At the beginning of 2012, the Adult Bible Classes at Florence Blvd. Church of Christ underwent some significant reworkings. First of all, more class offerings were added. Instead of two main classes (Auditorium and Lighthouse), there are now four. The Auditorium class has been renamed the Primetimers Class, and there is no also a College & Twenties Class. Between these two age groups–that is, for people roughly ages 30-60–there are two classes, called (quite uncreatively) Adult Class 1 and Adult Class 2.
The reason for altering the structure of our Bible classes in this way was to encourage smaller classes with more participation. So far, the plan is working well.
The restructuring of the Bible classes brought with it, however, some need to restructure our curriculum, which entailed making some changes. The original core curriculum was described in an earlier post. The changes I have made to the curriculum have been designed to allow for more in-depth study of some courses and to allow for more elective options.
First, I eliminated eight topics from the core curriculum: Baptism, Stewardship, Biblical Backgrounds, Church History, Formation and Transmission of the Bible, Theodicy, Eschatology, The Family. I retained the other eight topical studies: God, The Messiah, Salvation, Sanctification, Ethics, The Nature of the Church, The Purpose and Work of the Church, Worship.
I also added one class each to the OT and NT core: Survey of the OT, Survey of the NT.
There are now five double-quarter classes (whereas previously there were none): Samuel-Kings-Chronicles, Isaiah, Romans-Galatians, Revelation, and God. Also, Acts is more-or-less a double-quarter class, although I already previously had it split up as Acts 1-12 and Acts 13-28.
With four classes each working with an 8-year curriculum, each course comes up every two years somewhere in one of the classes. Taking the Primetimers class as a base, the College & Twenties start at Year 5 of the Primetimers, Class 1 starts at Year 7 of the Primetimers, and Class 2 starts at Year 3 of the Primetimers. So Class 1 and Class 2 will also be 4 years apart, and the Primeimters and College & Twenties will be 4 years apart.
One of my goals was to make sure that all classes would have an elective quarter simultaneously every year, so that if the elders wanted the church as a whole to study a special topic in the various classes, we would have a quarter set aside for that possibility. So, in the Fall (even years on Sunday morning, odd years on Wednesday night) the entire church will be on elective. If the elders want every class to study “Male Spiritual Leadership”, for instance, each individual class will teach that topic. Or if we want our Bible classes to correspond to Chris’ sermons for a quarter, we can do that. Of course, if the elders don’t want to use the quarter for that purpose, each teach will use the elective as normal.
Here in PDF are the new schedules for each class:
Primetimers Schedule: Jake Van Dyke and Greg Robbins (Sunday), Ed Gallagher (Wednesday)
College & Twenties Schedule: Greg Allen and Jay Lovell (Sunday), Sam Hurst and Jonathan Hinton (Wednesday)
Class 1 Schedule: John Mark Clark and Mike Davidson (Sunday), Don Williams and Ken McKinnon (Wednesday)
Class 2 Schedule: Mark Willingham (Sunday), Ken Vanhorn and Todd Chastain (Wednesday)
