We have three All Star Dates available in the Spring:

• March 9 – 10. Steve Parr, Josh Hunt, Bob Mayfield
• March 30 – 31: Ken Hemphill, Elmer Towns and Josh Hunt
• April 20 – 21. Steve Parr, Josh Hunt, David Francis

What an opportunity to get some of the nation’s leading champions of Sunday School on the stage at the same time to train the Sunday School teachers in your area!

These events are offered on a shared risk/ shared reward basis. If all goes well, they should be free for the host. You will need the cooperation of your state convention, assoication and nearby associtions to help with promotions. Each participant is charged a fee and the host gets to keep part of this to help with expenses.

For more information, see http://allstarsundayschool.com/

Here is a a little bit about each of these speakers:

Ken Hemphill is the past president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary as well as the former pastor of First Baptist Church, Norfolk, VA. While there, the church grew from 800 to 6000. He is the author of numerous books on on church growth including Revitalizing the Sunday Morning Dinosaur: A Sunday School Growth Strategy for the 21st Century. He has a new book coming out on new member assimilation called VELCRO Church.

Elmer Towns is the co-founder of Liberty University (along with the late Jerry Falwell). He has developed over 20 resource packages for leadership education, including Friend Day. He is the author of numerous books, including What Every Sunday School Teacher Should Know and What Every Pastor Should Know about Sunday School.

Bob Mayfield is the Sunday School and small group specialist for the Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma.  Bob has also served the Arizona Southern Baptist Convention and he has been minister of education at First Baptist Church, Chandler, AZ and Indiana Avenue Baptist Church in Lubbock, TX. Bob also has his own blogsite, www.bobmayfield.com Bob has authored several resources to help Sunday School:

• Power UP Your Sunday School
• Power Up Your World
• PivotPoints

David Francis is a well-known and trusted champion for Sunday school ministry. He travels across the country each year, speaking at churches and events to educate ministry leaders on how to begin and grow healthy Sunday schools. He is the head of Sunday School for Lifeway Christian Resources. He has authored numerous books on Sunday School including Transformational Class.

Dr. Steve Parr serves the Georgia Baptist Convention as the Vice-President for Sunday School and Evangelism and author of Sunday School That Really Works and Sunday School That Really Responds. He travels across Georgia assisting churches, pastors, and leaders with their small group and evangelism strategies. He has assisted hundreds of churches in strengthening their Sunday Schools by motivating and training leaders through seminars, conferences, preaching, and personal consultations.

Josh Hunt. Author of You Can Double Your Class in Two Years or Less, Disciplemaking Teachers, Make Your Group Grow, and Good Questions Have Groups Talking. He travels extensively training Sunday School teachers to double every two years or less.

What an opportunity to get these fine men on the same stage to train the Sunday School teachers in your area. For details on hosting a conference, see http://allstarsundayschool.com/

Just as the New Testament Church was built on teaching and preaching (see Acts 5:42), so the modern biblical Church must be built on Bible study in Sunday School and exhortation in the preaching service. Sunday School is still functionally defined as reaching people, so you can teach the people to win them to Christ and then care for those people spiritually. This fourfold nature of Sunday School is perhaps best expressed in an Old Testament verse that has often been used in the historic Sunday School conventions. “Gather the people together, men and women and little ones, and the stranger who is within your gates, that they may hear and that they may learn to fear the LORD your God and carefully observe all the words of this law” (Deut. 31:12). This verse reflects the four distinct areas of Sunday School ministry.

Sunday School Is the Reaching Arm of the Church

First, Sunday School is the arm that reaches all ages for Christ. “Reaching” is defined as making contact with a person and motivating him or her to give an honest hearing to the gospel. Since evangelism is giving out the gospel, reaching is basically preevangelism, for it gets people to listen to the gospel. In our text, it is expressed in the word “gather.” Note that those who gathered are identified as

• fathers,

• mothers,

• little ones or children, and

• the stranger.

Most church members have someone within their sphere of influence who is a stranger to the Church and who could be gathered into the Church.

Sunday School Is the Teaching Arm of the Church

Second, Sunday School is the teaching arm of the Church. “Teaching” means guiding the learning

activities that meet human needs. The first step of teaching is expressed in the verse by the words “that they may hear.” The ultimate step of teaching is “that they may learn.”

Sunday School Is the Winning Arm of the Church

Sunday School is also the arm of the Church that wins people to Christ. “Winning” is defined as communicating the gospel in an understandable manner and motivating a person to respond to Christ. The Old Testament expression “fear the Lord” means to bring a person to reverential trust of God. It was a concept of salvation. Today we might describe a person who “fear[s] the LORD” as a person who receives Christ, or trusts the Lord, for salvation.

