My all-time favorite literature ever

Literature only matters about 80% of the time. For our best 10%, they are so good they can produce a great lesson with any literature, bad literature, or no literature. For the bottom 10%, I doubt any literature is going to be good enough to help. But, for the 80% in the big middle, literature can make a huge difference.

Quite honestly, until recently, I have never been that excited about any literature. I would never have written this article two years ago, because up until then, I had never run across any literature produced by anyone that I thought was truly remarkable. Not that it was bad. It just was not the kind of literature that had me call my wife and say, "Hey, let me read this to you; this is great!" I find this happens quite regularly with the current literature we are in.

The problem with literature

Most literature (with the notable exception of my all-time favorite) has a kind of fatal flaw. It works like this. Smart people get in a room and decide what we are going to study. There is a rather elaborate criteria that I have never fully understood, but it insures that we study a balance of Old Testament and New Testament, that we study the life of Christ every so often and so forth. They seek to come up with topics and texts that produce a balanced spiritual diet. So far so good. Then, they go out and try to find someone that will write something brilliant about the topic and text.

This is an almost impossible task to do consistently. Sometimes the writing is good, sometimes great, but sometimes. . . not so much. It is nobody's fault, really. It is just a difficult system. It is hard to assign the task of writing something brilliant and consistently get remarkable results.

I couldn't do any better. If you assigned me the job of writing something remarkable on some particular topic or text, I doubt I could do it. If you asked me to find someone who could write something brilliant about some topic or text, I doubt I could do it. It is just a difficult thing to do.

Let me be clear: I am not saying all other literature is bad. I am just saying I have never seen any other literature that was as consistently remarkable. 

Lifeway's Masterworks Series

This is exactly what Lifeway's Masterworks Series has done. They take some of the best work done by some of the best writers and they turn it into literature. They take writing done by people like John MacArthur, Tony Evans, Beth Moore, and John Piper and the turn it into literature. It is great. I love this literature. I have been using it in the class I am a member of for a couple of years now and it is great.

Who should pick the literature, anyway?

This raises a question that does not have a universally agreed upon answer. Who should pick the literature, anyway? Who is in the best place to make the best decision about what is the best literature for a particular group to study?

The only answer everyone agrees on to this question is, "I am."

There are two schools of thought. Some are comfortable letting the teachers decide, while in other churches the staff decides. I have seen both approaches work effectively.

Often, when the staff decides, they have everyone in the same literature. In some cases, all age groups study the same passage. The idea is that this can create a conversation within families about what was discussed in Sunday School. (For a great new book on this idea, see The Big Idea by Dave Ferguson)  In some cases there is a teachers meeting where the Pastor or Minister of Education teaches the teachers on Wednesday nights and the teachers teach this lesson to the class on Sunday. In my own church, our former pastor used to do this. He taught a class himself, so there was no additional preparation; he just had to have his Sunday School lesson ready by Wednesday. He was a great communicator and this additional help in preparation was appreciated by the teachers. We are now in three services on Sunday morning, so this isn't possible any more, but when it worked, it worked great.

The other approach is to let each individual teacher decide what to teach. There are two benefits of this. First, because the teacher knows the class better, they are in a better position to decide what the class needs. Second, we all tend to teach better when we are teaching something that we are fired up about. By letting the individual teachers decide, you release their God-given entrepreneurial spirit and arguably get a better lesson.

A mid point between these two positions is to let the teachers decide from an approved list. Or, let the teacher decide, but the decision has to be cleared by the leadership.

On the whole, I prefer to let the teacher decide, although I have seen all three approaches work effectively. Whether I was a teacher or on staff, I wouldn't die on this hill. (The older I get, the fewer hills I would die on.) An effective teacher will be able to teach an effective lesson regardless of what the literature is or who selected it.

We keep looking for the one right answer. Traveling some has taught me there is more than one good way to grow a church.

And, no matter who does the selecting, I have a suggestion: consider the Masterworks Series. I think it is the best literature ever.