When you're serving at a small church, one of the biggest yearly expenses can be curriculum for your Sunday School or Children's Church.
While the content that comes from David C. Cook, Lifeway and Group are high quality, well-planned and thoroughly intentional curricula that teach God's Word in exciting and engaging ways, they come with a financial commitment that can eat up a big percentage of a small church's annual budget.
One of the indicators of a growing and vibrant church is the presence of young families. Prioritizing the spiritual development of children creates a welcoming and attractive environment for these young families as they decide where to regularly attend. Curriculum for Children's Ministries should be high quality, Biblical and well-developed.
So how does a smaller church prioritize the spiritual development of children without a big budget?
This is where Open Network comes in!
Open Network, found at Open.Life.Church, is a massive source of free curriculum, resources, trainings and videos provided by Life Church. Life Church is led by Pastor Craig Groeschel. It hosts content primarily created by Life Church, but also created by a wide range of partner churches.
And here's the amazing thing about the Open Network -- everything is absolutely free!
You're able to browse the content without logging in, but if you'd like to download anything, you'll need to create a free account.
On the Kids pages, you'll see a few different age groups to choose from. You may even recognize the Early Childhood content. It's the basis for The Bible App for Kids, and it's perfect for Nursery age children!
Generally, each lesson for any age contains a video-based lesson, a Small Group Leader Guide, and printables. Many lessons also have an object lesson and large group activities. Most of the lessons also have two videos -- one will contain just the teaching time, and the other will be a full 60-90 minute video with background music and timers for discussion times, sing-along worship songs, memory verses and more.
I've used this content in many different settings over the past decade or more, and I love the quality of the content, along with the printable handouts and activity ideas. I tend to customize and rearrange things depending on my group of kids, and I find it has worked really well for every group I've led.
When you start exploring Open Network, you'll also find lots of content for small groups & Bible studies, Youth Ministry, Women's & Men's Ministries, and even for Sunday Morning sermons and Worship.
One of the values at Life Church is "Irrational Generosity", and they demonstrated that value in such a huge way by hosting the Open Network.
It has been an amazing blessing to the churches and ministries I've worked with! Check it out for yourself at https://open.life.church.
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