Sunday School Is the Caring Arm of the Church

Finally, Sunday School is the arm of the Church that gives spiritual care to all members. One of the objectives of every Sunday School is to spiritually care for all so that all will “carefully observe all the words of this law.” Some people call this nurturing; others call it maturing.

Sunday School is the reaching, teaching, winning and caring arm of the Church. However, this definition becomes a mosaic when applied to individual churches. Just as it takes all the pieces of tile to make up a mosaic, so it takes all four aspects of the definition to describe a beautiful Sunday School. The beauty of the mosaic can be destroyed when we focus on one section of the mosaic and lose the whole picture. This happens when a church demonstrates a strong emphasis of only one aspect, such as gaining an abundance of visitors because of a dominant emphasis on a bus outreach ministry. The focus on outreach causes a church to lose the perspective of teaching, winning or caring.

Some churches have strong teaching Sunday Schools with a deep commitment to Bible mastery, but they have no outreach. Other Sunday Schools are committed to soul-winning; their success is measured by how many people they have won to Christ or prepared for church membership, but they do not have a passion to oversee students to help them grow in Christ. Finally, some Sunday Schools do a great job of caring for their students but ignore the other three objectives.

As important as each function is, do not forget to build a balanced Sunday School. The healthy Sunday School will perform all four ministries equally. To make your Sunday School healthy, cover the four basics for your students: reach, teach, win and spiritually care.

Elmer Towns is part of the All Star Sunday School Training Team. For details of meetings with Elmer Towns see http://allstarsundayschool.com/

According to the January/February 2007 edition of Children’s Ministry Magazine

·         50% of classroom time is lost due to misbehavior and kids being off task.

·         80% of lost time is a result of kids talking without permission.

·         Discipline is the #1 problem facing teachers today.

Would you agree with the above findings? Whether you do or not, I’m sure you have had moments where you were exasperated with the behavior of the children in your classroom. What is a teacher to do? How do we “handle” the children who do not behave in an appropriate manner in our classrooms?

F.Y. I. – when kids are bored, they misbehave. If you have lots of kids acting badly, it is in everyone’s best interest for you to take a look at your teaching. You might be the problem.  I know that may hurt your feelings, but truth is truth. We must face it, even if it is painful.

The Bible tells us in Hebrews 12:11”No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.”

I believe it’s safe to say that no one thinks discipline is pleasant. As a matter of fact, it can be downright painful – for both the giver and the give-ee . . . if you know what I mean, but it is a necessary part of life, and for many, life includes Sunday school. The Bible tells us that even God disciplines those he loves.

I underlined “trained by it” in Hebrews 12:11 because, I am convinced that is where we need to begin when it comes to having a classroom full of well-behaved children. If we expect children to act a certain way in our classrooms, we need to train them.

It is my opinion that many teachers never take the time to teach their students how to behave in class. Teachers simply assume that kids have already been taught how to behave, so they just dive right in to teaching the music, crafts, and Bible lessons without teaching the kids how to follow the rules in their classroom first.

Kids need to understand that there are certain rules in your classroom that they are expected to follow. You, the teacher, must come up with these rules ahead of time. Once you have established your classroom rules, you need to write them on a piece of poster board and tack the poster to the classroom wall for all to see. Kids need to be reminded, each and every week, that in your classroom, there are certain expectations for behavior.

Along with the rules, you need to list the consequences for certain behavior. Remember, consequences are not only negative, but positive as well. I am not going to tell you what your rules should be. Each teacher needs to come to that decision on his or her own. Rules will vary tremendously depending on your personality and the age and developmental level of the kids you are teaching.

I will give you one helpful piece of advice for when you sit down to generate your rules. They should all have to do with respect. Keep in mind respect of God, respect of peers, respect of teacher, and respect of property when considered what your rules will be.

Below is a sample list of classroom rules and consequences. PLEASE understand that you need to come up with your own list. Your list must fit your kids, your personality, and your particular situation.

Sometimes people with “iffy” faith will think, I have to try harder to believe that I’m going to get the answer that I want to my prayer. It doesn’t work. Trying hard to believe is toxic. It is a dangerous practice. I can say, “I’ll try to learn. I’ll try to study. I’ll try to grow. I’ll try to know God better. I’ll try to pray.” But I cannot directly generate belief through willpower.

Alice learned a lesson about the nature of beliefs on her trip to Wonderland.11 (Lewis Carroll was both an Oxford mathematician and an Anglican clergyman, so he was very interested in the nature of belief.) In the middle of a dizzying conversation, the Red Queen says to Alice, “Now I’ll give you something to believe. I am 101 years, five months, and one day old.”

