006: Choosing a Curriculum for Children’s Sunday School in Small Churches (& Why It’s Not Quite as Important as You Think)

Episode 006: Choosing a Curriculum for Children’s Sunday School in Small Churches (& Why It’s Not Quite as Important as You Think)

Intro  0:01  
Hey, this is Laurie Graham. Welcome to the Small Church Ministry Podcast.

Laurie Graham 0:15
Hey, welcome back to another Episode as we dive into children’s Sunday school. We’re going to talk about choosing curriculum for children’s Sunday school, specifically in small churches, and why it really might not be as important as you think.

Laurie Graham 0:29
As with pretty much everything I talk about in small churches, children’s ministry is no exception. Children’s Ministry in small churches isn’t less ministry than in big churches, but it is very, very different. People who’ve never served in small churches will talk about how simple it is to adapt any curriculum for smaller numbers. But I want to let you know that small church ministry is not like baking cookies. So think about baking cookies, we’ve got a recipe and whether we’re baking for 400 or 440, we follow the recipe, we might double it or triple it or cut it in half or even in quarters. But it’s the same proportions, it’s the same ingredients, and the products come out the same. Well, ministry isn’t like recipes at all, there’s not one formula that can just be adjusted for the masses or the few, it’s really very different. Most Sunday school curriculum that’s on the market these days is designed for larger churches with consistent numbers and enough numbers to have a full class of any one age group. We all just have to accept that reality. Big churches spend more money on curriculum, and publishers need to make money. And there you go.

Laurie Graham 1:41
Now, most publishers, if they’re smart, and most are very, very smart, they’ll also have options to adapt their curriculum for smaller numbers or mixed ages. Many of them have great ideas, and some of them are going to work great for your church. But there’s a lot of reasons why it doesn’t always work out so great to take curriculums that are designed for bigger numbers and boil them down into your church. Here’s a few other reasons. Number one, we don’t have the same kids from one week to the next, Billy may come one week, and then we don’t see him for three and Shanique, his grandma, might bring her when she can. The kids in the apartment complex come on Wednesday nights, but we can’t quite get their families to get up on Sunday mornings. So that’s one difference. There’s also a lot more inconsistency based on percentages. So we’ve got a class of 20 and one families out with COVID. Maybe you’ve lost a kid or two for the week, but you’ve still got a class of 18. Not so in small churches, if you’ve got a class of three mixed ages, and one family is out of town. What do you have left one? Maybe none? What do you do with the lesson you prepared? These are just a few of the challenges in small churches.

Laurie Graham 2:56
Another one is this. One special circumstance has a lot bigger impact on your class. So whether it’s a class with siblings, or a parent, as the teacher, or one child with special needs a family relocating a death, one person impacted in a class of four is totally different than one person impacted in a much bigger class. Mixed ages is actually one of the biggest challenges in small churches. Now in churches that are medium sized or big size mixed ages even means something totally different. Mixed ages for those churches might mean your preschoolers or with your kindergarteners or your third through fifth graders combined. In a truly small church, let’s face it, we’ve got one set of twins and they’re in third grade, we might have a four-year-old, we could have a 10-year-old with autism, or we’ve got one kindergartener and a 12-year-old in the same class. That’s mixed ages for small churches. And we’re going to be talking about that. Volunteers and small churches is another issue. And we’ll talk more about that in future episodes. But instead of a team of teachers, you may have one teacher that’s totally defeated, or on the verge of burnout.

Laurie Graham 4:10
The last thing I’ll mention that’s very different in small churches is just your resources are different. Your space is different. You might be a portable church, you might have one shared classroom. It’s not just the money per kid for the curriculum. It’s all the resources, the space, and the other needs that make it what it is. So taking a children’s curriculum that’s meant for big numbers and big churches and adapting it for small churches just isn’t that easy. If you’ve been trying and failing, I promise it’s not just you, and there’s a better way. So how do you choose the best curriculum for children’s ministry? Do you write your own? How much do you spend? What’s the scope and sequence anyway? Let’s take a quick tour. Just a really quick detour into the history of Sunday school.

