Many churches successfully use curriculum and are quite happy with the experience and results.  Some though haven’t found one that suits them and, despite our best attempts, our local Sunday School is one of the latter. We have tried various curriculums and despite our best attempts to make them work, we simply haven’t found one that we were completely comfortable with. Many of them, quite frankly, are in direct conflict with the truths of the bible so we would have had to do a LOT of work to make them doctrinally correct or they were so far-fetched or complicated that our poor teachers were simply discarding them as useless and teaching whatever they wanted to.

We couldn’t quite figure out what to do so we sat down and thought about what we were really trying to accomplish in our children’s ministry.

We, of course, wanted the experience for the kids to be incredibly exciting, to the point that they wanted desperately to come back AND to bring their friends with them but we did NOT want it solely to be entertainment. We understood that we were not merely babysitting the children in our care but rather were responsible for introducing core, basic, apostolic doctrines of the bible in a fun way that that they could easily understand.

We wanted to make sure that we covered all of the bases and that nothing was missed. Ideally, a child that passed through all of the stages of our Sunday School program would come out with a complete knowledge of what we believed and why while having had a great time the while.

So we created the following topic list:

CLICK HERE FOR SUNDAY SCHOOL TOPIC LIST

We in no way consider it perfect and it definitely lacks the step-by-step direction of a honed curriculum but so far it has worked for us. It is a list showing each week of the year and what topic we will be teaching on on those dates. We try to account for all holidays and other exceptions that occur on Sunday such as our quarterly Family Days which occur on any fifth Sunday found in a single month. We try to cover all of the core apostolic topics along with a series on bible stories because we were finding that many children, even those raised in church, didn’t know many stories we take for granted. The bible stories we cover change from year to year and we have had so much fun teaching on Balaam’s donkey, Jacob’s ladder, the famine of Samaria and many, many more.  Here is a list of all of the key bible stories that we use.

Click for list of bible stories

Merely giving a teacher a topic and asking them to build an entire lesson on their own from a simple theme is ambitious and a bit scary but our teachers have done a great job with it. They have each embraced the idea and nearly always have fantastic classes consisting of games, object lessons, snacks and more all nicely wrapped around the given subject.

There is a curriculum in the making that can be used for free but is currently incomplete and I am not sure when it will be completed.  It is located at www.apostolicdoctrineforkids.com and once it is completed it will be a viable choice… and you can’t beat the price!

I am not introducing the topic list I introduced as the cure-all for curriculum woes. I am just trying to address some of the questions that we have been receiving on the topic.  I hope it helps you in some way make your church’s children’s ministry better.