Have you ever had to modify a lesson plan because it didn’t line up with the Bible story it was supposed to be teaching?
Children’s ministry workers and Sunday school teachers should always be careful when teaching from a Sunday school curriculum. Most publishers have a statement of faith and editorial reviews to ensure sound doctrine.
But sometimes individual lessons can miss the meaning of the passage. The result can be misleading children when teaching the Bible story. Dr. John Walton has just posted on this topic on the Zondervan blog. His article is titled Hermeneutics and Children’s Curriculum and looks at five common ways that Sunday school lessons can fail in this area.
- Promotion of the Trivial
- Illegitimate extrapolation
- Reading Between the Lines
- Missing important nuance:
- Focus on people rather than God
This is one reason why I’ve been writing my own lesson plans for Children’s church. I also try to be very selective on which free Sunday school lessons I’ll link on this blog.
I encourage you to go and check out Dr. Walton’s article. It might make you read your Sunday school lesson more carefully this weekend.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Tony,
Thanks for the link to the article! I just returned to seminary so the title caught my attention. I normally don’t hear people talk like that when it comes to children’s ministry.
Many pastors/christian leaders believe it is important for those who preach to/teach adults to be sound and accurate, however when it comes to what is presented to children it seems to be ok to relegate it to cute little stories, etc.
In fact I recently had a pastor tell me that as a CP “I don’t need a degree for what I do, though it was important for those pastors who ministry to adults to have a degree.
And as I pursue my studies in seminary I am picking up on some of the same sort of mindset. I think I will be a much different voice in the halls and classes of seminary.
Thanks again for the link to the article.
@Darlene: It’s my position that you need to be an even more careful interpreter when teaching children. 1) then often don’t push-back and listen critically like many adults 2) they don’t have as much bible background to evaluate what you say 3) it takes deep understanding to simplify truth without distorting it.
Thanks for your comments and I hope your studies yield good fruit for God’s Kingdom!
It is imparitive that the terms, used by the christian church, are fully defined for children. I teach mentally handicapped adults, there it is vital that each word is throughly defined
Thank you for thus site, and may the Lord Jesus Christ bless each one! Margie.
Tony,
Thanks for this link! I teach Sunday School and am cautious about teaching straight from the curriculum. What advice do you have for a teacher who’s been given, and expected to teach, poor curriculum? (This particular curriculum jumps around the Bible in order to fit stories into certain virtues.)
Thank you also for this site! I recently discovered it through Kingdom People and it has been very helpful and encouraging.
Kris
You are so right. I have been teaching for many years and although we need to update and teach using styles that work with today’s kids, we need to keep the message very clear and straight from the Bible. As taught by my mom years ago, I always read before and after both the memory verse and lesson for context. Sometimes we pull scriptures that by themselves seem to say one thing but in looking at the whole, we find the meaning to be different. Sometimes in the lessons that I either look at online or in the curriculum that we are currently using, I shake my head and wonder where they get their goals/aims for that particular lesson. It is also important to keep our particular political philosophy out of our lessons. Keeping God as the center and linking him as important in the kid’s lives is usually my focus.