Laurie Graham 4:57
I don’t know if you know how Sunday school started, but I looked this up once. And Sunday school actually started during the Industrial Revolution, when children worked in factories, and they worked long hours. The church saw a need. And you know what the need was? It was literacy. If the kids weren’t going to school, they weren’t learning how to read and write. And the church was like, wow, this is a need, let’s do it. It wasn’t even necessarily about the Gospel message. They saw a need for children to learn to read, and the church stepped up. This is when Sunday school was born. The churches opened their doors on Sunday mornings, one of the few days when the factories were closed, so that children could learn to read and write is that not just amazing? I think that is crazy awesome that the church at the time saw a need in the community, and they determined to meet the need. So cool. I’m so excited to talk about that more in future episodes, just to be sure that we’re actually doing that, that we’re seeing needs and meeting them as the church but back to Sunday school.

Laurie Graham 6:06
Alright, Sunday school today is considered one of the foundational ways to teach biblical truths within the context of the church community. So whether your church has Sunday school, just for the littles, or all the way through adulthood, it’s a common program in churches. As we delve into this program, I just want you to keep in mind that this is a culturally bound program. Jesus never said all churches should have a Sunday School hour, or that Sunday school should happen before church or after church, or that we should divide kids into ages have curriculum, and give rewards. Nowhere in the Bible does God command Sunday school, or even lifted up as the best option for sharing, sharing the gospel or teaching his work, it’s not mentioned. So just keep that in mind. This program is meant for people, people are not meant for the programs. And if you wonder what I mean by that, sometimes we get so frustrated that people aren’t coming to our programs, because there’s a program happening. But that’s actually the opposite of how we should think the programs exist to serve the people. So are your programs meeting needs? Are your programs serving people, so never get married to the program? Because programs can change? God always has people on His hearts. So if providing Sunday School is an avenue that you’ve chosen to share God’s word, great. And if it’s working, that’s even better, or if you’re hoping it’ll work. So how do we do it best in small churches?

Laurie Graham 7:39
Let’s talk curriculum. Curriculum technically, as a guide of study, like what will be studied, what courses what content? In practicality, when we talk about Sunday school curriculum, it’s actually a guide that serves the teachers. It’s meant to help the teachers teach better, the content is part of it. But the curriculum is more than the content. It’s, it’s the how the helps the do’s the don’ts, the modules, the ways the tools to teach. So if you’re looking for a curriculum, it’s more about how the curriculum is set up. And if it serves your teachers, not just the content. Many people when they’re looking at curriculum will look at the, what the scope and sequence of what’s being taught. But if you want to choose the right curriculum, the better question to ask is, if it’s going to help your teachers teach in small churches, and any churches, really, your Sunday school teachers might not be teachers at all, or not professionally, right? They might be bus drivers, stay-at-home parents, or engineers, or doctors, or mechanics. In fact, career educators don’t even always make the best teachers. And a lot of times they teach all week, and they don’t want to teach on Sunday. So if a curriculum exists to help your teachers teach, what would that look like? Think about what would help you as a teacher.

Laurie Graham 9:00
Now, this depends a lot on the person who’s teaching. That’s why there isn’t one best curriculum, what would help me best might not help you best. So you need to know your teacher and what they need. If your teacher hates the curriculum, and I know so many people in this place, they’re like, my teachers hate the curriculum. I can’t get them to use it. They don’t like it. So if your teacher hates the curriculum, they’re not the ones who need to get with the program. The curriculum is designed to help them. So please, if you’re in charge of your teachers, get a curriculum that helps them teach. The teacher isn’t designed to help the curriculum. So let’s talk about scope and sequence because if you start looking into curriculum options, you’re going to hear this term somewhere, scope and sequence. If you’re the organized type of person, like an educator, you’re gonna love this. It basically lays out what’s taught from preschool through sixth grade or even all the way through 12th. or adulthood, we can get so excited about this because it sounds so perfect. This is what everyone who goes through our program is going to know by the time they graduate, they’re going to come to this lesson and this one and learn this in second grade. And by the time they graduate, they’re going to have the whole core the gospel and how to apply it in their lives. Now, if you’re in a small church, you might be laughing now like I am, or you might be hanging your head and failure, like, I wish that worked. Because if you’ve tried to follow a scope and sequence, this might not be your experience. And let’s talk about why not. In small churches, it’s more like this.