This is too much for poor Alice. Although one would guess it is hard to gauge the age of an animated chess character, it is clear that the queen can’t be beyond middle age.

“I can’t believe that,” said Alice.

“Can’t you?” asked the queen, in a pitying tone. “Try again. Take a deep breath and shut your eyes.”

Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said. “One can’t believe impossible things.”

“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” — Ortberg, John (2008-08-22). Faith and Doubt (Kindle Locations 2205-2221). Zondervan. Kindle Edition.

Do not apologize for wanting to grow

You will find that not everyone wants the church or your group to grow. Many of them are well meaning and do not understand that growth is not about larger numbers or about getting bigger. Growth is about people coming into a relationship with Christ and the church taking responsibility to assist them in their spiritual growth. Numbers increase as more people come into a relationship with Christ. Some members and maybe even some friends may try to make you feel some sense of guilt about wanting to grow. Always remember that Satan does not want the church or your group to grow either. Seek to obey God rather than to please man.

You have a responsibility for leading your class to be obedient to the Great Commission. Every group that does so will be blessed to see family, friends, and community members come into a relationship with Christ. Your group may not experience it every week or every month but God will bless you to be a part of the process of people trusting Christ if you are obedient. Any guilt that a leader may feel for wanting their group or church to grow is not coming from God. He is daily bringing people into a relationship with Himself according to Acts 2:47. He will let any leader or group who desires to be a part of His plan of reconciling sinners to Himself. Pray that the Lord will let you grow!

Apart from Christ you can do nothing

You will discover moving forward some of the practical strategies and principles for leading your class to grow. They are time tested and proven by churches and groups that experience growth in their Sunday school ministries. However, application of the tools will not bear fruit without the work and the power of Christ in your life and the life of the group. The anointing of God on your ministry is not a principle but is essential and foundational. How are you doing in your personal relationship with Christ? Are you growing personally? Are you spending time daily with the Father? Are you filled with the Holy Spirit?

Volumes have been written and opinions are plentiful as to the reasons for the lack of growth and even the decline of churches and Sunday schools in recent years. However, you may have noticed that not every church or every group has stopped growing. Perhaps you are passionate and growing personally and yet not experiencing growth in your group. If that is the case then some of the more practical tools may help you in moving forward. Be absolutely sure that you are seeking the power of God in your life and in your leadership first and foremost. God cannot use you if you are an empty vessel. Fill your life and heart with Christ by emptying yourself through repentance and filling yourself by spending as much energy as possible in prayer, worship, and the study of God’s word.

It takes a team

A team of leaders can obviously accomplish more than an individual. Multiple leaders enable you to multiply the number of hours invested in ministry, the number of contacts with the unchurched, the amount of ministry that can be done for the members, and maximizes the quality of ministry by utilizing the giftedness and passions of others. A team of six leaders can accomplish much more than an individual. You should give immediate attention to enlisting those that are attending to take on a specific role of leadership and ministry in partnership with you to strengthen and grow the group. A larger group will obviously need a larger number of leaders.

Do as Jesus exemplified in His enlistment of the apostles. Pray about who in your group is best equipped to help provide leadership and directly ask for their help. Remind those enlisted that you will work with them and that the ministry is a team effort. The time you invest is multiplied by many hours of service for each person that you bring on board. Consider who might help in the following areas: Who can assist you with organizational and administrative tasks? Who can assist you with keeping the group focused on outreach and evangelism? Who can assist you with planning fellowships that reach out to the unchurched and bring the group closer together? Who can assist with maintaining regular contact with all of the members?

You will note that there are not titles and no flow chart. You choose titles for these roles based on your context and begin enlisting one by one in the recommended order as you see them presented. You can follow by having each of those leaders in turn enlist teams to assist them. The roles you see are not the only possibilities. Simply ask what it is that your class needs to be more effective and enlist members to focus on and lead those areas.

Numbers that matter

You may recall from the introduction that every paragraph could be a chapter and every chapter could be a book. The numbers that you are about to consider all affect the ability of your group to grow. You can find more details about implementation of the following principles throughout this book as well as in Sunday School That Really Works.

1. You need to intentionally increase the enrollment. The average attendance will never exceed the enrollment and will ordinarily be between 40-60%. You will discover that the larger the enrollment pool the larger the attendance potential.
2. You need to intentionally increase the number of contacts made each week to members and prospects. The number of contacts affects the week to week attendance as much as anything else. Compare a group that extended twenty invitations and called every member absent last week to a group that invited one person and did not call those who missed. Which group is most likely to have strong attendance next week?
3. You need to increase the number of leaders serving in the class. More leaders enable you to accomplish more in your leadership.
4. You need to increase the number of prospects that your group has identified. Prospects are non-attending members, recent guests, and unchurched friends who are of the same life stage of your group that are not enrolled or attending any other Bible study. The more people your group is praying for and inviting to fellowships and Bible study, the more the attendance can grow.
5. You need to be involved in increasing the number of classes or groups in your church. Twenty groups can reach and minister to more people than three groups. Sunday schools do not grow without increasing the number of classes. That means that you will have to cooperate and participate in helping your church create and launch new classes and groups in the future.

