Five Step Formula

The Five Step Formula For Sunday School Growth
Arthur Flake became the first leader of the Sunday School Department of the Baptist Sunday School Board in 1920. What career path do you imagine bought him to that position? Was he a prominent pastor? a minister of education? a seminary professor?
Mr. Flake, a committed layman and traveling salesman, settled down in Winona, Mississippi, in 1894 to enter the department store business. By 1895 Flake led the Winona Baptist Church to form the first Training Union in Mississippi. He served as the church’s Sunday School director and was so successful that he was employed in 1909 as a field worker for the Baptist Sunday School Board. Then this outstanding layman was asked to move to Nashville in 1920 to head the Sunday School Department, which became the major work of his life for the next 17 years. He died in 1952 in Memphis, Tennessee, but his legacy lives on.
Flake’s Five Step Formula
Arthur Flake’s work with Sunday school in the early 1900s led to the development of what he is perhaps best remembered for. Flake promoted a five step formula building and growing a Sunday School:
1. Know the possibilities
2. Enlarge the organization
3. Provide the space
4. Enlist and train the workers
5. Go after the people
Although Mr. Flake authored many books that included allusions to portions of the formula, we have been unable to discover his five steps explicitly stated in any of them! Rather, this remarkable formula apparently formed the “talking points” of his “stump speech” or perhaps even the subject matter of a five-session Sunday School revival, enlargement campaign, or clinic.*
Today’s Sunday School at Ash Creek
Throughout our church’s history we’ve employed these “talking points” to build. Laurence Klempnauer was instrumental in starting new classes and adding interim education space (now the office) in 1998-2000. With the addition of our newest building in 2002 and the expansion of the organization we’ve seen continued growth. Since Promotion Day last August we’ve averaged 429 per Sunday.
Now is the time to apply the formula again. In 2006-07 we should start more new classes. We’ll need new workers with a vision of the possibilities who will train and go, seeking to build relationship with new people for the Lord. Will you do your part? Pray the Lord of the harvest that He will call forth laborers...the fields of Ash Creek are white...

*From The Five Steps Formula for Sunday School Growth by David Francis, LifewayPress