Sunday School Lessons & Bad Interpretation

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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.

  1. Promotion of the Trivial
  2. Illegitimate extrapolation
  3. Reading Between the Lines
  4. Missing important nuance:
  5. 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.

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