church in the last ten years and have taken up useful service?

29. How in your judgment has the college affected the religious life of both these groups?

30. How many young men have gone from your church into the ministry during the last ten years?

31. How many others, young men or young women, have taken up Christian work as a vocation during the last ten years? What forms of Christian work did they take up?

32. What efforts are being made in your church to induce young people to enter the ministry or other vocations directly Christian in character?

33. What books on the subject of religious education have you found most valuable in the last five or ten years?

AIM OF THE INQUIRY

The aim of the Commission in sending this list of questions was not to test or to pass judgment upon churches or pastors, but to gain information. The Commission felt that the heart of the problem of religious and moral education lies in the work of the local church. To help local churches to understand their educational opportunity and responsibility, and to encourage them to undertake an educational program commensurate therewith, seemed therefore to be one of the first duties, if not the chief business, of the Commission. At its first meeting, after a careful canvass of the situation and full and frank discussion, a committee was appointed to draw up a suggested "Program of Religious Education for a Local Church."

The list of questions was devised by this committee, in conference with the Sunday School lesson committee of the Commission. The committee on "A Program of Religious Education for a Local Church" found at the outset that it had need of a larger body of facts respecting what Congregational churches are at present doing, if its suggested program was to reflect more than the experiences and theories of its individual members. It felt, moreover, that its suggestions would be more concrete and definite as well as more evidently based upon reality and genuine possibility, if accompanied by a compact digest of this body of facts.

The lesson committee, as indicated in the letter above, was especially anxious to know something of the experiences and desires of the churches with respect to lesson courses. The particular situation which this committee was facing at the time, explains the emphasis which the letter put upon this phase of the matter.

DISTRIBUTION OF REPORTS

The questions were sent to 3,819 pastors, and 586 answers were received a return of 15%. Of these 566 report an aggregate Sunday School enrollment of 106,270, which is about one-seventh the total enrollment in Congregational Sunday Schools as reported in the last Year Book.

As was to be expected, a disproportionately large number of the reports are from the larger Sunday Schools, and from those using graded lessons. Yet the distribution is such as to afford a body of facts which is fairly representative. One hundred ninety-two schools, of those reporting, have an enrollment of less than 100 pupils; 240, an enroll ment of 100 to 200; 154, an enrollment of over 200. One hundred eighty-three use the uniform lessons; 257 the graded lessons; and 123 use graded lessons in some departments and uniform in others. The reports come from 44 states and territories. In geographical distribution they follow closely the proportion of Congregational churches in each section, save that there is a little more than the proportionate number of reports from New England, and somewhat less than the proportionate number from the Southern states.

CLASSIFICATION OF REPORTS

The reports were classified in two ways:

1. According to lesson material. Partly for the benefit of the lesson committee, and partly because this was felt to be the most fundamental principle of division, the reports were first classified in accordance with their answers to Question 5: "Give a list of the courses used in each department, and state where published." Three classes of schools were here distinguished:

(a) A uniform school was defined as one using the same lesson on a given Sunday in every grade or department. In all but a very few cases this is of course the International Uniform lesson. Schools using the so-called "Graded Uniform" plan, by which the Biblical material assigned for study is uniform, but the treatment varies with the grade, are included in this class. So also are schools where all use the uniform lesson except one class (a "men's forum" for example) studying some course out of relation to the work of the rest of the school.

(b) A graded-lesson school was defined as one using graded lesson material in all except the Senior and Adult departments. In most cases, as will later be seen, schools of this class are using the International Graded lessons. Some, however, use the Scribner's Completely Graded lessons, some the University of Chicago courses, and some combinations of material from various published courses. A few schools using the Bible Study Union courses are included in this class, because the reports showed that they were using these in combination with other material which is completely graded or were striving through them to reach the ideal of a graded-lesson school. The Senior and Adult departments were not reckoned in this definition of a gradedlesson school, because it was found that many schools otherwise completely graded in curriculum are yet using uniform lessons in these departments, intending to make the change either as soon as the courses desired for them have been published or as soon as enough pupils who have had graded lessons in the lower departments are promoted into them.

