Prepare from the passage first and from the quarterly second. Read the text out loud several times across the week, write down every line you do not understand yourself, look up only those lines, and turn what you find into questions that have more than one honest answer. Then put clock times on the plan. Adults in a Sunday school class have usually heard the passage before. What they have not done is talk about it, and getting them talking is the whole job.
The method, in order
This is the sequence, with rough times on each step. Spread across a week it comes to roughly two to two and a half hours. There is a compressed version below for a Saturday night.
- Find out whether the passage is already chosen for you (5 minutes). Many churches buy a quarterly that sets the text for every week. If yours does, the hardest decision is already made and you can go straight to reading.
- Read the passage out loud, start to finish, before you read anything about it (10 minutes). Out loud, because you will read it out loud on Sunday and you want to find the hard sentences now.
- Read it again every day until you teach (5 minutes a day). Mark A. Taylor, writing in a preparation guide for Standard Publishing, puts it plainly: “Read it every day of the week before you teach your lesson.” (Lesson Preparation)
- Write down every line you do not understand (15 minutes). Words, names, places, numbers, anything that reads oddly. The same guide gives this step as “Jot down questions about unfamiliar words, places, people, and phrases.” This is the step teachers skip, and it is the raw material for everything that follows.
- Now open the commentary or the quarterly, and answer only your own list (30 to 45 minutes). The order matters because some of the people in your class own the same quarterly. If all you bring is its summary, you have brought them nothing they did not have on Wednesday.
- Write one sentence that says what the passage is about (10 minutes). If you cannot get it into one sentence, you are not ready to teach it yet.
- Turn your leftovers into questions (20 minutes). The lines you could not settle, and the answers that surprised you, become the discussion. How to write them is further down.
- Put clock times on the plan (5 minutes). Real times, not a rough order of events.
Steps two to five are the old inductive Bible study sequence: look at the text, work out what it means, then work out what it asks of you. Asbury Theological Seminary’s guide to the method credits its modern form to William Rainey Harper and Wilbert Webster White at the end of the nineteenth century.
If you are preparing tonight
Ninety minutes, in this order:
- 10 minutes: read the passage out loud, twice.
- 15 minutes: write down everything in it you do not understand.
- 30 minutes: look up only those things.
- 5 minutes: write your one sentence.
- 20 minutes: write four questions.
- 10 minutes: put the clock times on the plan.
Elmer L. Towns spread the same work across the week in Successful Lesson Preparation: “Sunday Afternoon – Evaluate the day’s lesson. Read over the next lesson. Monday-Wednesday – Study the Bible, using the quarterly and other helps. Thursday-Friday – Plan the actual lesson with aim, method and materials. Saturday – Gather materials. Review lesson.”
He also named the reason most teachers do not manage it: “Most teachers cannot find one large block of time where they can spend three or four hours studying their Sunday school lesson.” (Liberty University Digital Commons) If tonight is all you have, take the ninety minutes and do them in that order rather than reading around the passage until bedtime.
Why an adult class goes quiet
An adult class does not fail the way a children’s class fails. A children’s class falls apart when the room gets restless. An adult class falls apart when nobody says anything. Much of the general advice on preparing a Sunday school lesson was written for children’s teachers, so it is advice about holding attention: props, visuals, activities, keeping it fun. None of that fixes silence.
Put three published lesson plans side by side and the difference is visible on the page.
| Published plan | Written for | The parts of one lesson, in the order printed |
|---|---|---|
| Adult Bible Studies, Cokesbury (The United Methodist Publishing House) | Adults | Purpose; Hearing the Word; Seeing the Need; Living the Faith; Important to Realize! |
| Sunday School Lessons for Adults, Volume 22, for Nazarene churches in Africa | Adults | Objective and memory verse; Introduction; numbered teaching sections; Optional Questions; Conclusion |
| The Basics of a Sunday School Lesson, Ministry to Children | Children | Welcome the children as they arrive; pray; sing songs; get them ready for the story; teach the story; apply the story; Bible verse; review the story |
Neither adult plan has a welcome activity, songs, or a story-and-review shape. Both end on application. The children’s plan spends its opening stretch settling the room, then tells a story and reviews it. Both plans are right for the class they were written for. If the class you have been handed is children, the children’s shape is the one you want, and Ministry to Children has free lessons for ages three to twelve. The rest of this page is about the adult class.
Adults bring something to the room that children do not: years of reading, sermons and settled opinions about the passage. The University of Utah’s summary of Malcolm Knowles on adult learners lists it among the working assumptions. Adults “acquire knowledge through life experiences,” see themselves as self-directed learners, and “are more problem-focused with a desire for immediate application of learning.” (Adult Learning Theory) That is a fair description of your class. They will engage with a problem. They will sit through a recap of what they already know without saying a word.
