Developing Resources

This is Part 6 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 the resources we developed to supplement the reading plan.

After we developed the reading plan, we turned our attention to resources that would help participants remain engaged, educated, encouraged, and involved in community.

Here is a list of some of the things we've done:

• Reading Plan Card- our media team designed a Bible-sized postcard with the entire reading plan on it for participants to keep in their Bibles.
• The Story- I led the group experience "The Story" before the reading plan kicked off to get folks oriented. It covers the chronological story of the Bible over the course of three nights.
• Small Group Guides- we have several small groups tracking with the Garden to City reading plan, so we provide a small group study/discussion guide each week. It contains suggested icebreakers, questions based on the readings, questions based on the sermon, prayer/Scripture memory challenges, and creative ideas.
• Website- on http://fromgardentocity.com/home. We've included a daily devotional blog written by our staff team, videos on choosing a translation and how to read the Bible, and other creative helps for folks who want to engage. The devotional blog also contains book introductions to give readers a framework for understanding the cultural, historical, and Biblical context of the books we read. We've linked this with Twitter and Facebook where other forms of interactions among readers can occur.

We will continue to develop other resources on the website throughout the year. We are trying to be creative in how we brand our sermon series, resource our small group leaders, and develop instructional videos and content for the blog.