✞ SERVING THE COMMUNITY IN FAITH
Suffer the Little Children
Peace Dorairaj
Sixty years of Sunday mornings and the children who came through her hands
By Deana Theodore • Member, RTMC
Peace Dorairaj — Peace Akka to those who knew her at RTMC, Peace Ma’am to those who sat in her classrooms at Neil Armstrong School and Bethany High School — is one of those people whose ministry never makes a programme or a report.
Sixty years of Sunday school teaching. Countless children, in the classroom and in the neighbourhood. A quiet, gentle, utterly consistent presence in the lives of whoever happened to need her.
Peace joined RTMC in the early 1960s, during the tenure of Rev. David Seamands, serving alongside her aunt Kezia and her brother Joel Abraham.
She taught Sunday school from that decade until 2023 — over sixty years — at various points serving on the Sunday school committee and as Sunday school superintendent.
Ms. Sunitha Gokavi, daughter of the late Rev. Fred Gokavi, was among her earliest batches of students.
“No incident witnessed, no object or artefact examined escaped her connecting them to some aspect of the God she loves.”
— Deana Theodore
🌿 A Ministry of Quiet Faithfulness
What made Peace distinctive was not simply the length of her service, but its quality.
She was always available in the classroom after Sunday school was over — gently helping a child with a memory verse, finishing an activity, or teaching a piece of handwork.
These unhurried, unscheduled moments became occasions when children opened their hearts to her.
She brought the same spirit into her neighbourhood, conducting Tamil Sunday school and bringing children to VBS regularly, buying Bibles for them, counselling them, and equipping herself with Biblical courses well into her later years so that she had something real to offer whoever came.
💛 The Teacher They Remembered
No one who attended Sunday school at RTMC has forgotten her.
Not necessarily her lessons — but the smile, the warmth, the hesitant but firm admonitions, the gentle nudging toward prayer and Bible reading.
If ever anyone lived out Deuteronomy 6:7 — teaching diligently as you sit in your house, and as you walk along the road — it is Peace Dorairaj.
Those who know her have been heard to remark, with some wonder:
“Peace is really peaceful.”
✨ Sixty Years of Influence
For more than six decades, Peace’s ministry was not built around a platform, a title, or recognition.
It was built around children.
Around Sunday mornings.
Around a Bible opened in a classroom.
Around a child who needed someone to listen.
Around the quiet conviction that faith is taught not only through words, but through a life consistently lived before others.
Her story is a reminder that some of the most enduring ministries are the ones that happen week after week, year after year, often without anyone recording them.
Peace Dorairaj’s legacy lives in the children she taught, the families she touched, and the generations who carried something of her quiet faithfulness with them.
“Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.”
Proverbs 22:6
