How to Increase Biblical Literacy in Your Church
“I’ve sat in Bible study groups (and cringed) when the leader asked the group, ‘What do you want to study next?’ Like preschoolers craving their favorite snack, people tend toward their favorite Bible books or topics.” - Lifeway
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Our church has used The Gospel Project before and is currently using Explore the Bible. Explore the Bible is a high-level overview of each book.
My impressions of this curriculum are mixed. As you work through a book, the curriculum will often skip major sections or chapters or begin the lesson in the middle of a pericope or narrative. As the teacher, it's up to you to take 5-10 minutes to supply all the context that was skipped over in order to rightly understand the passage under consideration. The passage under discussion each week sometimes seems random. The main ideas and application points the curriculum suggests for each passage can at times seem contrived or forced. Usually there are three to four ideas for each passage and a similar number of application points / questions.
They do maintain the Sunday school quarterly schedule. So, for smaller books, they will try to fit two or three books into a quarter. They will cover larger books in two quarters. For example, we just finished Acts 1-12 last quarter; this Fall quarter we're covering the rest of Acts. Next quarter, they plan to cover Exodus / Leviticus together.
So, I like that our people are getting high-level exposure to all of the Bible. I don't like the shallow nature of it and that there is really no opportunity in the quarterly schedule to deep dive on certain important passages, issues, or topics covered in the biblical books. I also think that Lifeway could help itself by providing more teacher training on how best to use and teach the curriculum. They do offer a podcast with teaching tips for each lesson, but I'd actually like to see an example of someone teaching the lesson.
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