Sunday School
The Mission of Calvary Bible Church is “to Call the people of Washtenaw County to worship the Lord Jesus Christ and Connect them together to serve Him.” Our Sunday school program fits with the “connect them together to serve Him” portion of our mission. It is about “connecting” people with a teacher (teacher/disciple relationship) who can instruct them in the Bible.
This ministry meets 45 Sundays a year from 10:30 to 11:15 a.m. (in between our two Sunday Worship services).
Adult Sunday School
The purpose of adult Sunday School is to provide adults at Calvary with all the resources they need to grow in their knowledge of and obedience to Christ and the Christian life. Although our Sunday worship services are designed to teach God’s Word to our people, Sunday school classes allow us time to explore all the areas of biblical truth that believers need to know as well as provide more detail and depth.
Our Goals for Adult Sunday School:
- To provide through our local church the kind of systematic instruction usually available only in a Christian college.
- To stop the spread of Biblical ignorance among Christians.
- To provide our community, which is rich with secular learning opportunities, with a place where people can learn about the Christian faith in a way that is both accessible to everyone and challenging to those who are well-educated.
- To develop the teaching gifts of godly, gifted adults in our church and give them many opportunities to use their gifts and abilities to build up our church by teaching other Christian adults.
In many churches, Sunday School is a rigidly scheduled ministry which never pauses, despite the fact that there are known Sundays when many regular attenders are likely to be out of town. Here at Calvary, we have attempted to develop a schedule of classes that allow us plenty of time for numerous classes while also allowing us to schedule flexibility into our ministry. This flexibility allows us some scheduled breaks in our class schedule on Sundays when attendance may be reduced due to holidays or to allow special events like missionary speakers. Scheduled days off will usually include:
- 1 Sunday before Labor Day (September)
- 1 Sunday around Thanksgiving
- 2 Sundays around Christmas
- 1 Sunday around New Year’s Day
- 1 Sunday for Easter (Easter Sunday)
- 1 Sunday for Memorial Day (May)
In many churches, Sunday School is more about fellowship than it is about teaching. Most churches organize their Sunday School around age and affinity groups such as singles, young marrieds, mid-life, older adult, and retired adults. This gives people the opportunity to form friendships with others in the church who are in a similar stage of life.
There are two negative consequences of the traditional organization of adult Sunday school:
- No opportunity to meet and develop relationships with others who are older or younger than you are. Because of this, the church loses the “older to younger” instruction that the Scriptures commend in Titus 2
. - No systematic instruction. Because the class is organized around age/affinity group, the teacher sets the agenda. Since the teacher chooses what to teach without any overarching plan or guidance, there are likely to be major areas of the Christian life that go unaddressed.
Because of these two disadvantages, Calvary has decided to develop adult Sunday school around a systematic/subject model. It is our goal to give every adult believer in our church access to the kind of teaching and training that a good Christian college gives to its students. We offer three 15 week blocks of classes each year and within each block there is a variety of classes covering such things as: a book of the Bible, a doctrine of the Bible, a survey of the Old or New Testament, a life skill that Christians should have, how to understand and address a common human problem biblically, and other topics. For information about current classes, see the news section of our website.
Children’s Sunday School
Like adult Sunday School, this ministry meets from 10:30 to 11:15 a.m. and usually follows the same schedule of 45 Sundays each year and 7 scheduled breaks. Our children’s Sunday School offers classes based on the child’s age, such as:
- Toddlers (2-3 years old)
- Pre-School (4-5 years old)
- Grades 1-2
- Grades 3-4
- Grades 5-6
- Grades 7-8
- Grades 9-12
We also have a well-staffed, well-trained nursery for children under age 2.