I don’t think I’ve written before about the Bible study I’m writing. I know I have in my monthly progress reports and goals. But I’m not sure I’ve done a post about it describing the project. The genesis of it goes back a few years.

I think it was around six or seven years ago that the co-teacher of our adult Sunday school class said he would love to have a class lesson series on Holy Week, going passage by passage through it, ending up with Easter. Based on the harmony of the gospels I had written, I told him that was something like 67 passages and it would take more than a year or continuous study to get through it all. Obviously, that wasn’t going to happen.

But I brainstormed it and came up with a way to do it. We would take it in chunks over several years during the season leading up to Easter, commonly called Lent. Ten lessons or so over six years would do it. I suggested that to Marion, my co-teacher, and he agreed it would be a good thing to do.

So I made an outline of six years of lessons. The text would be my harmony. We began teaching it in 2019, covering the Triumphal Entry and teaching on Monday and Tuesday of Holy Week. In 2020 we covered the Olivet Discourse, mostly by Zoom because of the pandemic. 2021 was the Last Supper, 2022 the time in Gethsemane and the Jewish legal actions. This year we have moved on to Good Friday. Lent and Easter is over. We’ve had seven lessons from this part with three or four to go. That leaves Easter and the times after Easter to be covered in 2024.

We got through the first two years, and were in the midst of the third one when I suddenly realized that this might make a good Bible study to write and publish. So part way through year 3, I began writing the book for that year simultaneously with teaching the lessons. It was slow going at first. I wasn’t sure what I wanted in the books , how long they would be or even how long each chapter, corresponding to a lesson, would be. But I worked on it until the lesson series for that year was over, then put it aside.

Then last year, I decided to write simultaneously from the start of the lesson series and keep up with it. I found I could do this fairly easily. That gave a couple of days each week to go back and work on the lessons from the previous year. By the end of the then-current series, I was within a couple of thousand words of being finished with the volume.

Except I came upon a flaw in the series. The lesson series from year 1 was too long at 21 lessons. So was the one from year 3 at 14 lessons. So this year, during the “off season”, so to speak, I worked on the overall plan for the series. I realized that, even though we would teach it over six years, it worked better as an eight year series and eight book volumes. I also finished the little bit left in last year’s series over a couple of weeks.

Once again, I began writing the chapters simultaneously with teaching this year’s lessons. And it’s working. As of today, we’ve taught seven lessons and I’ve completed seven chapters. It’s gone fairly well, I think. I’ve also had time to work on the books from the third year, which in the new organization are books 4 and 5. Volume 4 is finished, and Volume 5 is about 12,000 words away from being finished. EDIT: Actually, Volume 4 wasn’t quite finished when I wrote this post. It is now, though, with one editing pass completed. [23 May 2023]

So Volumes 4 and 6 are finished. Volume 5 is nearing completion. Volume 7 is fully planned and is on schedule to be done in about a month. Alas, I haven’t started on Volumes 1, 2 and 3, and Volume 8. I likely won’t start until next year. The word count of the four volumes done or partly done is just shy of 110,000. If I keep writing lessons at the current length, the entire series will be between 200,000 and 250,000 words, or maybe even more than that, though I’m sure it will be less than 300,000.

So that’s the current project. I’m working almost exclusively on it. For the last several weeks I’ve been able to add close to 7,000 words each week. That will be my goal this week. Possibly next Monday I’ll report on how I did.

I haven’t figured a publishing schedule yet. I don’t know whether to wait a year and publish them more or less all at once, or to publish the ones I have done (Vols 4 and 6) now. I’ll decided that in a month of two. By that time, I may have Vols 4, 5, 6, and 7 completed. That would make more sense to publish them and fill in 1, 2, and 3 when I can get them done.

That’s too big of a question right now. I need to concentrate on the writing.

Dateline Sunday, 8 January 2023

Today began with the temperature 10 or 15 degrees below yesterday’s low. The caused a thick fog to be about, so thick that I didn’t feel like driving to church on the high-speed interstate that is the quickest route. So I went through town on the slower roads. The closer I got to the church, the thicker the fog. Yet, going slowly and having a well-marked road, as well as enough traffic to see the road ahead of me clearly.

Thus, the drive to church was easy. I had to be there a bit early due to a schedule change in the new year and a desire that all the adult Sunday school teachers be in the lobby at certain times today. I had to take my computer upstairs first, set it up, and log into the Zoom account we are using for those who can’t come to class. Except I couldn’t log in and had to hunt someone down to get the 6-digit code to log in. Eventually I logged in, we held the class, and the new lesson series for the new year started well.

Church was good, except for the announcement that our minister of music is leaving for another church. So at present we are without a pastor, soon to be without a music minister, and have a temporary, parttime youth minister. But we will carry on. Spirts are good, workers available, and the cause will continue.

Upon exiting church, I saw that the fog had lifted. Bright sunshine and still cool temperatures were invigorating.

This afternoon, after a small lunch, I went to the sunroom to read. I got some read in a writers magazine and in an essay related to some Bible study lessons I’m writing, got them done, and fell asleep. I was in a bit of a sleep deficit due to my wife’s heart episode last night (no details required) and getting up early to study my lesson. After that. Lynda and I went for a two-mile walk, then it was reading and supper.

We watched some TV, including Midsummer Murders and All Creatures Great and Small. To multi-task while watching, I worked on the Bible study series I want to write at least part of this year. It’s a multi-volume series. In February we’ll start with Part 5 of the six-year Lenten/Easter series. One volume is about 95% done, and another somewhere around 40%. But, as I’ve worked on writing the book form of Parts 3 and 4, I’ve come to see that the way the series was broken up to teach didn’t make sense in book form. So I played around with it and felt a lot of fog—lack of a clear path on how to structure the split of the books.

I finally settled on dividing the series into eight separate books. What we taught the first year really needs to be two book volumes, and what we taught the third year needs to be two volumes. That, I think, would make it easier for people to use for a series of Bible studies.

However, it’s still a little foggy to me, this lesson series, and so I have to call that a tentative decision. I’ll have to perhaps work with it a little more. Maybe it could be seven volumes, not eight. I have some work to do on that.

But at least I made a little progress. The eight volumes will work (and, I should say, these are not meant to be big books: maybe 35,000 to 40,000 words each). Perhaps by morning the fog will have lifted and I’ll have better clarity on the issue. I hope so.