Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: m INCKEASED ATTENDANCE A Laudable Ambition.?The primal instinct of every healthy Sunday school is to grow. It may be only a little school now; but it does not intend to stay little. It wants every new member it can get; and from time to time it lays plans and starts a campaign of increase. A school that does not actively try to grow larger is very likely to grow smaller; for the older ones in such a school are liable to drop out faster than the younger ones come in. In most American communities, also, there is a certain amount of movement among the population. Some of the best workers and their children remove to other fields, generally the city, and newcomers take their place. These newcomers seldom seek the Sunday school; they must be sought and won. If the Sunday school is not ambitious to grow in numbers, the motive power necessary for this winning process will be lacking. Newcomers, however, are not the only available source of new members. It is a sparsely settled region indeed, or else a sadly overchurched one, where there are not some people in the community, and even some children, who ought to be in our Sunday school and are not. Some of these are former members who have dropped from the ranks, not because the school has finished its work for them, andthey their work for the school, but merely because the school has failed to meet their needs. The people who feel that attending Sunday school is worth their while do not drop out; and all but the young children are likely to settle that question for themselves. The school therefore should labor to bring in these outsiders. At the same time it should seek to understand why they left, and should plan to make it thoroughly worth while for every one of them to return. Every failure is a lesson. Retention and …