Writing questions that get answered
Most questions die in an adult class for one reason. They have a single right answer, and it was in the verse you read out thirty seconds ago. One person says it, and nobody else has anything to add. Cornell University’s Center for Teaching Innovation draws the line this way: “Closed-ended questions, such as those requiring a yes/no response, or multiple choice can quickly check comprehension. Open-ended questions probe and elicit expanded thinking and processing of information.” (Using Effective Questions to Engage Students)
Both kinds have a use. One or two closed questions check that everyone followed the reading. The discussion is built on the open ones.
A published example of each sits in the same book. The optional questions at the end of the first lesson in Sunday School Lessons for Adults, Volume 22 include “What’s revelation?” That has an answer, and it ends there. The same short list also asks “Since you received the gospel, what have you been freed from?” Five people can answer that five different ways, and all five answers are worth hearing.
Three checks before a question goes on your plan:
- Can you picture three people in your class giving three different honest answers? If not, rewrite it.
- Is the answer sitting in the verse you just read aloud? Then it is a comprehension check. Keep it if you need it, but do not expect a conversation from it.
- Do you already know the answer you are hoping for? Adults hear that in about two seconds, and they stop talking.
To bring a dead question back, add “why” or “how do you know” to it, or move it into the room. When have you seen this happen. What would have to change for this to be true of us. What does this ask of somebody who is in that position right now.
Then wait five seconds
This is the smallest change available to you and it has the largest effect. Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College puts normal practice at “approximately one second of wait-time between asking a question and allowing a student to respond.” Its instruction is to allow “3-5 seconds for the student to begin to respond,” and another “3-5 seconds after the student stops speaking before continuing with instruction or questioning.” (IRIS Fundamental Skill Sheet: Wait-Time)
The work behind that figure is Mary Budd Rowe’s, published in the Journal of Teacher Education in 1986 as “Wait Times: Slowing Down May Be a Way of Speeding Up.” (ERIC record EJ333700) Kent State University’s Center for Teaching and Learning lists what changes when the pause reaches three seconds or more: “An increase in length of student responses,” “An increase in the number of unsolicited but appropriate student responses,” and “A decrease in the number of students failing to respond.” (Wait Time: Making Space for Authentic Learning)
Five seconds of silence feels far longer to the person standing up than to anyone sitting down. Count it in your head. Do not fill it, do not rephrase the question, and do not answer it yourself.
A class plan with the times written on it
Write the times next to the parts. The common failure is not running out of material. It is reaching the application question with four minutes left, which turns the part that matters most into a rushed afterthought.
A sixty minute slot:
- 0 to 5: people arrive. Nothing starts.
- 5 to 8: say in one sentence what today is about.
- 8 to 15: opening question, the kind anybody can answer out of their own life without having read anything.
- 15 to 25: read the passage aloud, in sections, shared between more than one voice.
- 25 to 40: your two hardest questions.
- 40 to 52: the application question.
- 52 to 58: one round of the room. One thing noticed, or one thing to do this week.
- 58 to 60: pray, and finish on time.
Forty five minutes is just as common a slot. Standard Publishing’s preparation guide assumes it: “If you have only 45 minutes for your whole session, you may decide you don’t want to spend this much time.” The shorter plan:
- 0 to 3: people arrive.
- 3 to 5: one sentence on today.
- 5 to 10: opening question.
- 10 to 18: read the passage aloud.
- 18 to 30: one hard question, not two.
- 30 to 40: the application question.
- 40 to 43: one round of the room.
- 43 to 45: pray.
If you are short of time, drop a hard question. Do not drop the application. Whatever fits your church’s schedule is the right shape for your class, and these are only splits that other classes have used.
The oldest description of an adult Bible class in scripture puts the test in the same place.
So they read from the Book of the Law of God, explaining it and giving insight, so that the people could understand what was being read.
Nehemiah 8:8, Berean Standard Bible. Read it, explain it, give insight, and the measure at the end is whether the people understood, not whether you got through your notes.
When the quarterly picks the passage for you
If your church buys a quarterly, read its copyright page before you assume the text was picked at random. Adult Sunday school material from a range of publishers follows one shared outline that goes back to an 1872 convention, which resolved to “appoint a committee to consist of five clergymen and five laymen, to select a course of Bible Lessons for a series of years not exceeding seven.” That committee still exists as the Committee on the Uniform Series. (National Council of Churches)
You can see the connection printed in the books. Cokesbury’s Adult Bible Studies carries the line “Lessons and Daily Bible Study are based on the International Sunday School Lessons for Christian Teaching, copyright 2015 by the Committee on the Uniform Series.” The Church of God in Christ Publishing House describes its Adult Quarterly the same way: “The Quarterly Commentary/Teacher Manual provides the instructor with a comprehensive guide of the International Sunday School curriculum.”
Two useful things follow. Your passages are set months ahead, so you can read next month’s text now instead of meeting it on Saturday. And other publishers print on the same passage in the same week, so another publisher’s guide from the same series is a second set of questions on the text you are already teaching.
If you change only one thing this week, make the list in step four. Write down what you do not understand, look up only that, and bring those questions to the class. Questions are what an adult class runs on.