- Context. Where are we in the story of the Bible? What has come before? What is still to come? About what year is this—give or take a hundred years.
- What does the text mean? What do the words mean? How do you harmonize this passage with… How do we harmonize this with the truth that…
- What do we learn about God?
- What do we learn ourselves?
- How did they feel? Nothing makes the story come alive like asking about the emotion.
- What is the application?
- So, try really hard to…pray, serve, give, forgive, etc. Is that the application? Try really hard to be good? (I include this pretty regularly. It seems to me we make two mistakes in our teaching. One is to fail to teach for application. James taught us to be doers of the word. The other mistake is to teach for application and assume we can apply the text by sheer will-power. We have 2000 years of Old Testament history that teaches that we cannot. The Pharisees got pretty close. Jesus reserved His most scathing rebuke for those who merely tried really hard to be good. We must try really hard, all the while knowing that without Christ we can do nothing. Nothing. We also need the strong confidence that we can do all things through Christ who strengthens us.)
- How can we train ourselves to be godly as it relates to…
- How can we transform our thinking as it relates to…
- What are some baby steps we can take this week?
I also provide answers to my questions, but you might not need to. For a long time, I didn’t. Over time, I have invested in a massive Logos Bible Software library and provide answers in the from of quotes from respected authors.
Ideas on How to Publish Small Group Curriculum
After spending all the time to research and write your curriculum, what do you do with it? Give it to your small group leaders, of course. But, I’d encourage you to take one more step: share it with the world.
Amazon has made it super easy to publish your book in both Kindle and paperback format. (They have a hardback publish platform in beta.) Barnes and Noble has a similar service for Nook, but I have found that Kindle outsells Nook 10:1.
The set up is so each that if you had a carefully proofread curriculum, you can literally have in on Amazon in 24 hours. What a time to be alive! Even if you didn’t not want to sell on Amazon it is a great way to print your book. You can get an average-sized book printed for less than $3.
You can price the book at whatever you want. On average, you make about half of the amount above $3. (For a $10 book you would make about $3.50.)
The best way to do the page set up is with Adobe InDesign. If this is above your pay-grade, it can be done in Word. Manuscripts are accepted in .pdf for print books and Word for Kindle books. If you use InDesign, you can export .pdf for print and in .epub for Kindle.
Amazon provides a decent cover design service. The key word is decent. It is not fantastic. If you do design or have a have a friend that can help you, all the better. I have worked with authors who got some pretty good results through https://www.fiverr.com/. Covers are accepted in .pdf for print books and .jpg for Kindle.
This article originally appeared here and is used by permission.
