Sunday School (Mormonism)

Sunday School (formerly the Deseret Sunday School Union) is an official auxiliary of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church). All members of the church and any interested nonmembers, age 12 and older, are encouraged to participate in Sunday School.

According to the LDS Church, the purposes of its Sunday School program are to:

Historical records indicate that some form of Sunday School was held by Latter Day Saints in Kirtland, Ohio, and Nauvoo, Illinois, in the 1830s and 1840s. However, the meetings were ad hoc and no formal organization endured the Mormon exodus from Nauvoo.

The first formal Sunday school in the LDS Church was held on December 9, 1849, in Salt Lake City under the direction of Richard Ballantyne, a former Sunday school teacher in the Relief Presbyterian Church in Scotland. Lacking a suitable building to hold the meeting in, Ballantyne invited his students into his own home; approximately thirty Latter-day Saint children between the ages of 8 and 13 attended. The local congregation that Ballantyne belonged to—the Salt Lake City Fourteenth Ward—quickly adopted Ballantyne's Sunday school program and integrated it with regular Sunday meetings. Other LDS Church congregations followed the Fourteenth Ward's example and adopted Sunday school programs based on the Ballantyne model. At this stage, each Sunday school was completely autonomous and under the sole direction of the local bishop.

Anxious to bring a standard structure and organization to the over 200 independent Sunday schools that had been created, LDS Church president Brigham Young ordered that a union of the Sunday schools be carried out. On November 11, 1867, Young and church leaders Daniel H. Wells, George A. Smith, Wilford Woodruff, George Q. Cannon, and Brigham Young, Jr. met and organized the Parent Sunday School Union. Young appointed Cannon as the first general superintendent of the Sunday School, a position he would hold until his death in 1901. In 1872, the Sunday School organization was renamed the Deseret Sunday School Union.