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!

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!

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!

What Is Epiphany?

Have you enjoyed the previous "Church Year" videos from Concordia Publishing House? Perhaps you'll find a use for new addition to the line-up in the upcoming season of Epiphany: What Is Epiphany?

God bless you as you teach His children His Word in the new year!

Advent Video

The last Sunday of the Church Year has come and gone, and the new Church Year is about to begin with the first Sunday in Advent. You can give your students some sense of what Advent means through this beautiful video from Concordia Publishing House. You can play it here.

God's blessings 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!

WOW! CPH Has All That?

I've heard that some congregations are looking for new Sunday School material, something that is family-friendly, recognizes the Church Year, is experiential and relational, is easy to prepar, and contributes significantly to biblical literacy.

I have good news: Sunday School material from Concordia Publishing House does all that and more!

Family Friendly: For thirty years, CPH has produced Sunday School material that is unified across all age levels. Everyone in the congregation, from the youngest to the oldest can study the same biblical text each week, each using materials and techniques that are age-appropriate. The materials incorporate take-home materials that promote family discussion and further study about the lesson. Especially, check out the "Explore More Cards," published with our Cross Explorations material but useful with either curriculum. Our materials assume that families will worship together each Sunday and we incorporate elements of the Church's worship in the lessons.

Recognizes the Church Year: CPH Sunday School material is rooted in the Church Year; major festivals are recognized and often the focus of lessons (Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, the Baptism of our Lord, Transfiguration, Holy Week, and Easter lessons are taught on appropriate Sundays; Reformation Day, All Saints' Day, and other festivals are noted and often incorporated into the lesson. About half of the Sunday School lessons each year teach the Bible account that is read as the Gospel in the Divine Service in congregations using the three-year-lectionary.

Experiential and Relational: CPH recognizes that children learn best by applying Scriptures to life experience. The youngest children spend time each week in activities that provide a real-life experience to which the Scriptures can be applied; lessons for older children use role play and discussion to help student apply what they learn from the Bible to their lives between Sundays.

Easy to Prepare: Each lesson has a one-page study of the theological and bibical content of the lesson, handy materials lists, scripted teacher talk (so you know what to say, even if you put it in your own words), and a simple four-part outline. In addition, a 30-minute podcast about the lesson is available each week.

Biblical Literacy: the sequence of lessons in Growing in Christ and Cross Explorations materials has been carefully designed to teach the entire narrative of salvation history over a three-year-plus period, with the most significant parts of that history (Advent, Christmas, and Easter) taught every year. Lessons repeat every third or fourth year, so that as student grow they encounter God's Word again and again in age-appropriate learning.

In addition, CPH offers consistent instruction using both Law and Gospel, lessons that are truly centered in Jesus Christ as our Savior from sin, two choices of material (check them out at our new Web site: cph.org/sundayschool), realistic full-color Bible art, varied modes of instruction and story presentation, and a wealth of supplementary material.

What are you looking for in Sunday School material?

What do you think we are missing?

God bless you as you teach His children His Word!