The Impact of the Children's Christmas Service

The annual Children's Christmas Service is a wonderful tradition. (This year CPH has released To Us a Child Is Born, a classic service by Lisa Clark and organized around the gorgeous new Christmas song. Check it out!) It provides an opportunity for in-depth instruction about the Nativity during preparation, and for children to share the Gospel with family, congregation, and community.

Plan carefully, though, to ensure that preparing for this service does not detract from Sunday School's chief purpose, to instruct children in that Gospel. Limit the use of Sunday School time for rehearsal; never skip the Sunday School lesson completely. Use the songs the children will sing in the service as part of your Sunday School openings or closings for several weeks before the service. Encourage parents to step up, helping their children learn songs and speaking parts at home.

Then smile as those lambs, angels, shepherds, Wise Men, and Holy Family speak and sing the Gospel in the days before Christmas, sharing "the blessed gift of heaven!"

God bless you as you teach His children the Christmas Gospel.

Help! CPH Changed My Sunday School Material!

"The lessons no longer align with the Church Year!"
"They forgot the Easter lesson!"
"No wonder! They forgot to put dates on the lessons."

Yep. CPH changed things up in September 2015, and our customers are beginning to notice. Lessons are now organized into 9 themed units, four Old Testament and for New Testament, and the 13 lessons in each unit are organized chronologically. There are no dates to be found. And each unit as it is published will be stocked in the warehouse for purchase in any quarter of the year.

Would you like to teach the Bible in your Sunday School chronologically from Genesis to Revelation? Starting with fall 2016 that becomes a possibility.

Why? It turns out that the most expensive way to publish Sunday School material is by pegging it to the liturgical calendar, which then requires that every quarter of material be re-edited every year to accommodate the shifting calendar. As most Sunday Schools decline and congregational budgets get tighter, it was getting harder and harder to provide material without large increases in prices.

There are some major positives that result from this change.

• Congregations have greater flexibility to start the fall quarter on a date other than the first Sunday in September.
• They can choose the order in which to teach the nine units.
• They can save teaching material and unused student material to use in two or three years when that unit comes up again. The material will not change, so everything will still work together.
• They can stretch out each quarter if there is no Sunday School due to weather, or holidays, or other special occasions.

A couple of things become a little harder:

• It is harder to keep all teachers on the same page. (We have provided several tools for noting when lessons are scheduled by your congregation to be taught, but someone needs to decide those dates and publish them to all the teachers.)
• It is harder to teach children about the Church Year. Church Year Connections is a new annual resource that provides material for opening worship (either with the entire Sunday School or in your classroom) that is focused on the current Sunday of the Church Year. A feature of this resource is a complete set of "Teaching Points for Children" that can be woven into your lessons.
• Each winter and spring, CPH will provide free lessons for Christmas and Easter (more savings!) to supplement the material you purchased.

CPH understands that after 30 years of dated Sunday School material, this change will take some getting used to. We apologize for your frustration. Please know that some things have NOT changed.

• The Gospel of Jesus Christ is still central to every single lesson.
• Law and Gospel are correctly taught at all levels.
• The Small Catechism and hymnal are integrated into our curricula.
• The Bible is accurately taught through the text and images in every lesson.

God bless you as you teach His children His Word!

To Us a Child Is Born!

Merry Christmas! Thanks for teaching God's children His Word!

 

(Hear a sample of this wonderful Christmas song by Jacob and Rachael Weber here.)

What's the Hurry for Christmas?

The world will be done with Christmas on December 26th, delaying only long enough to put Christmas on sale for half-price. But what's the rush? In early times, Christmas was celebrated not just on December 25th, but for twelve more days after ("On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me . . ."). In the Eastern Orthodox Church, Christmas is celebrated on January 6th, the date when the Church marks the visit of the Magi.

So don't get impatient with the Growing in Christ and Cross Explorations Sunday School materials from CPH, when you don't get to the Nativity lesson until the middle of January, and that Epiphany lesson is delayed almost into February! There is a lot to bless children with in the accounts that lead up to and follow Jesus' birthday. Tell your students to enjoy the Church's celebrations of Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany as they come, and promise them that that Christmas lesson in Sunday School is coming!

For wonderful explanations about the importance of the several lessons before the Christmas one, I hope you listen to Pastor Tom Baker's exposition each week in the Seeds of Faith podcasts, produced by Issues, Etc. They provide 30 minutes of background on the biblical text, and they can be downloaded for listening on the go.