Laurie Graham 10:42
So Sunday school is not compulsory, it’s not required. It’s not like public school when I can guarantee that this kid’s gonna come at the age of five, and this child will learn this material in kindergarten, and each year, we’ll build on the one before because they’ve been there. I know they’re going to come to public school, or homeschooling, because it’s required by law, and there’s social pressure to get a high school degree, we’re going to take this class and this class all the way through, or we won’t graduate. But what’s real life like in small church, Sunday school, I mentioned it before Billy comes one week, and then we don’t see him for three weeks. Shanique, his grandma, brings him here and there when she can. And again, the kids in the apartment complex down the street, they don’t even come on Sunday mornings. So how does the scope and sequence serve us? It might not. So we have a choice, we can either get these kids to come every week so that that scope and sequence by golly is going to work. Or we need to figure out how to serve the kids instead of serving the curriculum. If you’ve gone the route of trying to get them to come, you’ve probably added a bit of frustration to your plate. And it’s really not needed. Because the point isn’t to get the curriculum to work. The point is to share Jesus with the kids. Now, please hear me I’m not saying a scope and sequence is wrong. In fact, I think it’s a beautiful thing if it works for you. If you’ve got a culture of consistent attendance, and parents invested and bring in their kids weekly, awesome. totally go for it. But most small churches today, and actually, most churches of any size, are pushing against a changing culture, trying to force something that used to work instead of looking at the current needs and how to meet them. Really, instead of joining God, where he is at work, we might be trying to force a program that used to work. So just keep in mind why Sunday school started. And then that’s not even the same anymore. So am I saying you shouldn’t have Sunday school? Absolutely not. You will not hear that from me. I love Sunday school. I love meeting people when they come I love diving into the Word and finding creative ways to share it, express it and to help people apply it, and even sharing what God’s doing in my own life.

Laurie Graham 13:03
So there’s a great principle in teaching. It’s not about what we teach. It’s about what they remember. So many times, we’re trying to cram all this information into a Sunday School hour, and we get frustrated when they don’t come or they don’t listen. Or we get frustrated with how much we prepare, and then they don’t remember 90% Of what we say. Just keep in mind, that’s not the point. It’s not about what we teach. It’s about what they remember. And I want to tell you what people remember when people look back on their experiences of churches from childhood, and I’ve asked a lot of people about their experiences. I have never once heard a person say the Sunday school curriculum was terrible. Or the Sunday school curriculum was amazing. You know, what I hear? What people remember, is how they felt. I hear things like this. I never felt loved at church. I never felt accepted. Or I remember how much my Sunday School teacher loved me. I always felt wanted, like they valued me it was the one place in my life where I felt like I belonged. So getting back to the curriculum, the curriculum is great. We need solid, biblical truth. We need tools to help us teach. But man, what makes a difference? Is people just knowing that they’re loved? Now, it’s absolutely possible to focus so much on the curriculum and the lessons that we miss the ministry of loving kids. So we’ve got to keep that first. But it’s not an either or it’s a both and an and.

Laurie Graham 14:50
So how do we make the curriculum work for us? We’ve got to start somewhere. We need a base of what to teach. So how do we pick what to teach? What curriculum should you use? I’m going to give you a few options here. But before we get into the options, three things to consider, first look at your teachers, you need to know who they are and what they’re like, and what would actually help them. That’s the point of the curriculum. If your teachers and maybe you just have one teacher, if your teacher is crabby and burnt out, just cancel Sunday school for a while, because you need to serve their needs, no one can pour out of empty. And I really mean it, your kids will live without Sunday school class. And honestly, if it’s not working well, it might be healthier to take a break anyway, then leave them with a negative experience of church and have that person who is like fighting to teach them and wants to teach them. But they’re so exhausted, burnt out, or frustrated, that their love is not even coming through. So pay attention to your teachers who they are, what they need, what they love their personalities before you delve into finding the curriculum. The second thing to consider is really look at your kids. In small churches, this could vary by the season or by the year. In our small church, we’ll have a year when we have a handful of fifth and sixth graders like there’s this really cool up-and-coming junior high group. And when they graduate into the junior high group, we may have several years when we don’t have any kids that age at all. Or a family split might mean that half our kids, which is to end up going out of town and living with their dad for a year.

