A Lectionary-Based Sunday School?

I'm feeling some heat this week for decisions CPH made over a year ago to remove dates from our Sunday School lessons. This move ended more than thirty years of dated Sunday School lessons from CPH. Some of our customers, looking back, remember our curricula as lining up with the Church's lectionary far more closely than it actually did. But the criticism is deserved to some degree, because a lesson that has been edited so that it can be taught on any Sunday of the year will not resonate well on Easter or Christmas.

Why did we remove the dates? Because basing Sunday School lessons on the lectionary is perhaps the most expensive way to produce such material. Every component of the curriculum has to be carefully edited, re-written, and printed each quarter to match the shifting Church Year calendar. Sunday Schools, and church budgets, are shrinking, and complaints about rising costs of material were increasing.

Enter Church Year Connections!

This book and CD product provides resources that equip the Sunday School Director in openings, or the teacher in his or her classroom, to help students connect each lesson with what is going on in the Church Year. The Bible study for a Sunday in March may be about Jesus being anointed, but the student also learns about the approaching Passion of our Lord through hymns and songs, prayers, object lesson, and teaching points.

For less than 60 cents a week, you can have a lectionary-based Sunday School experience that meshes well with the Growing in Christ or Cross Explorations materials you love.

God bless you as you teach His children His Word!

Church Year Connections, Year C

The first of three annual volumes of Church Year Connections is now available. This product includes a full year of resources, in print and on CD, that allow a Sunday School teacher, director, or pastor, to connect the children they lead and teach to each Sunday of the Church Year through seasonal songs and hymns, object lessons, collects, and teaching points. In some Sunday Schools, this resource can replace the Directors Guide they currently purchase.

Though our CPH Sunday School materials no longer have specific Sundays on which they need to be taught, your church does not need to give up teaching students about the liturgical calendar and the Sundays of the Church Year.

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

Which Sunday School Would You Choose?

• Unified (all classes study the same Bible account)? OR
• Topical (different material at each age level)?

• Closely graded (one or two grades of children in a classroom)? OR
• Several grades (or all grades) in a single classroom?

• Self-contained classrooms? OR
• Children rotate to different locations for different activities during the hour?

• Lessons tied to the Church's lectionary? OR
• Chronological study of the biblical narrative?

• High tech? OR
• As simple as possible?

Sunday School can be about a lot of choices. As I look to the future, I have the opportunity to make some of these choices to benefit our customers. We will be asking our customers about their preferences in several ways. Maybe this blog can be one of them.

Given the five choices above, which would you choose and why? Which would benefit most the children you serve? I'd love to hear from you at tom.nummela@cph.org.

God bless you as you teach His children His Word!

Making the Most of Lectionary Ties

Do you use Sunday School material from Concordia Publishing House? Do you use the three-year lectionary outlined in the Lutheran Service Book? Then you probably have noticed that this is one of the quarters when the Sunday School lessons and the Gospel accounts read in the Divine Service line up rather nicely. This Sunday, for example, the Gospel reading and the Sunday School text are identical: Matthew 4:12-15, Jesus calls His first disciples.

This is nice because teachers and parents can call a child's attention to the parallel texts. You can use the church bulletin in your classroom or parents can use the Sunday School leaflet at appropriate points in the church service. Later in the day on Sunday the family can review the Bible account from a base of knowledge, discuss it together, and enjoy sharing what was learned. If you're lucky, your church is using the "Explore More" cards that were designed initially for use with the Cross Explorations curriculum, but available for use with Growing in Christ as well. These cards provide activities and discussion starters to help families maximize their time together.

The last four weeks of this winter set of lessons present a bit more of a challenge. The Gospel lesson each week is a portion of Jesus' "sermon on the mount," from Matthew 5. The Sunday School lessons may not, at first, seem to relate.

But they do! It would be tough for even the most creative teacher to teach what is essentially the same narrative, the occasion of Jesus' sermon on the shore of Galilee, four weeks in a row. However, the concepts about which Jesus teaches in each week's installment of this important chapter of the Bible are expanded on in Sunday School by studying a related Bible narrative.

Children learn what it means to be blessed (Matthew 5:1-12) by studying Jesus' blessing of Zacchaeus. They learn what it means to be salt and light (Matthew 5:13-20) by studying the work and resurrection of Dorcas. They learn an alternative to anger (Matthew 5:21-37) by exploring Paul's letter about Onesimus. And they learn about dealing with enemies (Matthew 5:38-48) by seeing how God and Ananias care for Saul.

Make of point of teaching these worship connections in the lessons ahead. Your students will be glad you did!

God bless you as you teach His children His Word!