No; it was none of these. Rather, as Dinur explained to Wallace, all at once he realized Eichmann was not the godlike army officer who had sent so many to their deaths. This Eichmann was an ordinary man. “I was afraid about myself,” said Dinur. “I saw that I am capable to do this. I am… exactly like he.” Wallace’s subsequent summation of Dinur’s terrible discovery—”Eichmann is in all of us”—is a horrifying statement; but it indeed captures the central truth about man’s nature. For as a result of the fall, sin is in each of us—not just the susceptibility to sin, but sin itself.

It was not the horror of the man Eichmann that smote Dinur, but the horrible revelation of self and the predicament of mankind that made him faint. Eichmann is in all of us, because all of us are in Adam. This is proven by our susceptibility to temptation. We are tempted by theft because we are thieves, even though we may not in fact steal. We are tempted to kill because we are murderers, even if we do not literally slay our brother. We are tempted to adultery because we are adulterers, even though we may not commit adultery. James says, “When tempted, no one should say, ‘God is tempting me.’ For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone; but each one is tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed” (James 1:13, 14). The fact that we are tempted proves that we are prone to evil—and it is terrible. Eichmann is in all of us.

Objecting to this shows that we have not yet fully grasped the Scriptures’ teaching about our sin, nor have we come to grips with the realities about our own personalities.

What is our hope? As believers, it is the fact that we are in the second Adam, the last Adam, the Lord Jesus Christ who conquered temptation. Admittedly this is a wonderous mystery (cf. 1 Cor. 12:13), as is the mystery of his being sinless and yet fully tempted (Hebrews 4:15). Because of our solidarity with him, we can have victory over the sin within us. In recognition of this, we are going to examine the great temptation of Christ in the wilderness—seeing the nature of his temptations and what he did to overcome them, and then seeing how this can be of help in our own struggles with temptation.

Preaching the Word – Preaching the Word – Mark, Volume I: Jesus, Servant and Savior.

Good Questions Have Groups Talking correspond with these outlines:

• Family Bible Series
• Explore the Bible
• Masterwork
• International Standard Series

The can be used supplementally, or stand-alone. Each lesson consists of 20 ready-to-use questions. Answers are provided in the form of excerpts from best selling authors such as Max Lucado, John Maxwell, and Beth Moore. I include some great attention-getting stories that drive the lesson home in every lesson.

Check them out this weekend for free!  Just go to www.joshhunt.com Click on lessons. Click on whatever lessons you want. Keep clicking till you are blocked by a box asking for a username and password. Enter this information:

user: winter

pass: coming

Enjoy! And may God richly bless your teaching ministry.

Josh Hunt
Author, Good Questions Have Groups Talking

P.S.

If you are a subscriber, would you mind passing this email along to a friend that might be interested?

A somewhat less threatening road to self-improvement is followed by those ministers who, on three or four occasions a year, ask for five or six volunteers to constitute a sermon evaluation committee. A typical format brings these lay volunteers together first for two evenings during which they formulate and discuss the appropriate criteria for the evaluation of a sermon. Pastors have varying degrees of involvement in that process. After two such sessions these folks come to the Sunday morning worship experience and, obviously, listen carefully to the sermon. A couple of evenings later they meet with the preacher to share their reflections and insights. In at least a few cases the group worships with another congregation first before the formal evaluation of their own minister’s sermon.

44 Ways to Increase Church Attendance by Lyle E Schaller

Fear, it seems, has taken a hundred-year lease on the building next door and set up shop. Oversize and rude, fear is unwilling to share the heart with happiness. Happiness complies and leaves. Do you ever see the two together? Can one be happy and afraid at the same time? Clear thinking and afraid? Confident and afraid? Merciful and afraid? No. Fear is the big bully in the high school hallway: brash, loud, and unproductive. For all the noise fear makes and room it takes, fear does little good. Fear never wrote a symphony or poem, negotiated a peace treaty, or cured a disease. Fear never pulled a family out of poverty or a country out of bigotry.

Fear never saved a marriage or a business. Courage did that. Faith did that. People who refused to consult or cower to their timidities did that. But fear itself? Fear herds us into a prison and slams the doors. Wouldn’t it be great to walk out? — Lucado, Max (2009-08-25). Fearless: Imagine Your Life Without Fear (p. 5). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.