Developing Apologetics SS Curriculum on the fly

[dolfan]

I teach an adult SS class. We have just finished a curriculum that took over two years, closer to three, to complete; I've only taught the class for the last four months or so. The goal when I was asked to teach this class was to bring them into a discipleship curriculum, namely, Multiply.

We use Multiply on our Friday night meetings now, since January. And, about half of the SS class is in our Friday night meeting. Plus, Multiply seems to me to be extremely difficult as a SS type of study. And, honestly, those folks in the SS class who are not in our Friday night group are highly unlikely to catch the vision of Multiply's purpose.

So, as we wrapped up this past Sunday, I stopped to discuss with the class what kind of curriculum or study they would like to do. It seems they have a history in there of a bit of a democratic way to move forward with things. And, frankly, the class has grown from 6 to roughly 12-13 in the past two months or so. Most are more experienced Christians, some are not.

One sister brought up that someone at work had put a question to her about evolution and how he could not believe in God over science, etc. She was silenced by it because she could not respond. This bothered her. And, boy, that's a good bother, isn't it? So, I proposed that we move into an apologetics curriculum.

I was excited. They seemed to like the idea. And, then I dutifully marched into the Lifeway stores locally to select and buy my apologetics curriculum. Only, there was none. Not really. There was "sort of" one, but it ignored more than it attempted.

I think I may have shared here a few weeks ago how disappointed I was to learn that there is no real, specifically designed curriculum (that I could find!!) to take your child from "this is a Bible" to "maturing disciple". In fact, when I lamented that fact to the Lifeway employee (who also youth pastors), he said, "that means you need to write one." We agreed that someone does. But, on a return trip, my daughter with me, we selected a student-age (really 6th grade and up, she's 4th grade) study called Fast Track by Chad Hovind, an 8 week small group study that we'll do at home as an overview of the Bible. My point with this being that it seems that for all of the curricula available, so much of it is just junk or not really doing the job, IMO.

So, I found a similar problem with the apologetics curriculum. I settled instead on a trio of books that I'm going to use to develop an apologetics curriculum on the fly. And, having never done that, I would appreciate your prayers. One of the books is "How to Know God Exists" by Ray Comfort. It is basic enough to help frame the main points of attack and defense of the faith in a way that people understand, although I find him to be overly silly now and then. But, I really love to watch him on YouTube (hold that thought). This book is set up in a way that I may use it more as a syllabus of topics to address than as a substantive teaching resource. Another of the three books is "Meet the Skeptic: A Field Guide to Faith Conversations" by Bill Foster. I like this book because it tries to identify the questions behind the questions. It is not overly analytical and does not dive into theoretical and philosophical questions that are not commonly asked by your garden variety unbeliever. I expect to use it a lot. There is "How Do We Know the Bible is True? Volume 1" by Ken Ham and Bodie Hodge. I bought this book mainly because Ken Ham edited it. Because of that, is has a healthy dose of science that supports creation as opposed to evolution, although it does not by any means emphasize that at the cost of other questions and support for the reliability of the Bible.
I don't know what Volume 2 contains, and I will probably end up ordering it online.

Again, I ask for your prayer. This is very important and timely for our class, and they need to be equipped (as do I) in these matters.

Now, about that last part. (You can let go of that thought I asked you to hold a minute ago about Ray Comfort videos.) My spirit and interests, , my longing to see people reached with the gospel where I live, circumstances and my own wife's expressions to me are coming together in a way that I am preparing to do open air preaching. Note I said "preparing".

I am reading and watching and absorbing what I can. I am praying. I am studying the Scriptures with an eye toward this. I am contemplating the last 20 years of my life and how things have more or less arrived at this point. I have reached and --- I'll use the word 'conquered' in a humble way because God did it and not me, but He DID do it --- but, "conquered" an old unfinished pride issue between the Lord and myself where I surrendered something back to Him that I refused to yield in 1994. I have established a very early, cursory contact with a local, experienced open air preacher who is connected with a well-respected ministry of this kind and which is spoken of favorably by the folks at Living Waters (Comfort, again, who I consider the gold standard for this sort of thing); this guy has kindly responded to me that he wants to meet with me about starting a training/mentoring relationship for open air preaching. So, we'll see where that leads.

I don't know where I'll do this. Maybe down my street, maybe out in the woods! I do know that I have a burden for the rural folks who are being ignored by most of the outreaches and churches. But, how that shapes this other thing with the open air stuff, we'll see.

My wife is in agreement with me that this is a direction that the Lord appears to us to be leading us toward. It would not surprise me in the least to see my wife doing this at some point. She practically does it at work now and people are hearing and responding to the gospel there.
It dovetails with what we are doing in our Multiply meetings and with our respective teaching roles (meaning, that the stuff we find ourselves teaching in the one class I teach and in the SS class she teaches as well as the ladies' Wednesday night class she's set to start teaching next week fits well within the goals of gospel-sharing and disciple-making as does the open air preaching).

I'm asking for your prayers in all of this.

[Poimen]

Answers in Genesis has a wonderful new SS curriculum devoted to this very purpose. You might check it out. It's a 3 year study through the bible.

http://www.answersingenesis.org/store/sunday-school/

Prayers for you either way, brother.

[macgulley]

I haven't used their material but Ravi Zacharias is one of the greatest apologists I've ever heard (in my opinion) and he has some materials available. Every speaker I've heard from his organization really seemed to have his act together. http://www.rzim.org/study/

[dolfan]

Ok. Well, I put together an introduction about the "why" of apologetics and more or less did a lecture format yesterday. I tend to teach that way, but yesterday was more so since there was no pre-printed and pre-distributed lesson plan like everyone is used to in SS or small group studies.

I'm putting my chin out here and posting it for critique here (attachment).