I want to thank this week’s sponsor, The Thoughtful Christian. They’ve been a great sponsor of Pomomusings in the past, and while I’m sure many of you are familiar with The Thoughtful Christian, in case others of you aren’t, I thought I’d share briefly about them.
The ThoughtfulChristian.com is an online resource center of downloadable bible studies for youth, adults, and parents of teenagers. Studies can be purchased individually, in study packs (clusters of studies), or a church can purchase a subscription and have unlimited access to all of the studies available.
I’ve used a variety of different Thoughtful Christian resources in the past, and they’ve generally been very good. As it is with any curriculum publisher, some will work better for you and your context than others, but we used a really great one for Lent last year with a small class, and the conversations that came out of that study were very fruitful. I think it was the first time many in the class had used anything put out by Thoughtful Christian, and they were very impressed with the quality of the materials.
One current option that is available is their “Build-a-Pack” option. With this option, it’s easy to create multi-week studies. You can build study packs based on a theme of your choosing, or you can pick unrelated studies from any of their six categories, including more than 300 adult, youth and parenting studies. Or you could get your small group or class together and have them select the studies based on their individual interests. The best part of their “Build-a-Pack” option is that it allows you to save some money too. You can get any 5 individual studies for $40. They’ve also discounted subscriptions by 40%, so a large church is $195 and a small church (weekly worship attendance is under 100 people) is $150.
Finding good small group and educational curriculum is hard. There is a LOT of stuff out there – and a lot of it is just poorly done. But if you want some really quality stuff (which I’ve both personally used and recommended to other colleagues in ministry), I’d suggest to start by looking through the variety of options available at The Thoughtful Christian.