Laurie Graham 16:34
And this is why scope and sequence doesn’t always work in a small church, a 12-year-old down the street might start coming when they’re 12. They never had a biblical basis of that scope and sequence that gave them the foundation that most 12-year-olds would have if they had been brought up in our church. So you’ve really got to look at your kids and who’s coming. Literally, it might be taking it year by year, a family moves a family comes, who do you have this year, it might be a different curriculum for that year. And thirdly, just look at what’s out there and what meets your needs. I’m going to tell you, you don’t have to look too long, I’m about to give you some options. But don’t get sucked into the curriculum, vortex of pros and cons and so much more. Because your curriculum doesn’t matter nearly as much as your core beliefs, training your volunteers. And even if you’ve got one volunteer, the curriculum doesn’t matter nearly as much as our own personal discipleship, because we teach out of how we’re being transformed, because God is a living God, and we need to be living and moving with him. But let’s get into some curriculum because I know that’s why you’re listening to this podcast. So here’s some options. Okay, your first option is to look at the big-name curriculums like Group Grow Orange, the Gospel project, your denomination may have its own curriculum.

Laurie Graham 17:59
Now, in any of the big box curriculums, there’s going to be pros and cons, they pretty much weigh out the same. They’re brilliant. The curriculum companies have hired amazing people, disciples, educators, and they have considered everything, there is lots of good stuff, you’re going to spend a bit more money, you’re going to have to adapt it a bit or a lot. I will tell you, you will not use at all. And at the end of a month or a year, you’re going to have a lot of curriculum that sat untouched because your classes weren’t full, you canceled certain weeks. Different teachers didn’t like different things. But it’s a definite option. I love using big box curriculum myself, I but I have fun adapting it. And this is again, this is going to depend on your teachers, your kids, and what’s out there at the time. Second option, other people are going to say I would much rather spend less money on curriculum and more on the good stuff, like better crafts, science experiments, the good stuff that will help them actually get the hands-on learning. This is a little more like cut and paste and create your own teaching from a variety of resources. There are tons of great options out there. We have a blog post right now with a creative little church that talks about just using the beginner’s Bible as a base for your curriculum lessons and how to write lessons based on that. There’s also amazing object lessons you can find out there on Pinterest or my friend Anne Marie has a site called Future Flying Saucers. She’s like the queen of object lessons for churches. There’s resources at Deepa Kidman, which is a site that my friend Brittany Nelson has put together, and you can pick through and choose lessons and titles and topics and things that matter the most right now for your kids and your teachers.

Laurie Graham 19:53
Now again, there’s pros and cons of making your own lessons. It takes more time. There’s teachers who are going to love delving into this to researching to pulling together the things that they love. The cons are is that a lot of your teachers are not so confident they can do this now, I totally believe they can. But if they don’t feel confident or capable, they’re not going to do it and you’re going to end up frustrating your teachers more than helping them. A third option is finding resources that are truly created for mixed ages in small churches. A couple of those, our group has a series called All In One Sunday School, it’s literally set up for preschool through middle school. Cokesbury has something called the One Room Sunday School. Again, these are resources that are truly created with mixed ages in mind. And I don’t mean mixed, mixed ages, like two or three grades, I mean, the gamut from a four-year-old and a 10-year-old in the same class. Fourthly, there’s another great option and I find this one super fun. And it’s to use old VBS material like old VBS curriculum. And adapting that to be your Sunday school for six weeks or eight weeks. This is a really fun option. It’s free, because churches use Vacation Bible School material, right, and then they’re done with it. Many big churches, small churches, mid-sized churches, they literally throw out this curriculum when it’s done. And I will tell you, it’s hands-on, it’s fun. It’s gospel-oriented, it’s biblically based. And I know churches that use VBS material all year round, they’re literally switching up their theme for six or eight weeks and doing a next one. And it’s a way to bring some life back into your Sunday School hour.

