Categorizing the Books

This is Part 3 of a behind the scenes look at the development of National Community Church's "From Garden to City" Bible reading plan. It's step-by-step through our process of developing our church-wide reading plan with the hopes that there are some transferable principles. Today, we give an inside look at our process for organizing books of the Bible into liturgical categories.

After developing a skeleton liturgical calendar, the NCC Discipleship Team started categorizing the books of the Bible according to theme. Each book could be categorized in a number of different ways, so things stayed rather fluid while we looked for all the ways we could incorporate different books and themes into the various liturgical rhythms we set forth for the year. This took a couple of different tries. We started by grouping books together that made sense. Then we matched it with our liturgical calendar.

Practically, Team D sat at various coffeehouses around the DC area and hashed through several iterations and possible categorizations. We consumed lots of caffeine, discussed lots of variations, and scratched out a number of drafts.

We came up with the following ideas:

• Lent/Reflection/Repentance/Tears- Job, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Mark
• Miracles- John, Numbers, Joshua, 1 Kings, 2 Kings
• Pentecost/Expansion of the Church/Mission and Doctrine- Acts, Galatians, 1 Thessalonians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Ephesians, Colossians, 1 Peter, 2 Peter
• Atonement/Salvation- Leviticus, Matthew, Romans, Hebrews
• Advent- Isaiah, Luke
• New Beginnings- Genesis, Exodus, Revelation
• Relationships- Ruth, Song of Solomon, 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, Titus, 1 John, 2 John, 3 John, Philemon

...and so forth... you get the idea.

We then generated a draft plan. The next step was to present the draft plan to the NCC Teaching Team and Creative Team.