You can only teach so much in one hour on a Sunday. The trick is getting your people to stay on the same page during the week.

I used Search The Scriptures, a book by IVP, edited by Alan Stibbs, first published in 1949 and still available. It’s an inductive format that takes the people through the whole Bible in 3 years. It’s written in Q and A format and is ideal for home study and group study. You can copy the week’s lessons for a class or, ideally, get them all to buy the book and use it.

A typical lesson involves you either hitting the highlights of the previous week’s lessons or, ideally, getting them to do short presentations for each other’s benefit and talking about what they learned during the week.

It usually involves them writing. The questions do not tell them what to believe, but they are pointed enough that they have to dig through the text in order to answer them. Using this tool, they learn to think about the text itself. You can either hit the hightlights, pick a particular theme from the week out to teach, or get them to do short presentations and teach themselves. In short, it’s highly adaptable. It includes some commentary notes in it to help them along, but those are minimal. It encourages them to apply the lessons through the use of rhetorical questions at the end of the objective portion. Most days, there are 2, never more than 3 questions to answer. Some questions will require a page or 2; others will only require a sentence or two. It just depends on the material. The important thing is that it gives you material from which to teach, and it keeps them all on the same page from week to week. It’s one thing to keep them on the same page from Sunday to Sunday, but to get a whole class to study the same thing every day from week to week and cover the whole Bible is quite a feat. It takes committment, and I’d encourage you to try it with a pilot group, but, in my experience, it works very well.