Involving the Teaching Team

This is Part 4 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 talk about involving the teaching team and the creative team.

Since we had determined that we would be preaching through our reading plan at our weekend services, we needed to serve the teaching team well. After inserting books into our unique liturgical calendar and creating a rough draft, we decided it was time to bring in the NCC teaching team and creative team to get their thoughts and perspectives.

We went offsite to the National Gallery of Art for an afternoon and presented the draft. Arduously and meticulously, we went through the calendar, the themes, and the books associated with each. Honestly, this is where things got tough. Good discussions about the underlying philosophies and theologies of the plan itself, about the wisdom of starting with the books of Job and Jeremiah, and about the best ways to group things together.

After hearing the preferences of the teaching team and the ideas of the creative team, we had a better sense of workable liturgical calendar and of where the teaching team wanted which books. So Team D went back to the coffeehouse and cranked out the next draft. And then started to crunch numbers...