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!

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!

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!

Choose Your Dates

The most visible change in Concordia's Sunday School materials starting this fall is the absence of assigned dates. In the long term, this is a boost to good stewardship, both for the customer and for the publisher.

With a little planning, there can be

• No unused lessons.
• Flexibility in scheduling.
• Fewer purchases of teacher materials.

You can:

• Teach the lessons in order. In the winter 2015 quarter, the Church will celebrate Christmas while SS is studying the events leading up to Christmas. If they start on the first week of September and teach every week, The Birth of Jesus will be taught on January 10th. The Sunday School can use the Church Year Worship Kit and Church Year Connections to connect to the church’s worship and simply say “We’ll study that event in a couple of weeks.”
• Skip a couple of lessons in the “before the Nativity”sequence. Most congregations probably skip a Sunday or two each year anyway.
• Start a couple of weeks early. School starts in many places in mid-August. If SS starts on August 23, the Christmas lesson would hit on 12/27.
• Save a couple of the Old Testament 2 lessons to be taught later.

Use a chart like the one below to inform teachers of the best dates to use the lessons. Watch this space for more about the changes you'll see in the fall.

God bless you as you teach His children His Word!

Sunday School Material Without Dates

What would your Sunday School material look like without dates?
When would you use it if nobody told you?
What would be the advantages to "date-less" curriculum?
What drawbacks would need to be overcome?
What additional resources would you need?

These are not rhetorical questions. Starting this fall the popular Sunday School material from Concordia Publishing House, Growing in Christ and Cross Explorations, will no longer have dates. I'll unpack some of the rationale and reality around that decision in future blog posts.

Change is not always comfortable however, so I'm devoting the next few weeks to talking through this exciting change in our material and what it will mean for Sunday School teachers and directors.

God bless you as you teach His children His Word!