Essentials for High School Bible Curriculum
One of the biggest disappointments I ever faced as a high school Bible teacher in a Christian school was the consistent pressure, from parents and administrators who bowed to parental pressure, to “dumb down” the Bible curriculum in both middle school and high school.
“It’s an extra class they have to take while their peers in public school get four electives, one each year,” was a standard whine.
“Bible class shouldn’t be academically oriented, it should be relational and fun,” was one that I had difficulty processing.
“The kids get tired of having all of this stuff shoved down their throats,” was also a common complaint.
Then, tell me again why you have your kids in a Christian school?
These sorts of complaints, and administrator pressure to avoid anything whatsoever that might be controversial (impossible job, but you know what I mean) and to take it easy on the kids are weighed against evidence provided by research which shows that teenagers who are active in their church youth group during high school are leaving the church during their college years at a rate of more than 8 out of 10. Some surveys show an even higher departure rate, and a “churched” percentage among the under 30 population of right around 6%.
I’d be willing to lay odds and take bets (figuratively speaking, of course) that a big part of the reason for this is that teenagers are not prepared for the academic challenges to their faith that they face in college. Those who don’t have a Christian school education have little or no ability to weather an intellectually based challenge to Christian beliefs and principles. An hour, maybe an hour and a half of Bible study each week, built around banana splits and pizza nights doesn’t equip very many youth for Freshman Philosophy Seminar 101. Cut and paste, mamby pamby Bible courses in Christian schools are like a straw fence against a fire.
If parents are going to fork out $10,000 a year for four years of Christian high school, they should at least expect that their children will emerge from that school reasonably equipped to deal with the philosophical and moral challenges they will face in the immediate four years upon graduation. The odds should at least be better than 2 out of 10.
While it is not an absolute guarantee, Bible courses that focus a student on the reasoning behind the faith decisions they’ve made, ability to do exegesis of the scriptures, a solid foundation in apologetics, and comparative studies of Christianity’s claims versus those of other major world religions, and particularly the philosophies and methodologies of higher education that come from secular humanism, should be foundational. Students should be reading books by authors like Josh McDowell, Bill Hybels, Lee Strobel, John MacArthur and other apologists, and they should also be reading books by secular humanists and the Jesus Seminar, and then making comparisons between what those people say, and what the scriptures teach. They should understand church history, the modern missions movement, and they should be able to tell you about the evidence which supports the accuracy of the text of the New Testament. They should be able to convey an understanding of the divinity and humanity of Christ, and explain the difference between a humanist worldview and a Christian one. Everything they learn in Bible class should be one more step on a journey to an irrevocable decision to not only be a faithful believer in Christ, but to be well informed enough not to blandly accept arguments simply because they come from a professor in a college classroom.
One of the first emails I ever received from a former student who graduated and went to a well-known public university was a thank you for making Bible class “hard” enough to make her study to get a good grade. This particular student encountered a professor in freshman philosophy who, on the first day, promised to refute anything remotely related to what he called “mythological religion,” which was essentially Christianity. She responded back, day after day, with points that she had learned in my apologetics class, forcing him to look things up and discover that some of his theses had holes. She did the same when she got into medical school, and was challenged by the professors there as well. She emerged from both college and medical school with her faith intact, and with the respect of both her professors and her Christian classmates who hadn’t been as well equipped to speak up.
Don’t “dumb down” your Bible class. It should be your school’s biggest academic, intellectual challenge.
For a good resource on this subject see Love Your God With All Your Mind, by J.P. Moreland.
A well-stated post!
You may also be interested in Moreland’s just released KINGDOM TRIANGLE (Zondervan). See the website http://www.kingdomtriangle.com for more info.
