Should I use published resources?

It must be true that the western, English-speaking, church has never had access to so many high quality, published resources. There are Bible study guides, evangelistic courses, study books and more books on different questions, issues and topics than every before. Yet I find I'm tending towards using them less for the church. Why?

First, I think it's worth saying lots of them are very good. They are faithful to the Bible. They engage, encourage and challenge me. I would have no problem with people in my church reading, watching and using them in general.

Second, I often use them as I prepare material for Bible studies, preaching and so on.

What I'm doing less of is, for example, buying ten copies of a Bible study guide and working my way through it with our growth group. Again, why?

I think the principle behind producing published resources like this is that it makes up for a lack in the churches and groups. There may not be enough trained Growth Group leaders to prepare studies. Even where there are, they don't have the time to study and produces the quality of material the publishing company has produced. Particularly in areas like Growth Groups, we've all seen problems with poorly prepared studies and groups. The published material is to lift the standard.

However, I'm not sure that's the most effective way to go. First, I'm not sure published material always helps as much as we think. For one thing, if a group is as ill-prepared and unmotivated, it will take more than a booklet to help! Even for a group that wants to improve, there is the inevitable problem that the material now in their hands was not written in their context and for them. I wonder if that's becoming particularly and issue when much of our material is coming from other countries and for me when even what comes from the UK is often from culturally very different contexts.

This leads to my second thought, I've increasingly come to the conviction that home-written material, even when it has less preparation from less skilled Bible teachers is often much better for a group because of the personal relationship between leader and group and between members of the group. Questions make more sense and can be more easily explained. Methods can be more easily adjusted to the situation and so on.

Third, using materials like this is expensive. Some of the resources I might like to use are very expensive and even the cheaper ones, when multiplied by the number of people (not all of whom would want to pay or be able to pay) can be costly.

So what do I think is the way forward? Well at the moment, I think it's valuable to do the preparation I can, making use of the materials available to me, but I commit part of my time to writing my own material. I don't do anything clever - usually just a set of questions, maybe with a bit of background to help. But it still works better than simply working through someone else's course or study and I can produce it for the cost of paper and ink.

However, I don't think that's the ideal. What I'd love to see is people producing editable high-quality materials. Here you could get high-quality stuff (including print and video), but you could modify it for your context. You could use parts of it and re-write other parts and so on. I know this is hard from a copyright point of view (although I'm not sure that needs to matter, there's a whole world of free-licensing out there). I know some would worry about their material being used in ways they don't approve of (I think that's easily a risk worth taking). But I wonder if this would really be the way to resource the church.