Starting this fall, we’re going to unify our junior and senior high programs as well as our regional campus student ministries teaching calendar. That means that everyone will now be on the same page the same week, even maybe giving the same talk. Here are the four levels of collaboration we’re going to decide on for each week of the 9-month experiment during this next school year:

LEVEL 1: THEME – this is the minimum amount of collaboration. This is where we decide the page we are going to be on, but the page is pretty blank. We might do creative design teams together but it is largely up to you and your respective teams to figure out the exact direction/tone/program/teaching. The theme will probably be a 1-paragraph guiding direction for the series, the rest is on you.
LEVEL 2: TOPIC – this level 1 + we get more specific and determine and then dictate the topic for each week of the series. This is the “series arc”- practically it will be a guiding paragraph for the series, as well as a specific topic for each week. If we decide this is the best option for a particular series we’ll give specific direction to each week with what should be covered. I would expect this to be the most common area, but we’ll see!
LEVEL 3: TEXT – this is level 1 + level 2 + sometimes we’ll also determine the specific text the message will be from and passages to be taught. This is going to give you very clear direction and boundaries of the message. You’ll be handed a lot from this one, the theme, topic, texts and some program elements. Lots of assignments and moving parts depending on all of us at this level.
LEVEL 4: TALK – this is level 1 + 2 + 3 + in some cases our new superteam will create pretty much everything including a finished transcript talk to be distributed to each campus/ministry to be edited to suit style then delivered. It may even be a full video teaching that is provided and most all of the elements of the program. Who knows! This is by far the most hands on of all of the possible options.
We’re hoping this new collaboration and unity brings us all on the same page. Always up for another challenge, so here we go again!
JG