Many people have heard of Sunday school. Most have no idea where it came from. In 1780 a Jesus-follower in Great Britain named Robert Raikes could not stand the cycle of poverty and ignorance that was destroying little children, a whole generation. He said, “The world marches forward on the feet of little children”. So he took children who had to work six days a week in squalor. Sunday was their free day. He said, “I’m going to start a school for free to teach them to read and write and learn about God.” He did, and he called it “Sunday School.”

Within fifty years, there were 1,5 million children being taught by 160,000 volunteer teachers who had a vision for the education of a generation. Sunday school was not a privatized, optional program for church kids. It was one of the great educational volunteer triumphs of the world.

The alphabet of the Slavic peoples is called Cyrillic. It was named for Saint-Cyril, who was a missionary to the Slavs and discovered they had no written alphabet. Thus, he created one for them so they would be able to read about Jesus in their own language.

In nation after nation, Christian missionaries found languages had not been committed to writing. So in acts of remarkable sacrifices, they devoted their lives to this task. In many cases, the first efforts of the scientific study of a language were done by Christian missionaries. They compiled the first dictionaries. They wrote the first grammars. They developed the first alphabets. The first important proper name written in many languages was the name Jesus.

A Methodist missionary, Franck Laubach, cited an extraordinary encounter with God about a century ago that put him on a mission to lift the world out of ignorance. He began a worldwide literacy movement. The phrase “Each one teach one” flows out of the extraordinary life of this man. He travelled to more than a hundred countries and led to the development of primers in 313 languages. He became known as “the Apostle to the Illiterates.”