God bless you as you teach His children His Word!

Are You Ready for Christmas?

Those who use Concordia Publishing House Sunday School material will notice that in our first undated New Testament unit, we now have six lessons ramping up to the Nativity. Previous editions of these materials usually had only four. Taught in sequence starting from the first Sunday in December, the "Christmas" lesson will land in the middle of January. I can hear you already: "What were they thinking?!"

Here's the scoop! New Testament 1, God Sends His Son to Save Us, is the only unit of our material that teaches about this early portion of Jesus' life. Teaching the whole narrative involves these six distinct events, each of which we want our children to study and know. In other Decembers, other portions of Jesus' life and ministry will be studied. (Free Christmas lessons will be provided online for churches that decide to interrupt the chronological series of lessons to insert a Christmas lesson.)

How can congregations accommodate this unusually long series of pre-Christmas and Christmas lessons? Here are some options:

• Teach the lessons in order. When the church celebrates Christmas in worship, remind the students that in Sunday School we will get there eventually, but let them know there is important stuff to learn before they study the Nativity itself.
• Skip two or three lessons among those before Christmas. Return to them after studying the Christmas lesson, or not.
• Skip two or three lessons from the Old Testament 2 unit in November. Save them to be taught at the end of the spring quarter or at the end of the summer before beginning the Old Testament 3 unit.

Our undated Sunday School lessons give congregations lots of options and, over time, may save congregations money as they stretch each unit over a couple more weeks or reuse saved material.

God's blessings as you teach His children His Word!

Have a Debt-Free Christmas!

I've seen these thoughts many times over the years, most recently on the Christmas card from a friend:

Christ came to pay a debt He did not owe,
because we owed a debt we could not pay.

Jesus paid the price we owe for our sins (Romans 6:23), by coming to earth as a human child born of Mary, living a sinless life (He accumulated no debt of His own), suffering and dying on the cross as the once-for-all sacrifice for sin, and rising again as a guarantee of new life for all who believe in Him as their Savior through the proclamation of God's Word.

I hope you will have the privilege of sharing that good news with some of God's children this Sunday and each week, so that they, like you, can have a debt-free Christmas!

God bless you as you teach His children His Word!

Are You Ready for Christmas?

If Sunday School has kicked off the fall quarter of lessons, can the children's Christmas service be far behind?

Here are some basics steps to take as you work toward Christmas!

Set a date! (Or dates!) My congregation often has scheduled two Sunday School Christmas presentations, one early on Christmas Eve and one on the Sunday before schools let out for Christmas break. This allowed families who were headed out of town for Christmas to participate. Curiously, the two services are nearly identical in size.

Select a program. This year CPH is releasing another service based on a favorite Christmas hymn, "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing." You can get details here.

Prepare scripts and rehearsal CDs. Share the scripts and CDs with your teachers to distribute in class. With the publisher's permission, prepare a CD of songs the children should practice and send a copy home with each student or with the oldest child in each family. (CPH Christmas programs come with permission to duplicate such a CD for practice at home.)

Schedule rehearsal time. Work several weeks in advance and encourage your teachers not to spend too much class time on this project. Teaching the Gospel in Sunday School certainly comes first. Alert parents to ways their children can prepare at home.

Delegate key tasks. Volunteers are usually willing to tackle limited, one-time projects like duplicating material, arranging costumes, rounding up props, preparing banners or other visual aids, and helping supervise the children at rehearsals and presentations.

Publicize the event. Make sure that parents, grandparents, and congregation members know the dates and times of the presentations.

Conduct dress rehearsals. One or two Saturdays before the presentation, bring the children together for rehearsal and to run through the presentation. When we have two presentations, we would schedule two back-to-back rehearsals, one for each service.

Why go to all this trouble, you may ask? The annual children's Christmas service is an opportunity to teach one of the central events of Scripture in an event that engages visual, verbal, musical, and kinetic learners. It teaches the story of salvation. It teaches about the Church Year. It also gives your children an opportunity to share the Gospel with their families, friends, congregation, and community.

God bless you as you teach His children His Word!

Did You Have Sunday School after Christmas?

Those who follow this blog might expect a bit of a rant here (like this one from 2011). No this year. But I have to ask the follow-up questions: why? or why not?

