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Summer Sunday School to be held on Thursday evenings

13.5.1960 Weard Giffard experiment

The enterprising Rector of Weare Giffard (the Rev J M Lucas) is to try an experiment to overcome the drop in Sunday School attendance during the summer months – by transferring the school to Thursday evenings.

He tells of the plan in the current Hartland Deanery Magazine, pointing out that Sunday afternoons in the summer ‘are a chance for families to go out together, and who would say that is a bad thing?’ He continues: ‘Each Thursday during the summer at 6.15pm the church bells will ring and a short service and lesson will be held for the children…At about 6.45 any boy or girl who like to do so can come over to the Rectory Gardens for games and other activities. This is not bait to catch them for ‘Thursday School’, because they can come and play games whether they have been to church first or whether they have not’.

The Rector also asks: ‘But what about worship in Church on Sunday?’ He says: ‘The answer is that we hope that the children will come to Church at 9.15 each Sunday morning, for at least part of the service’.

Mr Lucas records that the Sunday School worked well from Christmas to Easter ‘thanks to the help that was forthcoming from many people’.

Gazette article dated 13 May 1960

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