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Best Practices for Preparing a Lesson
Really enjoyed this post about preparing a youth ministry lesson over at YouthMinistry360 today. Here’s a clip of it, head there for the complete post to maybe share with your volunteers:
Prayer Is Foundational—When we incorporate prayer as a part of our preparation, we align ourselves with God’s agenda. We open ourselves up to the leading of the Spirit and what He desires to accomplish in our students. Also, I find prayer helps me realize that for the lesson to be effective, it needs to be about the Lord and not about me.
Your Curriculum Is Just A Starting Point—The best curriculum is nothing but a stepping stone to a good lesson. Like buying a suit off the rack of a department store, for it to work, it must be tailored. You know your students better than the men and/or women who wrote the particular lesson you are using. To be effective, you’ll need to tailor each lesson to your group.
Good Study Helps Are Key—Good commentaries and Study Bibles are extremely important to your prep. If you’re a teacher, you owe it to your students to invest in some of these resources. I’ve been doing this for a long time and have amassed a pretty impressive collection of resources. HOWEVER, the best single volume study resource I have seen is the ESV Study Bible. It’s simply a wealth of information. (It also comes with a free online version.) It has become the first step in my preparation. It’s that good. I could not recommend it highly enough.
Keep It Simple—It’s rarely ever a good idea to teach more than one key point in a lesson. Prepare to teach one essential truth from any passage. Doing otherwise works against helping students apply the truth.
JG
View More: leadership, teaching, youth group meetings
