Hello all.

A group of us from NHCC have undertaken the task of looking at our education system in hopes that we can make it better. I’m posting this because not only is it something that affects all of us somehow, but I wish to keep everyone in the loop as well as be transparent about what’s going on in our congregation.

What I mean by our education system is our current process of deciding what topics & books to study in our Bible classes, how we evaluate what we learned, building upon past studies, and ensuring a comprehensiveness – completeness – of studying Scripture, not only what a text says but having a plan for studying the whole Bible.

I don’t mean this in a mean way, but our current process is hardly a process, but simply a realization that it is getting toward the end of the quarter and we must decide what’s next. I’m not saying there is not thought behind it – it is good to study a gospel after an epistle, or an Old Testament book in conjunction with LTC, but my simple point is that currently we don’t have any process to intentionally think about & plan our future studies with our past ones in mind, any plan to cover different topics with books, any intentional process for new teachers to develop, & no way to evaluate if our study accomplished what we intended, among other things.

Hence why the education committee has assembled. If some of you will remember I put out the call late last year for those interested in intentionally helping plan our education through email & several Sundays & Wednesdays of announcements. Several people responded, and we tried a few things that didn’t work in getting together and finally about a month ago committed to meeting in the few times we’re all available to start this process.

Currently the committee consists of myself, Paul W, Angela H, Alan & Deb H, & Sarah F. We’ve spent our first few meetings answering & focusing on why we’re assembled (why do we want to create an education committee) through Paul leading us through the 5 Whys process, and last meeting fleshing out some of our benchmarks & purposes from the first meeting. Please feel free to ask any one of us about our process, our results, our intents, anything you want. I’ll also post our results as we attain our benchmarks, i.e. finalize our purposes & goals, design our processes, & begin to look at our educational scope. As of now some of our main purposes are to design a process independent of personality to facilitate our education, establish our educational needs, develop new teachers, leverage our human resources, ensure depth & scope of Bible education as well as overarchingly ensure that our education is Biblical, among others.

Please feel free to ask or stay tuned for updates. Grace to you all.