Come Near
A year of Sunday School for everyone in the room.
2026
Fifty-two lessons for Year B, from Advent 2026 to Reign of Christ 2027. Built for one room holding a nine-year-old and an eighty-nine-year-old at the same table.
Most congregations have already tried putting everyone in one room. Fewer children, fewer teachers, and one hour on a Sunday morning make it the obvious move. What is missing is something written for that room.
Come Near is not a children’s curriculum that adults tolerate, and it is not an adult curriculum with a coloring page stapled on. It is one room, one text, one conversation, with several honest ways in.
Nobody is assumed to already know the Bible. Every lesson includes a short grounding, written out to be read aloud rather than improvised. It is offered to the whole room as information, never as a quiz. The person who has been in this church for sixty years and the person who walked in this morning start the hour on the same footing.
We do not make the Bible smaller. Job is allowed to be angry. Mark’s Gospel is allowed to end without resolution. When the lectionary leaves out a hard passage, the lesson tells you what was left out and offers the room the option of reading it. Simplification is about language, not about substance.
Something for everyone, and not everything for everyone. Three parallel activities every week on the same text. Nobody is asked to do the thing they dread. Nobody sits with nothing to do. None of the three is the children’s version.
The youngest person answers first. At every table, every week, for a year. It is not a courtesy. It is the structural fix for the most common failure of intergenerational teaching, which is adults answering before children have formed a thought.
The teacher does not answer the questions. During the discussion the one permitted intervention is asking whether everyone at the table has said something. What the room produces belongs to the room.
It lines up with worship. The curriculum follows the Revised Common Lectionary, so if your preacher is on the lectionary, the class and the sermon are in the same text on the same Sunday.
The year
Eight seasonal arcs, each with a question the class lives in for several weeks.
What you get
- Fifty-two complete lessons in eight files, one per arc, in Word and PDF
- A scope and sequence for the whole year, with primary and secondary texts for every Sunday
- A teacher background for each lesson, written to be read on Tuesday rather than Sunday morning
- Read-aloud scripts, three tiered questions, and three station plans for every week
- A one-page take-home card for each Sunday, for participants and households
- Adaptation notes for a group of six and a group of sixty
- A check-in at the close of each arc, so the year produces something your board can actually use