I recently came across this blog post. Yes, it’s written to the student ministry audience, but it could just have easily been written to the kidmin community. For whatever reason, those of us in kidmin just love writing curriculum. I’m not sure what our reasons are. I say “us” and “our” because I spent the first several years of ministry writing much of the curriculum I taught. Granted, this was in a time where there were also very few options… not today when there are so many options for every kind of ministry genre.

Seriously, read the post, “The problem with ‘We do our own thing.'”

I want to point out the three main points of why you shouldn’t write your own curriculum:

  • It’s arrogant to write everything.
  • Curriculum is cheap, your time isn’t.
  • It communicates isolation when your students long for connection.

I’ll reference what I wrote last week. In my post “Have More Respect for Yourself” I talked about the things that only you can do. I’m going to add a little twist here. Just because you can write curriculum doesn’t mean you should. Okay, maybe if you have extra staff that is dedicated to writing, then writing might be the right decisions. However, if writing curriculum comes at the expense of building into leaders and connecting with parents, there are others who are better equipped to write your curriculum.

Your time is precious. Although you might feel that the lesson that was penned by your hand might be the more relevant and powerful than the canned curriculum from the company in a far away city, I promise you that the time you’re able to invest in leaders and families with the extra time you have because you buy your curriculum far outweighs the superior curriculum that you can write.