The Activity Was Never the Problem

Most churches are drowning in activities and starving for outcomes.

I've watched this play out across hundreds of church education programs, and the pattern is almost comically consistent. A teacher feels like a lesson isn't landing. So they reach for more. More cutting and gluing, more relay races, more cotton balls glued to a sheep outline that will sit in a drawer until June. The instinct is that engagement is a volume problem. Add more stuff and the kids will care.

That instinct is wrong, and it's expensive.

An activity is a delivery mechanism. It is not the thing being delivered. When you can't say what the activity is delivering, you've built a craft, not a lesson.

Here's the part nobody wants to hear. The vast majority of Sunday school activities for kids that get passed around in Facebook groups and printed off in a Saturday-night panic aren't tied to anything. They're tied to a theme, maybe. Noah's ark, so we do animal masks. But the mask doesn't teach obedience, or judgment, or covenant, or whatever the actual point was supposed to be. It teaches that Sunday is where you make an animal mask.

I'm not anti-craft. I want to be clear about that, because founders who write about education tend to come across like they've never met a real eight-year-old. Crafts are fine. Games are fine. But the question I'd push every teacher and every children's ministry director to sit with is uncomfortable: if you stripped the activity out of the lesson entirely, would the kids learn less? If the honest answer is no, you didn't build a teaching tool. You built a babysitting schedule with a Bible verse stapled to the front.

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The economics of this are what get me, honestly. Churches will spend real money on curriculum, and a huge chunk of what they're paying for is the activity layer. The printables. The supply lists. The "15-minute creative response." And most of that layer is decorative. It exists because a curriculum that's mostly teaching content looks thin on the page, and a curriculum stuffed with activities looks substantial. Publishers know this. Thickness sells. Whether the thickness does anything is a separate question, and it's not the question the buying decision usually rewards.

Publishers are paid for the appearance of preparation. Teachers are responsible for the reality of learning. Those are not the same job, and the gap between them is where most lessons quietly fail.

I talked with a children's ministry director a while back who'd done something I found genuinely smart. She'd gone through a full quarter of her purchased curriculum and, for every single activity, written one sentence: what does a kid know or believe differently because they did this? About a third of the activities, she couldn't answer. She cut them. Her prep time dropped, her supply budget dropped, and (this is the part that surprised her) the kids didn't notice anything was missing. Because the things she cut weren't carrying any weight to begin with.

I don't want to oversell that story into a formula. It worked for her room, with her volunteers, in her building. I've also seen plenty of classrooms where a so-called pointless game was the only reason a squirrelly group of second graders stayed in the room long enough to hear anything at all. Sometimes the activity's job really is just to burn energy so the actual lesson has a shot. That's legitimate. The problem isn't activities that admit they're managing the room. The problem is activities pretending to be the lesson.

This is where I think the AI moment actually matters for teachers, and I'll say it carefully because I build a tool in this space and I'm not interested in pretending the tool fixes character flaws in lesson design. It doesn't. What a good curriculum builder can do is make the connection between objective and activity cheap to check. When generating a lesson takes thirty seconds instead of two hours, you stop being precious about the activities you already made. You can ask, every single week, does this thing serve the point. And you can throw it out without mourning the Saturday night you spent on it, because you didn't spend the Saturday night.

But a tool that generates activities faster just gives you more decorative activities faster if you don't know what you're aiming at. The bottleneck was never production speed. It was clarity about the objective. To be honest, I'm still not sure most curriculum (ours included, on a bad day) does enough to force that clarity before it hands a teacher a stack of things to do.

So here's the reframe I'd leave with anyone planning lessons this summer. Stop asking what activity goes with this story. Start asking what you want a kid to walk out believing, and then ask whether anything you're doing in that room actually produces it. Most of the time you'll find you need fewer activities and sharper ones. Less glue. More aim.