Help! Share Your Thoughts!

CPH is conducting a Sunday School materials survey. It is a multi-path survey for anyone interested in or using any Sunday School curriculum. It is designed to help us measure which components of our curriculum are most used and what new features Sunday School leaders and teachers are seeking.

You can help in two ways!

First, take the survey! Your thoughts will be extremely helpful as we craft the next generation of Sunday School resources her at Concordia Publishing House.

Second, encourage others (your Sunday School teachers, and colleagues and their teachers in other churches) to take the survey as well.

You can access the survey by following the link below. It will be live through June 30.

Please take our Sunday School survey to share how you use Growing in Christ or Cross Explorations, what you like about the curriculum, and what you think could be improved. 

God bless you as you teach His children His Word!

Time for a Change?

A marketing study I reviewed recently, including a broad range of denominations using curriculum from a multitude of publishers, reported an interesting finding.

Christian churches seem to change Sunday School materials about every two years on average, with many of them changing every year!

Why?

Those who prepared the report did not ask that question. What do you think?

• Is it just for something new?
• Is it because things are not working and changing the curriculum seems the best, only, or easiest fix?
• Is it because leadership changes and wants to make the change?

It makes me wonder, how many Sunday School curricula are there that would really meet the needs of a congregation seeking material that clearly teaches the Bible from a Lutheran perspective? (I know of at least two. : )

How often has your congregation changed Sunday School material?

What prompted the change?

God bless you as you teach His children His Word!

Going Digital

My Sunday School team is discussing how best to format the next revision of Sunday School material for Concordia Publishing House. This would be for material published for fall 2015 and following quarters. Among our observations are these points:

• Our scope and sequence is pretty solid; we might eliminate a bit of the annual repetition imposed by the Church Year.
• The biblical art created for Growing in Christ and reused in Cross Explorations is a winner.
• The demand for Sunday School material in general continues in a downward trend; many congregations are struggling to maintain their Sunday School in the face of a poor economy and fewer students.
• Advances in digital publishing suggest that we look seriously at how Sunday School material for teachers and students could be provided to congregations digitally.

Digital Sunday School material represents serious challenges. Our Sunday School customers are often late-adopters of technology. A significant part of our financial investment is recovered through sale of student material. For each teacher guide we sell five to ten student sets in our "print model." The financial picture changes radically if we are selling just one digital set of material that is then printed locally. Most of our publishing costs do not go away. The process of developing, writing, editing, and playing out the material in a designed format still remain; only the printing cost are reduced, which is a small part of the total investment.

Digital material also presents several significant advantages. Customers could have some choice in designing their own scope and sequence. Distribution of material to teachers might also be possible electronically.

Do you have time to answer a couple of questions about this possibility?

Would you purchase Sunday School materials as a digital subscription?

What advantages would you look for?

Would you print student material locally in color or black and white?

I would love to hear your thoughts on this thorny issue. Leave me a comment or write me at tom.nummela@cph.org.

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

Stewardship of the Gospel

I occasionally hear from Sunday School leaders and other Christian educators that they are looking for reproducible or "download it yourself and print it from your home computer" resources as a matter of good stewardship. Attendance varies so greatly from session to session, that they cannot accurately estimate the amount of pre-printed student material to purchase.

Here is what I wrote recently to a VBS director:
         'Let me step up on my soap box for a moment. I want you to be a good steward with your church’s financial resources. But even more, I want you to be a good steward with the Church’s Gospel message. Consider what you give up when you sacrifice “the official LCMS program” for sake of dollars: CPH is the only publisher who guarantees that your VBS will teach God’s Word clearly and fully from a Lutheran perspective without the false teachings of moralism (you can be good by your own power), synergism (you help God by cooperating in your salvation), or decision theology (you find and choose God). CPH is the only publisher who submits their material for an independent doctrinal review by LCMS theologians. I assume sharing the Gospel is the reason your church goes to all the work of preparing a VBS in the first place.'

Jesus, in Matthew 25:14-30, commends those stewards who put their master's treasure to work and condemns the one who guards the master's money and gains nothing with it. Since we know that Jesus is not teaching a course on financial management, we must consider: Is it good stewardship to save money and sacrifice theology?

But what about that "wasted" student material? You can:

• negotiate a better return policy with your supplier or publisher
• send the unused material by mail to the student who otherwise would have used it (with a sincere invitation to use the material in person next week)
• offer it to a local mission congregation
• in larger congregations where more than one class uses the same student leaflets, store the leaflets in a common area rather than in the classroom and distribute them at the end of opening, or simply make sure teachers know to ask and share; don't let leaflets sit unused in one classroom, while also classroom runs short

Exercise good stewardship of the Gospel, not just good financial stewardship. God promises to bless you as you teach His children His Word!