Starting a New Year of Sunday School, Part 2

A new year of shepherding the disciples in your Sunday School class is near. What will you do to get ready?

In Part 1, I mentioned that my wife is a middle school math teacher. For her, there are four important areas of preparation for the new school year:  training, planning, room preparation, and relationships. In this four-part series, I want to focus on those four areas of preparation as they relate to Sunday School. In Part 1, I focused on training. In Part 2, we will examine planning.

Our Lord and His sheep in our care deserve our best efforts. That means planning is needed. Gather a team. Pray. Evaluate. Set goals. Make plans. Provide training. What is there to plan? Consider a few ideas:

• LEADERS. Study your Sunday School organization. Are additional leaders needed? Which ones? Where? Prayerfully plan to enlist those leaders.
• CLASSES. Study your organization. Are some age groups missing? Plan to start a class. Are some age groups too full? Plan to start another class. Is there an affinity group in the community that needs to be reached? Plan to start a class. Each class you start usually will grow to 10-12 in attendance and 20-25 in enrollment in 12-18 months.
• CLASS LEADERS. Study your classes. Which classes need additional leaders in order to improve the span of care? There should at least be one leader for every five persons on the class list. Prayerfully plan the enlistment of needed outreach leaders, member care leaders, apprentice teachers, and greeters.
• TRAINING. Study the needs and practices of your teachers and workers. What training is needed? What focus is needed? Who will lead the training? When will it be scheduled? What method of training will you use? Prayerfully plan for training at least twice each year.
• ENROLLMENT. What can be done to enroll new people? Sunday School does not grow without new people. How will you challenge your members to invite people? How will you train your people to invite people to be added to your class care lists? Prayerfully invite and enroll new people.
• GUEST FOLLOW UP. How will you ensure that guest follow-up is consistently done in a timely fashion? How will you train your classes to make caring contacts? How will you check on progress and affirm good work? Prayerfully plan guest follow-up.
• FELLOWSHIPS/PROJECTS. To keep members connected, they need to know each other better than Sunday only. To lead guests to get to know us better, they also need opportunities beyond Sunday. Prayerfully plan fellowships (social) and projects (work) and invite members, absentees, and guests.

What would you add to this beginning list? Gather your team to pray and plan. Make disciples. Be revolutionary!