It’s getting to that time of year when pastors are setting their preaching calendars and thinking about what their small groups will study. Published Bible studies—like those published by Matthias Media, The Good Book Company, and others—are an invaluable resource worth considering. They are inexpensive, especially if bought in bulk.
Benefits for the Preacher and Small Groups
Pre-prepared Bible studies can be helpful for you as a preacher. These studies give you a possible break-up of the book. They also serve as a micro-commentary to get you oriented to the book and give you a through-line for each text, and usually the book as a whole.
If you build your own preaching series around the break-up provided by some published studies, then you will also have a readymade set of studies that will match up with your sermon series week-by-week.
Of course, pre-prepared Bible studies are also helpful for those using them! For hard-to-understand books in particular (Leviticus, anyone?), having a set of studies that a team of people have spent scores of hours preparing will be useful for small groups and their leaders.
Some Limitations
One limitation of pre-prepared studies is they restrict your small groups to the breakup the author has chosen. But such a restriction is navigable, if you do not expect every single week of the sermon series to match every single week of your small groups. This mismatch could even free you up to do something unrelated to the sermon series in your small groups that you otherwise wouldn’t have been able to do.
Another limitation is that pre-prepared studies rob you of the opportunity to teach people in your church how to write studies. For this reason, I think it’s wise to produce at least some home-grown studies. But I think there is still value in ‘mixing it up,’ both to reduce the overall workload at church and also to expose your small groups to the variety.
Some people avoid pre-prepared studies because they don’t think they’re tailored enough to their people. While I hear this concern, in my view, the best way to target church or ministry-specific applications is to keep study questions general and then train and encourage leaders to add the tailored applications. I think we overestimate how closely our studies get followed by our groups. You could spend hours carefully crafting studies that you think will hone in precisely on the needs of your people, when in reality the study will start twenty minutes late, your leader will have to rein in a rogue member for ten minutes, and a bunch of questions will have to be cut on the fly to make sure everyone can leave by 9pm. As a result, many of your targeted questions will go to waste.
Write Your Own… and Publish Them
Sometimes, we need to write our own studies because published ones don’t exist (at least in a format that’s helpful and from a publisher we know). If you need to write your own studies, can I urge you to do something else as well? Publish them! Share the love! If you’ve gone to the trouble of writing good studies on a book that doesn’t have published studies, why not do us all a favour and make them available online, or submit them to a Christian publisher.
Over ten years ago now, I was planning to preach on 1 Samuel, but I couldn’t find any published studies, so I wrote my own. After spending the significant time writing them, I thought: ‘Why not get them published, so the next person doesn’t have to and can use their time on other things?’ To be honest, I felt a bit presumptuous pitching them to the publisher. But then I thought, ‘Well, someone’s got to write these studies, and the worst the publisher can do is say no. Besides, the work is already done.’ So I sent them off to Matthias Media, and to my surprise they were accepted.[1] I’ve since tried to publish every new study I’ve had to write, to save others time.
[1] Since I’ve always written these studies on church time, I do not receive the royalties personally.
