Creating an Online Class for a Church

This won’t be so much of an authoritative “how-to” create an online class for your church as it is a description of “how I did it” and encouragement for you to change things up for your own context.

I’ve been teaching seminary online for a few years now, having started the semester before the pandemic began (great timing?). I should begin with the concern that every church leader has: time. I teach part-time. I work full-time at a local church (https://greenwood.church). I’m able to teach 3 classes a semester by leveraging technology in online teaching. This allows me to get a maximum return on the time that I use. You can do the same thing at your church.

The trick is in the design of the online material. If you put in the work before-hand you are left with very little teaching work during the class. I prepare mini-lectures for each week to accompany the reading material of my seminary class. In the same way, I’ve prepared links to resources for my church class. This way the church class participants are able to go at their own pace through the curated material, and utilize me only as a help or coach.

I have a setup in mind for each week of material. I am creating a course on Hebrews for our church. So, each week the participants read 1 chapter of scripture (that’s 1 assignment). Then they have an optional resource to read, that I’ve called “going deeper” (the second assignment). Additionally, I’ve created some group discussion questions that will appear during the week. So, Tuesday morning the group will get a notification asking how the group can pray for them that week. They can write prayer requests, and comment on other’s posts (that’s a third assignment). Then I have a discussion question that I’m using to get the group to engage with one-another. That discussion questions will post Wednesday morning (fourth assignment). The final component is a zoom-type meeting (for this group) at 8pm on Thursday that will last 30min.

That’s it. That’s what I’m asking of my group each week. It seems small, but in reality it’s more than most “in-person” groups get during a week. This format also allows me to confront two unique problems: 1) if people miss a normal “in-person” meeting they usually miss all the group benefit for the week, and 2) church buildings have a limited number of classrooms. I’m attempting to create more daily engagement AND create an opportunity for scale.

For my trial group on Hebrews, I’m using Google Classroom. I chose it because it is free and there are tons of tutorials out there for it. Being a Google product I’m sure they will sunset it at some point in the future (like reader, or hangouts), but for now it works fine.

Please let me know if you have any questions or suggestions!! I want to create the best training possible for my church, so your comments are appreciated!!