3 Different Ways To Teach Small G Lessons

One of the beautiful things about the Church is its diversity. We serve different groups of people with different needs. That’s especially true when it comes to serving teenagers. That’s part of why we created the Small G Plan, because small churches need a plan built just for you. But even within small youth groups, there can be lots of different ways to effectively teach curriculum. So let’s talk about 3 different ways to teach Small G lessons.

Small G: 5 Different Lesson Components

Our Small G Plan may be paced for smaller churches, but we refuse to cut corners. You may not need 12 teaching series/year, but we still want to be your simple solution for gospel-centered youth ministry. That’s why, in addition to parent video resources and a year’s worth of youth ministry games, we equip you with five different lesson components with each Small G series. Let’s overview each of them briefly before we dive into 3 different ways to teach Small G lessons:

1) Small Church Guide

The Small Church Guide is your standard lesson guide for any small youth group. It takes a 15-minute sermon manuscript and retrofits it into an interactive 25-35-minute lesson perfect for a small youth group sitting in a circle. These lesson guides are typically comprised of short teaching monologues interspersed with gamified activities, discussion questions, and response time experiences.

We’ve even included an alternative lesson plan within every Small Church Guide called Where Two Or More Are Gathered. This lesson plan is adapted for when one or two students show up to youth group. Just because it’s a small gathering doesn’t mean you throw out the plan or completely wing it. With the Small G Plan, you just adapt! Because where two or more are gathered in His name, He is there.

2) Video Messages

Every Small G series comes with full video messages for each lesson in the series. These video messages are engaging 10-15-minute sermons recorded by our amazing team of video communicators.

3) Discussion Guides

These are guides to use when you want a concentrated time of discussion amongst your group, and they’re included with each lesson. A Discussion Guide typically consists of 6-8 questions and an interactive activity designed to drive home the point of the lesson.

4) Discipleship Event

Every Small G series comes with a Discipleship Event. These event guides equip you to create an interactive response time experience for your students related to the content of the series you’re in.

5) Devotionals

These weekly three-day-devotional resources contain a passage, devotional thought, and space for students to journal. The devotionals are always related in content to the series they come with.

3 Ways To Teach

Without further ado, let’s talk through three ways to teach Small G lessons in your youth group.

1) Use only the Small Church Guides

One option is to use only the Small Church Guides to teach through the lesson at youth group. Play a game, share announcements, worship/pray, and then walk through the lesson plan with students. Afterward, hand each of them a printout copy of the Daily Devotionals, or, if you’re techy, digitally distribute the Daily Devotionals through a QR code on a screen or screenshots to a group text messaging platform.

With this option, the Video Messages would be used as a lesson prep resource for you or distributed digitally so students who missed youth group can still hear a form of the lesson.

2) Utilize Video Messages and the Small Church Guide together

For some of you, the beauty of having Video Messages is that you can do some, but not all, of the teaching. For those of you who prefer that kind of structure, you may decide to play the Video Message, and then use the activities, discussion questions, and reflections from the corresponding Small Church Guide to drive home the point of the sermon.

Others of you may choose to play the previous lesson’s Video Message toward the beginning of youth group in order to recap for students who missed the previous youth gathering. Doing so would provide you with a quick, engaging 10-minute recap shared by a fresh voice before you jump into the current lesson using the Small Church Guide!

3) Watch the Video Message and Discuss

For leaders who are short on time or capacity when you meet for youth group, this option is perfect. Just press play on the Video Message and watch the sermon with students, and then pull out the Discussion Guide afterward to facilitate a discussion based on what you all watched. You can even still get interactive with the one activity located at the bottom of each Discussion Guide!

Bonus: Devotionals can be a cheat code for more content

As a bonus, if you find yourself in a position where you need more lessons than the quarterly series the Small G Plan provides, consider springboarding your Devotionals into their own lesson plan! It takes a little bit of leg work on your part, but since each lesson of a series comes with three devotionals, you could easily turn a 4-lesson series into an 8-lesson series if you used one devotional/week as a springboard into a new lesson!

You Got This!

In any event, no matter how you utilize the resources, the Small G Plan sets you up to succeed well. Your church matters, and your context matters. That’s why we’re creating some of the best and most flexible resources out there—to help you serve your congregation well. We want you to be able to teach Small G lessons with confidence and poise.

In the context of the gospel, God meets us where we are. We’re working hard to be the kind of company that does that for you. And we hope you’ll continue being the kind of youth leader who does that for your students.

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