The Christian school where I used to send my kids, a $10,000 a year school as you have described, had a bad habit of ignoring well-qualified Bible teachers in favor of people who had coaching experience, but no formal Bible training. The end result of that was that their high school Bible class was a joke. My son told me flat out one day that he didn’t have to worry about his homework, he’d be able to do it in Bible class the next morning because the girls’ basketball team had a game and the coach (the teacher) gave them free periods on game days. One of the other Bible teachers there was dismissed in the middle of a semester for planning a divorce from his wife because he was involved with a former student. He was also a coach with no formal Bible training. When they hired two more coaches as replacements, I pulled my kids out of that school. Teaching the Bible requires, in my opinion, the spiritual gift of teaching which has been deepened and expanded by formal Bible training. One of the teachers in that school had both college and seminary degrees, and about 15 years of experience as a youth pastor, but they ran him off because a few shrill, influential parents were upset that the Bible class required homework, research and an investment of time.
Good post. I like Moreland’s book, and I’ll look for Kingdom Triangle.
I’m a big fan of J.P. Moreland. I’ve got 4 boys (two brothers, a brother-in-law and a son, ages 17, 16, 16 and 12) in a Christian school. Our school also liked to use the Bible teaching positions to hire coaches. We had three in the high school, none of which had even taken a college level Bible class because they went to state universities. The classes were terrible, one of them spent the period talking about sports and belittled the kids who weren’t up on everything in that subject. There was never any homework, no scripture memorization, and some of the comments my boys said were made in class were apalling, from an evangelical theological perspective. But the message the administration was sending was that winning in sports was more important than a quality Bible department. It took dozens of parents over a year to get the board to listen. Is this a common problem in Christian schools these days? It would seem so.
I hear you guys. I’m thinking about doing an article on common problems in Christian schools like this. With tuition in most schools pretty high, you wind up attracting a lot of families who are more in the market for private education, and less mindful of the Christian emphasis. It’s a slight annoyance to some that they have to put up with “religion” to get the academics. So they put influence on administrators to tone down the “religion” and emphasize the quality of the academics. In the long run, this neutralized the effect of a lot of Christian schools. We’ve got to find a way to get back to the place where we are affordable for the majority of our church families.
I’ve heard some interesting things coming out of some of the schools, especially in light of the fact that 1) we are supposed to reflect Chrisian principles and attitudes and 2) parents are paying for what they get. In the school where I taught, we were using a large church facility and the school was somewhat scattered around the campus for a while. One of the coaches who taught senior Government and economics would give his class an assignment and then step into the gym and shoot baskets with a coach who was off during that period. This same coach was too caught up in his sports experience to have time to keep a gradebook and gave it to one of his students to keep for him. When the grades went on computer, he gave her his access codes so she could do them from home. He was one of the head of school’s “golden boys” and while others got reprimanded for that kind of behavior, he got away with it. Several parents in that same school once told me that another one of the head honcho’s golden boys used bad language in both the classroom and on the sports field, and when they spoke to her about it, she told the coach and he made their kids do extra running. And there you have an example of what happens when a head of school has a secular education and state certification.
Thanks for posting this. I thought I was the only person who had experienced this while teaching Bible in a Christian school.
I am a Bible teacher at a Christian school in Mississippi. The struggle I have is finding good curriculum to use in order to teach exegesis, comparative religion, church history/missions and apologetics. I have tried to develop a study based on Rick Warren’s Bible Study Methods, but I’ll have to back up and start again – I think its a little too adult oriented for middle school students. I also used Lee Strobel’s Student Edition Case for Christ and Case for Faith books to launch some basic apologetics for my Senior Bible class. I would rather use a classroom guided curriculum so I can manage the lesson plans a little better than I did this year (first year to try this).
Most of the complaints I’ve had this year are that “Bible isn’t fun, you’re scaring kids away from the Bible.” While I don’t think that’s true, I feel that if I took the spotlight off of the fact that I’m developing the lessons, part of the pressure I’m having placed on me by parents (some to remove me, but only a few) would be reduced considerably… so the question remains… what curricula provides a good basis of education on exegesis, history/missions, comparative religion and apologetics for high school Bible classes in a Christian school?