If you cancelled Sunday School for convenience (yours, or the teachers, or the families), I challenge you to re-think. We have precious few opportunities to teach God's children His Word. I would give up even one of them with the greatest reluctance.

If you cancelled Sunday School for safety (as our church did on Sunday, with blizzard condictions, travel advisories, and single-digit temperatures), bravo! Thanks for doing your best to keep God's children safe to hear His Word another day.

Children's Christmas Service or God's Word?

What will your Sunday School be doing for the next three Sundays? Teaching God's Word using the curriculum you've paid good money for? Or rehearsing for the annual children's Christmas service?

The children's Christmas service is a wonderful teaching opportunity in and of itself. It not only teaches God's Word, Law and Gospel, to the children (I hope and pray that this is so), but it provides an opportunity for the children to be the teachers, sharing God's wonderful Christmas Gospel with the congregation members, family, and friends who attend. It is an event that offers spectacular visibility for your Sunday School within the congregation and in your community. By all means, continue this tradition in your congregation or begin it.

But don't let it crowd out the Sunday School's agenda for teaching the Bible's salvation narrative in an organized sequence of lessons. Keep this main thing the main thing, even in December. Here are some tips for preparing for the Christmas service with a minimum or disruption.

• Use the musical selections of the service in school-wide or classroom openings and closing in December.
• Practice for the service outside of Sunday School time. I had mostly seen these rehearsals run on a couple of Saturday mornings in December. Yes, it is another family commitment during a very busy time of the year, but parents are usually highly committed to this event. If they understand that the Saturday rehearsals are the price of participating in it, they will usually bite the bullet and make it work. (And it can be a great kid-free shopping window, though you don't have to advertise it as such.)
• If using some Sunday time is essential to make it work, don't surrender the entire hour. Use a half hour. Or keep the kids for an extra 20 minutes after class for rehearsal.
• Send home unused Sunday School materials (leaflets and craft pages) with the children with a note suggesting how they can be used to teach or review the lesson at home. 

God bless you as you, and your children, teach His children His Word!

Christmas Plans

I've seen some posts this past week on e-mail list I follow on the topic of how to deal with Sunday School on Christmas Day and New Year's Day. Most, almost all, of the responses fall into two groups: those who are going to cancel and those who are going to some form of alternate activity.

I'll admit I'm hard pressed to choose between the alternative of teaching nothing or turning the class over to a video of dancing and singing vegetables who preach moralism instead of God's grace.

Those who follow this blog will know where I stand on this one: there is no better day to teach a solid lesson about God's gift of a Savior from sin, death, and Satan, than on the day we celebrate the Nativity of that Savior and no excuse for teaching moralism in Sunday School ever.

I know that staffing your Sunday School can be difficult on these holidays and I know that low attendance can make planning and teaching a challenge. But in the long run, how we handle these Sundays will say a lot about a congregation's priorities.

How will your congregation meet these challenging Sundays?


How can a congregation prepare for the staffing and attendance challenges without sacrificing the opportunity to teach God's children His Word?

Cancel Sunday School the day after Christmas?

No!

I was almost tempted to just leave it at that, but let me expand briefly on my rationale.

• The Nativity is one of the biggest stories in Scripture. There is no better opportunity to teach this foundational account from Scripture than when the world's celebration of the event is fresh in the minds and hearts of children.
• Christmas holidays bring visitors to homes and churches. A positive Sunday School experience for visiting families sends a powerful message about the priority of place Christian education enjoys in your congregation.
• We maintain our other important routines on a daily and weekly basis (breathing, eating, sleeping, even attending church) through holidays. Attending Sunday School should be one of those routines---every Sunday, for all ages.

Yes, it will take some effort. Substitutes will need to be enlisted (tell them why you think it's important to have this opportunity in Sunday School). Material and classroom assignments may have to be adapted (no, this is not the time to break out a Veggie Tale movie and skip the Gospel; re-read the first bullet point above). Some special training may even have to be provided.

Do everything you can to make this Sunday School experience this Sunday (and every Sunday) a memorable, Christ-filled occasion. Those who attend will be blessed. Those who do not will hear that they missed something worthwhile.

"Will we have Sunday School this Sunday?"

"Of course!"

"Why?"

"Because it's what we do. We teach God's children His Word."