Welcome to the fifth annual BCOQ Youth curriculum, City of God, a resource designed to help students find connection to community.

Several years ago, BCOQ Youth took a risk to meet a need in our youth ministry family and you are reading the outcome of that risk. The decision to create an educational resource for high school ministries started with stories from our local church youth leaders who felt taxed by the heavy burden of putting together teaching times for their ministries. Many youth pastors and volunteers feel stretched to put the necessary work into planning lessons that are creative, interactive, and thoughtful. Our vision for creating the curriculum was that youth leaders of all kinds would be freed up from the intensive preparation of weekly lessons, freed up to work in their areas of passion, by relying on a resource that was written by their peers with their particular contexts in mind.

The curriculum is designed to be used as a part of a larger youth ministry strategy; it is not designed to be youth-group-in-a-box. What it can do is assist youth leaders in preparing an environment where students can learn about their faith and grow in their maturity as followers of Jesus Christ. It is driven by the educational metaphor of guided discovery, in which you are the guide who enables students to discover important lessons as they explore together.

We expect and encourage youth leaders to use the curriculum in the way that makes sense according to their context and their gifts. If you are creative or want to invest more time in lesson preparation, you can use your several hours a week to adapt the curriculum to your needs. If you have very little time at all, you can teach the lessons as they are with minimal preparation. City of God is here for you to use as you see fit! It is here to serve you as you minister to students!

New This Year: A City of God Folder

New this year, we have packaged the curriculum in a user-friendly folder. This will allow you quick reference to each series and its handouts. It will allow you to do things such as share series with volunteer leaders and keep all of your supplies together in an easy-to-carry pack. We hope you like it!

At the beginning of the folder you will find this package, the City Guide, which is full of information about the resource. Then behind each tab you will find one of our seven series. Each series is inside of a clear folder, which includes the series introduction, the lessons and handouts for that series, and a brief teaching tip for your perusal. The folder even has a pocket where you will find the CD resource and where you can store resources of your own.

Divide the series up, fill the folder with supplies you need, make copies and store them in the folder, and enjoy the new look!

Note that many of the lessons are in Adobe .pdf format. If you don't have Adobe, you can download it for free by clicking here.

Lessons

Included in City of God are seven series, a total of 22 lessons. Each lesson will take approximately 45-60 minutes to lead and approximately half an hour of minimum preparation, which must include reading through the material and may include making photocopies, doing extra reading, renting movies, and a variety of other activities.

Although the curriculum is designed with a ten month youth ministry calendar in mind, these lessons will not fill every week of the ministry year. This is to allow room for local ministries to insert their own concerns into their yearly planning. Plan to use these lessons according to the needs of your own context.

Also, we have ordered the series in a way that makes thematic sense. We begin in the garden, with a relational God who created us in connection to himself, to each other, and to the world. We end in our future home, the heavenly City of God, where we hope one day to return to these essential connections. In between, we explore the reality of living in the wilderness, striving for the connections we were designed for while confessing the reality of our broken world. While this is the order that makes the most thematic sense, you are free to teach them in any order that is appropriate for your group and ministry calendar. Each series is written in a way that it does not depend on other series to make sense, although you will likely find it best to teach each series in consecutive weeks. The final series, At the Party, is designed to conclude your ministry teaching year.

Finally, included in the folder is a CD-Rom that includes all of the lessons and handouts for those who prefer an electronic format. The CD is easy to navigate and allows the user to adapt the materials to best suit his or her own context.

Lesson Objectives

Lesson Objectives are the engine that drives a lesson. We have spent our time researching topics and scripture so that you can reduce your preparation time. We have condensed our research into clear, concise, and measurable objectives that express what students should be able to do as a result of each lesson. The point of each lesson is to achieve the Lesson Objectives and we have designed each lesson to do just that. You will also notice that Lesson Objectives are framed in terms of the students rather than the teacher. That is because the point of education is not teaching; it is learning.

Materials Needed

At the beginning of every session, you will find a list of materials that we suggest using as part of that lesson. Minimum preparation for teaching should include reading the lesson over carefully and gathering all of the necessary materials. Consider keeping a box or drawer with some frequently used items such as pens, scrap paper, board markers, and so on. It will save you time in the long run.

We have not included a DVD player and screen in the Materials Needed lists but obviously, if there is a DVD clip suggested, you will need the player and the screen. These are also good things to have in your regular room. VHS is also an excellent tool for the classroom; in many ways it is better suited for the classroom than DVD. We have simply used the DVD references here because the chapter and minute references make it easy to find the clip.

You will also find “Board and Markers” listed frequently in the Materials Needed. This is a general term that could mean a) a chalk board and chalk, b) a white board and markers, c) an overhead projector, blank overheads and overhead pens, d) chart paper and markers, or e) anything else that works for you in the space that you use.

Media Use

Please note that presenting a video in public (e.g. in a church) does require a license (similar to a CCLI license for music). You can obtain a license that will cover most distributors such as Universal, Disney and 20th Century Fox, at Audio Cine Film.

Also, it is important that you preview the movie clips suggested and decide whether they are appropriate for your group.

Bible Translation

Unless otherwise noted, we have used the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible throughout the curriculum.

Word We Use All the Time

Like every industry, education has its buzz words and lingo. We have tried to avoid anything really complicated but we thought you might enjoy a run down of frequently used terms. Here they are:

Curriculum Team

Many people contributed to this resource in a variety of ways. The lessons in this resource were conceived and written by Al Anderson, Paul Carter, Gino Dube, Dallas Friesen, Leanne Friesen, Chris Heise, Luz Iglesias, Alvin Lau, and Tim McCoy, and edited by Luz Iglesias, Manager of Youth Mission and Education for the Baptist Convention of Ontario and Quebec. We are a group of men and women from various churches across our denomination, who are serving God as youth pastors, senior pastors, associate pastors, denominational servants, educators, and youth ministry volunteers. We are diverse in our perspectives, ethnicities, contexts, and experiences, and we hope that you can relate to some or all of our styles and perspectives. To get a better idea of who our team is, click here.

Finally, it is our hope that this resource will be a tool that will connect us together in the City of God. We invite and encourage your feedback on any aspect of City of God and can be reached by email.