Laurie Graham 21:38
Even if you just use this once or twice a year as a break for your teachers just to mix it up from your standard curriculum. So those are four great options for you. And then a fifth option, which I just want to caution you against. You might be tempted to take on this scope and sequence and write your very own curriculum that meets your church right where it’s at. And here’s just a little word of caution about really starting from scratch and writing a full curriculum for your church. I did this once I gathered a team, we had so much fun. There were like five or six of us adults digging into the truth about Scripture and getting super excited about creating centers of music and science. We even had a kitchen one and drama. We wrote the curriculum, we had a blast. And then the pastor I was working for pulled me aside and said, Hey, let’s talk about this. How much time are you putting into pouring into this curriculum that’s better than what you could find? But maybe that stuff you could find is good enough. Because look at where you’re spending your time. And I was spending so much time preparing lessons, that I wasn’t spending as much time as I could with people. And I just want to remind you that there may be a little person out there that needs your presence, more than your creative writing skills.

Laurie Graham 23:00
So regardless, there’s four or five options now which one do you choose? That’s going to come down to again, your teachers? What do they want to spend time on what lights them up? What gets them excited, because remember, the curriculum serves your teacher, there is not one right curriculum. And again, in small churches, you may change your curriculum choice by the year or by the season. Keep in mind that in the end, your curriculum matters a lot less than you think it would. It’s not as much about what we teach, as it is about what they remember. And just remember that people will, will remember a lot more how you made them feel than the information that you taught. In a future episode, we’re going to be talking about the one thing that every best teacher does and does amazingly well. And how we miss a lot of ministry opportunities, while we’re trying to complete a lesson. Instead of stopping to love the people that we’re with. When I think about interruptions and interruptions in teaching in ministry, I have to remind myself often of Jesus, because he was a master at interruptions and he embraced them. Like the next time the little wants to tell you their cat story for the millionth time, or a child with special needs is banging on the table. Or that older one just won’t listen or doesn’t seem to want to respect you or follow the classroom rules. Just remember what Jesus did. When somebody grabbed his cloak in the middle of a crowd. Or another one interrupted a dinner meeting by pouring perfume on his head. Or when Zacchaeus was like, clambering up a tree to try to get a better seat. Because unlike us, Jesus stopped. He stopped everything he was doing. And that interruption became a ministry moment.

Laurie Graham 25:04
Keep in mind too, that unlike the kids in the Industrial Revolution, who were in factories, sweating and working all day, and Sunday school was a break for them, right? Most of your kiddos are sitting at desks all day long in school. And the last thing they want to do is sit down for another day of school. So maybe Sunday school needs to take on a new feeling a new flow, and some new excitement as we choose to meet the needs of what’s around us. Instead of hanging on to a program that’s always been done this way, and we just want to make it work. Because our call is to love people like Jesus and to grow disciples to live out our own discipleship in a way that draws others to him. As much as we can use Sunday school as an amazingly successful tool, our call is not to make Sunday School successful come hell or high water. Sunday School is a tool that serves us if it does.

Laurie Graham 26:09
So let’s keep returning to the question of how can we meet needs. What needs do we see? Who is Jesus drawing to us? The call to love others and to see our churches as an outflowing of our own walks with Jesus, not a venue to make people fit the programs. And keep in mind it’s less about the curriculum than the people who are teaching the curriculum. And those students that are filling the seats or the beanbags or the carpet, hearing the curriculum. Make sure you’re asking the right questions, and focused on the right goal. And find the curriculums are the lessons that meet your needs instead of the other way around. Wherever you’re listening from, whether it’s Spotify, Apple, Google on the website, or wherever. There’s always a place to leave ratings and comments, and it’s so going to make a difference. Well, that’s all for now. I hope you have an incredible week. Whatever you’re up to this week, just be a light. I’ll talk to you soon.