Phillip,
I had the same problem at a Christian high school in Texas. The superintendent came from an elementary background with “cut and paste” Bible classes, and attended a megachurch where the youth department was “fun” but which ran about as deep as a dry river in the desert. She didn’t have a clue about what a high school curriculum should look like, and based her guidance on the complaints of a few parents rather than consulting with either myself or a Christian school organization like ACSI or SBACS to find out what they thought.
You will have trouble finding a publisher that produces curriculum materials to do what you want done, and that contain the depth that is necessary not only to sustain a five day a week class, but also to provide students with what they need to know to deal with challenges they will find in college. For apologetics, I wrote my own curriculum guide, including developing a workbook, tests, lesson plans, and daily classroom activities based on Josh McDowell’s “A Ready Defense.” I often thought of marketing it. I believe they are still using my materials, as are a couple of schools where I presented it at a conference, and copied my material. I don’t have access to that, or I would send it to you.
Lifeway produces the best curriculum line I’ve seen or used, but you will have to do some modification to get it to the level where it can be effective. It may help relieve some of the pressure you are experiencing.
Sadly, most Christian school Bible teachers are under the same pressure you are. The ones I have observed over the years who are the best teachers, and who want students to take the subject seriously, and use it to help them not only in their daily life now, but in the future, when they will really need the substance for their faith to survive college, are the ones most under attack. I’ve met few Christian school administrators who are willing to stand up for what needs to take place in their Bible departments. They’d rather cave to parents who don’t have a clue. This, while 80% of our high school students drop out of church altogether by the time they finish college. Go figure.
Why can’t a group of dedicated Bible teachers get together (online and in person) for a series of meetings and planning sessions and develop a set of Open Source texts and teaching manuals for middle school and high school Bible curricula that meets the needs of most Christian schools, yet, offers the ability for the local teacher to adapt its plans to their particular needs? Then, once the curricula is developed, we could find artists to help develop a visually appealing, PDF version of a student’s textbook/workbook for each grade. In addition, we could write the license for the textbook/workbook so that each school would have to distribute that text/workbook for free, thereby decreasing the cost of textbooks for each parent.
Phillip,
You are right! I have written apologetics, spiritual disciplines and hermeneutics curriculum for middle school students(www.biblelessons4youth.com), mostly because I could not find something that linked the head and heart that was not too scholarly or too Sunday schoolish. I am still working on how to combine making kids think hard, and have a tender heart to become a disciple of Christ. This is a real weakness for Christian schools and I don’t know of anyone who does it well. Do you? Does anyone?
I am faced with the same situation. I was hired on at a Christian school and was told that Bible curriclum was to expensive. Though I have a Master’s in Bible Exposition I feel very inadaquete to come up with my own curriculum. I have not found a solid Bible program that is built firmly on the word and that is in depth. It is all dumbed down….
If anyone can recommend a program please do.
I recommend the Quest series, produced by Lifeway Publishers, Nashville, Tennessee. Their Christian school curriculum division focuses on Bible curriculum alone, and the Quest series is well organized and well presented. It does have its “dumbing down” spots, but a good Bible teacher, someone with a Masters in Bible Exposition, should be able to supplement it and bring in the expository depth that is needed.
When I taught high school Bible, I wrote a year long curriculum based on Josh McDowell’s A Ready Defense. It took quite a pitch to get administration to accept it, because it required in depth Bible study, a lot of out of class reading, dealt with subjects that integrated history and language study, and required real work to earn a decent grade. That’s exactly what we need, and it is the last thing most administrators want from Bible class. We used it for years with a high measure of success. I got more comments from parents on how much that class helped their kids when they went on to college, and for years, dozens of emails and notes from former students every year on how it helped them. The school used my notes in offering the course for several years after I left, and I shared it with several other schools, a couple of whom are still using it. I no longer have copies of it, but I have thought of revising it and keeping it around just in case.
Also, Summit Ministries produces a one year course called Understanding the Times, which is Biblically sound and can be used particularly for their senior year.
