Here’s a question: In your Sunday youth and children’s groups (assuming you have them), what do you teach? And how do you decide what to teach?
I think there are three approaches — all of which I have used. Let’s look through them and consider their strengths and weaknesses.
#1 Teach what we feel like
Okay, this doesn't mean on a week-by-week basis, but perhaps at the beginning of term deciding, “We haven’t done a Gospel for a while; let’s look at some parables.”
While there is some merit to this — we might often have a sense of what the youth or children in our care need at a particular time — I think there’s value in putting more thought and planning into what we teach.
If we decide we are at a stage where we want to do this, I think this leads to two further options.
#2 A common curriculum
In this approach, all (or at least most) of the youth and kids’ groups learn the same (or a simplified version) of what the adults are learning in the sermon. This is an idea that has been pushed a lot recently, and for many good reasons.
The main attraction is that it helps join up what is happening at church on a Sunday when everyone is split into different groups, helping to reinforce the unity of church. It also helps parents to talk about what their children learned, especially if they covered the same passage in the sermon. And it’s a good way to acknowledge the overall authority of the minister, who sets sermon series that are carried through to all members of the church, even if they’re not directly responsible for teaching everyone.
However, in practice there are a few difficulties that are often found with this approach.
There are some parts of the Bible that are hard to teach to children — many of the Epistles, for example, or passages such as the Song of Songs or certain ethical topics that may not be age-appropriate.
In addition, when a minister chooses a sermon series, they’re usually thinking about the adults in front of them rather than the toddlers in the back hall.
When I used a common curriculum, I found that some important topics for children were being missed, because they only came up if the minister happened to preach on them. It was brought to my attention that, as a result, we weren’t covering some really important stories in our youth and children’s groups.
So, in order to avoid this, we moved to the third option.
#3 Age-group-specific curriculums
This involves a set plan of lessons each age group will cover over a number of years.
These will differ between each age group, and while there will be some repetition, the aim is that key doctrines and parts of the Bible are covered at a time and stage that are age-appropriate.
We’ve used age-specific curriculums, and a major advantage is knowing that the key teachings are covered in a way that avoids gaps. This gives us confidence that we’re supporting parents by teaching the full counsel of God.
Practically, it’s made my life much simpler: I know what we’ll be teaching and when, so I can have the resources ready. This is much simpler than options one and two, which often involve the panic of finding resources for whatever my latest fun idea is, or for what the minister has chosen. Age-specific curriculums also make things easier for leaders, since they can teach lessons that are age-appropriate and supported by ready-made resources.
However, there are some downsides too. As discussed, this approach does, by its nature, disconnect a bit from what the adults are learning and create a situation where five or more groups might be in completely different places in the Bible on any given Sunday morning. For a parent with a child in each group, this can be hard to keep track of.
The other potential downside is that things can become a bit predictable, stale, and repetitive. Interestingly, this is probably more of a risk for the leaders than the young people. But if leaders feel they’re just cycling through a curriculum and it’s becoming stale, it can have a real impact on the quality of their teaching.
We have used all three approaches with varying levels of success. Having landed on the third option, though, and having reflected on each approach in this article, I do wonder whether it might be time for a change!
