My Sunday School Project … 6 Years And Counting!

Background

In Sunday school, with the help of my teacher, Sis. Jeanette Le Duke, I have been creating web pages outlining my Bible beliefs.1In September 2011, Sis. Jeanette and I started our sixth year of work on the project. Our mission has been to de­velop an effective way of showing my friends what I believe, as well as clarifying my own understanding of first principles. I should explain that because there are no other young people my age in our Kitchener-Waterloo ecclesia, I have been the only student in this class!

We started the project by making a list of first principles such as baptism, the kingdom of God, etc., and creating a web page for each subject. Our goal has been to put things as clearly and simply as possible, and to include an interactive quiz with each page so users can test their knowledge. Each Bible verse that is quoted has a hyperlink which, when clicked, shows the verse in the bottom right frame. We are also working to give each Bible character a link to a short “bio” that shows in the bottom left frame.

Technical details

Because Sis. Jeanette is experienced in HTML (hypertext markup language), we decided to make each page from scratch, using only HTML code rather than web development software. We used a simple frame set consisting of four frames (as shown above), one for the list of topics, one for the explanation of the topic, one for a brief biography of each Bible character mentioned, and one for the Bible verse hyperlinks. Each Bible verse is a file, and we currently have almost 300 verse files. Great care was taken in naming each file for easy access. For some verses we have bolded part of the text for greater clarity.

The pages

It took about four years to create our topic pages. Topics included are The Bible, The Nature of God, The Creation of the World, The Garden of Eden, Abraham, God’s promises, and many more. We spent a lot of time experimenting with the order of the topics to make a logical sequence for users to follow.

The Garden of Eden page is shown above. In addition to telling the story of what happened in Eden, it covers important principles such as the lie of the serpent, the curse, the promise of redemption, the seed of the serpent, and the seed of the woman. All of these principles are backed up by Bible verses. Naturally, many pages cover similar topics and we have linked related pages to each other. We have tried to make each page look consistent in terms of fonts, layouts, colors and illustrations. An interesting problem has come up along the way: the more pages we make, the more we think there should be! Our page on “God’s Three Great Promises” was fairly brief. We didn’t want to fill this page with information about Abraham and David, so we ended up making separate pages for each of these characters. This year, we are working on pages about Moses and Elijah.

The Quizzes

We spent almost a year making the interactive quizzes for each page. The purpose of these multiple choice quizzes is to give users a chance to test their knowledge and see if they really understand the contents of the page. It took a long time to think up the questions for each quiz. The right answers were easy, but it was hard to think up wrong answers! We wanted to lead the users in the right direction without being flippant or irreverent.

To make the quizzes, we obtained a Java application online and adapted it for

our purposes. In addition to learning a great deal about first principles, I also learned basic web page design, as well as how to program in HTML and Java!

Benefits

I have really enjoyed creating the web pages to display my beliefs in a unique way. I have found the project extremely interesting, both in terms of the Bible study involved and learning how to design the pages. I have been able to summarize major Bible topics, realizing best of all that this knowledge will last a lifetime. As time goes on, I will be able to build on my knowledge and have inspiration for new topics that will challenge me to further study of God’s word.

Credits

We used a lot of different source material to put the various pages together. For the hyperlinked Bible verses we decided to use the King James Version, although we sometimes include other versions for clarity. We simply copied and pasted the verses from E-Sword2into an HTML verse template we had designed.

Christadelphian sources, in no particular order, include the following:

  • Exploring the Bible, A basic step-by-step Bible study course designed for everyone, published by Christadelphian Scripture Study Service.
  • Key To The Understanding Of The Scriptures, by H. P. Mansfield.
  • Exploring the Psalms, by Mark Vincent.
  • The Christadelphian Instructor, by Robert Roberts.
  • Preparing for Baptism, published by the Christadelphian Bible Mission.
  • Faith Alive!, October, 2007, Issue 88, “Teach us to pray”, published by the Christadelphian Office.
  • “Basic Bible Principles: The Second Coming of Jesus Christ”, published by The Testimony Magazine.
  • “Basic Bible Principles: The Resurrection of Jesus Christ”, published by The Testimony Magazine.
  • “Basic Bible Principles: The Kingdom of God”, published by The Testimony Magazine.

Understand the Bible, Work it out for yourself, by Tecwyn Morgan. Emily

  1. Here is the web address for Emily’s Sunday school project: http://www.execulink. com/~ledukes/ERSS/MainPage.html. Try it out with your Sunday school students or as a CYC activity. Share it with others. It is easy to navigate and highly educational. It works with Internet Explorer and Chrome, but not with Firefox.
  2. E-Sword ® is free Bible study software available online at http://www.e-sword.net/.