(c) A part-graded school was defined as one using graded lesson material in one or more of the departments below the Senior and uniform material in the remainder. This class includes some schools that have adopted graded material for the smaller children but are content withthe uniform lessons for all above the Primary or Junior departments, as well as some schools that are in process of adopting graded lessons by "growing up into them."

2. According to size. The reports were divided into three classes according to size: (1) Those from schools with an enrollment of less than 100 pupils. (2) Those from schools with an enrollment of from 100 to 200 pupils. (3) Those from schools with an enrollment of more than 200 pupils.

These two classifications being combined, the reports fell into nine. classes, to each of which a designating letter was assigned, as follows:

A tenth group, designated Class K, contains 23 schools whose lesson material could not be ascertained from the reports. Of these 9 have less than 100 pupils, 12 from 100 to 200, and 2 more than 200.

Naturally, the reports differ somewhat in quality. The great majority of respondents have given careful and adequate answers to a list of questions which demanded of them time, patience and intelligence. Others, however, have not taken as much pains or manifested as thorough an acquaintance with conditions in their own parishes or with the problems of religious education in general. Without attempting any careful grading, it was thought best to indicate in a general way the quality of the reports from which any quotations are made. The letter "x" appended to a report number indicates that it contains adequate and intelligent answers to all the questions; the letter "y," that at least half the questions are so answered; the letter "z," that the report is poor. Thus "B718y" after a quotation indicates that it is from the blank numbered 718, that this comes from a school in class B (one using uniform lessons and having 100 to 200 pupils) and that the report is fair only in point of adequacy. It must be clearly understood that no attempt has been made to grade or to pass upon the standard of the schools themselves. The letters indicate simply the adequacy of the reports. Some excellent schools have sent meager reports; and some small and poorly-equipped schools have been most careful and thorough in their replies.

1.

ENROLLMENT AND ATTENDANCE

What is the enrollment in your Sunday School? Pupils? Teachers? 2. What is the average attendance?

3. What methods do you rely upon to secure and maintain attendance? Five hundred sixty-six schools report a total enrollment of 106,270— an average of 187. Cradle rolls and home departments have not been included in these figures, that a proper basis might be secured for estimating the average attendance. The average enrollment in uniform schools is 124; in graded-lesson schools 229; and in part-graded schools 197. The largest enrollment is 1405 (F26x); the smallest 15 (A789z). The largest school using uniform lessons has an enrollment of 783 (C606y).

An aggregate average attendance is reported of 68,896, or 65% of the enrollment. This percentage of attendance remains singularly unaffected by the size of the school or by the type of lesson used. The following is a table of the percentages of attendance in the various classes:

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This percentage of attendance is very low, judged by the standards of public school and college. It only serves to indicate one of the great difficulties that confront one who seeks to make of the Sunday School what it should be a real school. It is due in part, of course, to the low standards and inefficient teaching which too often prevent the work of the Sunday School from really enlisting the interest and effort of pupils; in part to the summer low ebb. But it is due quite as much to the fact that church and Sunday School lack the sanctions which the institutions of secular education possess to enforce attendance and compel a set standard of work. Undoubtedly the percentage of attendance for most schools is kept low, moreover, by the fact that the enrollment includes the names of many whose connection is nominal only or spasmodic but who are not dropped from the list because of the church's wish to keep a hold, however, slight, upon them. The church does not "flunk"; it seeks to redeem. It is of interest in this connection, however, to note that one report and one of the best opens thus: "Enrollment 193; trimmed down from 221 - for business! Average attendance 166. A bit better recently." (E213x). That is 86% on the basis of the present enrollment and 75% on the basis of the old - in either case higher than most schools.

It is difficult to summarize the answers respecting the methods relied upon to secure and maintain attendance, and impossible to work out any correlation between methods and results. They show in what manifold ways the Sunday School is seeking to overcome its lack of compelling sanctions. One hundred four schools, in one form or another