Thank you all for this blog. I have just been given the privilege to construct a scope and sequence for a four year Bible curriculum in our Christian school for 9-12th. I am of the same mind with the “Essentials…” essay posted. This has provided me with some book titles that I may use. Also, the following may help us all: Answers in Genesis (AIG) has some excellent material that I plan to delve into and hopefully incorporate which includes archeology history and a course on apologetics. Check out their educational materials on line. You can also view pages to preview. I have found their materials to be very solid.I will check out Lifeway’s Quest series-thanks. If anyone can recommend a good course on Bible Study Methods, I would like to begin our 4 yr. plan with that. In our planning stage, we discussed what were the important “Must gets” for a graduate going on to secular colleges. We came up with 8 semester courses, they are the following: Bible study methods and incorporating the history of the Bible, Genesis with large concentration on Creation vs Evolution (using AIG), Bible doctrines, Archeology and Biblical History (AIG), The Gospels, Biblical Living-study of Proverbs and Patriarchs, Apologetics, and World Religions.
FYI- Aside from the Quest series, the ACSI has some material on its website under the “textbooks” link (in the “store” tab) including a hermeneutics intro, old and new testament surveys, apologetics, life of christ, theology, ethics, and relationships… I still am of the opinion that we all need to be shooting way higher in this area, though. Why must the subject of Christianity come out as flimsy manuals and workbooks? I intend to write something of glencoe or prentice hall quality for a four year high school program and publish it in the next ten years. I am pursuing my doctorate just for this purpose. I hope that God moves mightily in stepping up our Bible programs across the globe.
HI
I just stumbed on to your blog while searching for resourses to teach biblical ethics to my highschool youth group, and i may even get a chance to present in school as well. I’m still working on that part. Anyway, I am looking for a good ciriculum for this, you say you wrote such a curiculum, is it accessible. or do you kjnow of one that is.
Thanks for any help you can offer.
Pastor Fred
Fred,
The curriculum I wrote was a companion to Josh McDowell’s “A Ready Defense.” I wrote course objectives, workbook activities, study guides and tests based on thirty two weeks of class. When I left that school, I left the notebook with the stuff in it. If I had been thinking about it, I’d have copyrighted it and sought to have it published. I think they are still using it. I’ll find out and see if I can get a copy of it.
I would strongly recomment the Quest series from Lifeway Christian Publishers of Nashville, Tennessee. That’s the best secondary Bible curriculum on the market today by far.
I stumbled across this website today in my search for Bible study curriculum for Christian high schools. I, too, have been appalled by the lack of quality, in-depth Bible curricula. I am also deeply saddened that other Christian school Bible programs are suffering in the same manner that my own children’s school is. I have been extremely pleased with the quality of other academic courses at our school, but very disappointed that the same standard of excellence is not infused into the Bible program.
Part of the problem, I think, is that the school does not have a secondary Bible text as the framework for the Bible classes. They want the students to have the Bible itself as the primary text. While the idea is indeed noble, in practice, however, the Bible teachers–all of whom are teaching classes in other subjects as well–simply do not have the time to adequately develop “from scratch” lessons. Most of them teach “core” classes in their academic specialty (e.g., English) and the Bible class is tacked on to their other classes.
I have some inklings, however, that the administration is seeing the problem and desires to change the program. One of those changes is to include teaching the students how to study the Scriptures, which all of us here would agree is vital.
Jacob, I applaud the desire you have to create an in-depth Christian school Bible curriculum, and I pray that your doctoral studies will bear fruit that will strength the spiritual lives of our young people.
Cindy, I’ve discovered that when Bible is a “tack on” class to a regular teacher’s schedule, rather than taught by someone who does it full time, it usually does not get the attention or preparation time it deserves. I’m appalled at how many schools do this.
I have no objection to a school considering the Bible a textbook but simply having a textbook does not mean you have a curriculum. Having curriculum doesn’t mean the Bible isn’t the textbook. If you want to have an effective Bible teaching program in your Christian school, it has to be a priority, and you have to put someone in charge of it who knows what they are doing.