Designing a teaching calendar for your ministry can feel overwhelming. There’s no shortage of Bible stories to choose from, holidays to plan around, and spiritual habits you want to reinforce. It’s tough to know where to start — or how to make it all work together.
We’ve all been there, trying to figure out how to make every week of ministry count, while not skipping over any stories, books, or topics. So let’s talk about how to map out an intentional, strategic, and sustainable teaching plan you can feel confident about all year long (and beyond!)
Whether you use Grow Curriculum, a mix of resources, or curriculum you’ve written yourself, this guide will show you how to build a clear, well-designed scope and sequence.
Oh, and if you want to follow along, you can download our free Build Your Own Scope & Sequence Kit
WHY A GOOD SCOPE & SEQUENCE MATTERS
Your scope and sequence is more than a calendar. It’s your teaching strategy in action. A great scope & sequence helps you:
- Plan your Bible stories intentionally
- Align your teaching with your discipleship strategy
- Ensure balance between Old and New Testament passages
- Keep your teaching fresh and fun
- Make communication easier with your volunteers, parents, and church leadership
The goal is simple. You’ll want to create a predictable structure that still leaves room for creativity and new ideas all throughout the year. Here’s what you can do to build your own scope & sequence!
DO SOME PREP WORK
If you’re familiar with the Grow Strategy, you know there’s so much more to Grow than just teaching!
Before you do the detailed work of creating your complete scope and sequence, it’s helpful to know the bigger context in which your Teaching Strategy will exist. So before you get started…
1. READ THE GROW STRATEGY GUIDES: Our free Grow Strategy Guides walk you through creating a strategy in 7 key areas of ministry:
- Teaching
- Discipleship
- Weekly Environments
- Events
- Volunteers
- Parents
- Leadership & Annual Planning
2. DO AN ANNUAL PLANNING MEETING: Our free Annual Planning Meeting Guide will give you a walk-through video and step-by-step tutorial on how to plan the big picture of your entire ministry strategy. When building your scope and sequence with the Grow Strategy, it’s important to already have mapped out your Discipleship Strategy and Event Strategy for the year, since your discipleship efforts and big events will impact what you teach throughout the year. So get clear on this before moving forward!
3. PREP YOUR SUPPLIES: When you’re ready to start working, grab whatever planning tools fit your style. You can…
- Create a digital spreadsheet
- Sketch it out on paper
- Use color-coded sticky notes
- Use the resources in our Build Your Own Scope & Sequence Kit
But for the rest of this guide, we’ll pretend you’re using our resources!
BLOCK OFF SOME WEEKS
For the first few steps of this exercise, you’ll be making both the Multi-Year Calendar and a One-Year Calendar at the same time. Your Multi-Year Calendar will be filled up first, since it focuses on the big picture and requires fewer details than your One-Year Calendar does.
First, use a black marker to block off the rows of the weeks you won’t need to teach, maybe because…
- Your ministry isn’t meeting that day.
- Kids or teenagers will be in the adult service.
- You’re planning special programming, bringing in a guest speaker, or doing student-led services.
ADD IMPORTANT HOLIDAYS & EVENTS
In the Holiday column, add any important holidays or events that could impact what you teach. Refer back to this column often during this exercise to see how you might align your teaching with what’s already happening in your church, and in the lives of the kids or teenagers you lead. Consider…
- National or local holidays or observances
- Community events, like prom, graduation, or the first day of school
- Big ministry events, like VBS, Camp, Retreats, or mission trips
ADD YOUR SPIRITUAL HABITS
If you’ve already read the Grow Strategy Guides and done an Annual Planning Meeting, you know we suggest breaking the year into four quarters and focusing on one of Grow’s four spiritual habits each quarter, like this…
- FALL: Spend Time with Others
- WINTER: Use Your Gifts
- SPRING: Spend Time with God
- SUMMER: Share Your Story
Use an orange marker to color in the column labeled with the Discipleship Strategy icon. Then write the spiritual habit you chose for each quarter in that column.
ADD YOUR TOPICS
For a detailed walk-through of the topics in Grow’s Teaching Strategy and where to place them on your calendar, see our Strategy Guides and the sample scope and sequence we’ve provided.
Print the Teaching Topics page and cut out the topics you need. Arrange the topics in the Teaching Series column in the order you’d like. Pay attention to your Discipleship column, Holidays column, and month breaks, which can all help guide what you teach and when.
The Topics blocks are sized for 5-week series for kids and 6-week series for students, so trim them to fit the length you need them to be, and glue.
ADD YOUR SERIES TITLES
At this point, your Multi-Year Calendar is complete! It is missing series titles, but it may be too far in the future to plan specific series titles beyond the current year. Set aside your Multi-Year Calendar and focus on your One-Year Calendar.
Now it’s time to go shopping! Head to The Grow Marketplace and use the “Topics” filter to find teaching series that match the topics on your scope and sequence. Of course, you can also plug in series from other curriculum creators or curriculum you’ve written yourself. This is your scope and sequence! Do what you want! When you’ve got your series titles identified, write them in the blanks.
ADD YOUR BIG IDEAS & SCRIPTURE
Now for the most fun part (and the most time-consuming part, if you’re creating your own curriculum from scratch)!
For each week, identify a Big Idea that summarizes the main takeaway of that week’s lesson. Then list the Scripture references you plan to cover.
As you work, keep your eyes on the big picture as well as the details. If you’re covering similar subjects, telling similar stories, or using the same Bible passages in more than one place, make sure to highlight this so you can remember to approach them slightly differently each time in order to keep the material fresh.
WALK AWAY
When you’re finished, take a breather! Walk away and come back later with fresh eyes.
- Review everything a week later. Do you still like it? Is there anything you forgot to include or consider?
- Ask for feedback. Who are your trusted ministry allies, like team members, mentors, and key volunteers? Give them a chance to review your work and give feedback.
- Make revisions. Just because you wrote it down already doesn’t mean you have to do it! That’s why delete keys and white-out exist.
STICK IT ON YOUR WALL
Finally, it’s time to admire your work! (If you made a lot of revisions, you may want to make a fresh new final copy—we won’t tell anyone if you do.)
Make it pretty, print it if you were working on your computer, and hang it on your wall as a reminder of everything you have coming up—and as evidence for your boss that you really do know what you’re doing!
Great job! You did it!
Want the templates, samples, and planning tools mentioned in this guide? You can get them in our free Build Your Own Scope & Sequence Kit! It includes all the pieces we talked about so you can download them, customize them, or use them as inspiration to build your ministry’s teaching calendar!
In this post, here’s what we’ll cover: