After three years of adding posts to The Sunday School Revolutionary, I have been encouraged by Josh Hunt and other friends to write a book about Sunday School. And that is my plan during May and June. I plan to spend the month of May preparing for the project. I will collect and prepare my content. I will outline the book and chapters. I will determine my focus and what will be covered. I will spend time researching the way others approach some of those topics. This will mean reading old and new Sunday School books in my library and the library of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. And if I can hold off that long, I plan to begin the writing in earnest in June.
And I want to invite you to join me in this effort. While I have lots of personal experiences, examples, and illustrations, I want to share more than my own. Would you be willing to share some of your successes and failures? What has worked well? How has God blessed? What have you learned from your mistakes?
Allow me to suggest some possible areas. I may not need examples and illustrations in all of these areas, but I’d like to have them in case I do. And I may add more areas later that come to mind in the outlining or the writing. So stay tuned! Anyway, do you have stories, successes, mistakes from which you learned valuable lessons, illustrations, examples, or testimonies about the following Sunday School topic areas?
- total Sunday School growth,
- age group Sunday School growth,
- class growth,
- creative teacher training,
- Sunday School planning meetings,
- care group ministry,
- outreach efforts,
- class outreach or ministry projects,
- apprenticing or potential teacher development,
- teacher appreciation,
- improvement of Sunday School assimilation,
- benefits of using variety of teaching methods,
- spiritual growth or growth as disciples,
- caring for members,
- shut in ministry,
- successful starting new classes,
- failures starting new classes,
- great class organization/leadership,
- reaching dropouts,
- winning attenders to Christ,
- class greeters,
- age grading Sunday School (success or failure),
- using leftover Sunday School literature,
- bus ministry,
- language ministry,
- off-site Sunday School,
- moving to dual Sunday School,
- mental and physical special needs,
- high attendance day/emphasis,
- name tags,
- developing a prospect list,
- and others of your choice!
Tell me your true stories and examples and/or those of other classes or churches. If you would prefer, I would be happy to change the name of the church and/or people in the story, example, or illustration. Use the above list as a starting point. Feel free to add to it. My preference would be for you to e-mail them to sundayschool@kybaptist.org. It would help me to collect them in the same place. Your deadline for submission of this material is May 28, 2009. So would you look through the list now and pick out one or two and send me a paragraph about the topic area? I look forward to integrating your submissions into my book in June! Allow God to use you and your Sunday School. Be revolutionary!
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