What International Bible Lesson Lg Parkhurst Actually Is
It is a set of structured Sunday school curriculum materials developed from the International Bible Lessons Council. The program pairs four standardized Scripture passages for each Sunday throughout the liturgical year, then provides commentary, discussion questions, and teaching notes. L.G. Parkhurst was one of the early contributors to this line of material. The full catalog runs from September through May, matching the Revised Common Lectionary rather closely, though not identically. The original printed editions came out through various denominational publishing houses. Today the materials are available in a few different formats. Some churches still use the older loose-leaf workbooks. Others have moved to PDF versions that circulate within adult education committees. A number of congregations print the lessons themselves from public domain sources. The core content has not changed much over the decades because it was built on a fixed lectionary structure. I used these lessons for about eight years running an adult Bible study at a mid-size congregation. The version I worked with most often was the one labeled under Parkhurst in the commentary sections. It was not the only commentary track available, but it was the one our committee settled on. Here is how I actually used it and where it tends to cause problems.
The standard format gives you four passages. One from the Old Testament, one from the Psalms, one from the Epistles, and one from the Gospels or Acts. Each passage comes with a brief historical introduction, a set of observation questions, and a few application notes. The commentary section runs about two pages per passage. That is enough to prepare a twenty-minute teaching segment without needing to read five other commentaries. The main drawback I ran into was the gap between the commentary depth and what actually happens in a room full of adults. The questions are solid but they lean heavily toward observation rather than interpretation. If your group already knows the text well, you will spend twenty minutes going over ground nobody needs to cover and then realize you have ten minutes left with nothing to fill. I started skipping the observation section entirely for groups that had been studying the same book for six weeks or more. I would go straight to the theological notes and the application prompts. That cut preparation time down to about forty-five minutes from roughly two hours. Another issue that comes up with the Parkhurst editions specifically is the date formatting in the older print runs. The weekly lessons carry publication dates that do not always match the current liturgical calendar. You can end up handing out a lesson labeled for the Seventh Sunday after Pentecost in year C when your congregation is actually on the Sixth Sunday after Pentecost in year A. I learned to cross-reference the passage citations directly against the lectionary rather than trusting the banner headings. The passages themselves are indexed correctly. The calendar labels in some printings are off by a week or two depending on when Easter fell that year.
If you are trying to download or access current copies, there are a few routes. The United Methodist Publishing House still carries updated editions. The Church Publishing Inc. edition is widely available through their website and through most denominational bookstores. Some of the older Parkhurst volumes are in the public domain and can be downloaded free from sites like the Internet Archive or the United Methodist Archives. The PDFs are not always well formatted for printing, so I usually pull the relevant pages and reflow them in a word processor before distributing them to teachers. A few things most people miss when they start using this curriculum for the first time. The commentary assumes a certain level of biblical literacy. It will not walk you through who Luke is or why the epistle to the Hebrewles is structured the way it is. If you are teaching beginners, you need to layer in basic background before you get to the discussion questions. The second thing is that the application notes are intentionally generic. They are designed to work across denominations. That means they often avoid specifics that would resonate in a particular church context. I found it useful to replace the stock application questions with two or three locally relevant ones before each session. It takes about ten minutes and makes a noticeable difference in engagement. The program does not work well for large youth groups or for children. The reading level and theological framing assume an adult audience with some familiarity with Scripture. Attempting to adapt the material downward usually means rewriting half the questions anyway, which defeats the purpose of using a prepared curriculum in the first place.
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There is also a limitation worth noting about the lectionary alignment. The International Bible Lessons use a four-reading cycle. Many churches today follow the Revised Common Lectionary which has three readings. The overlap is substantial but not complete. If your church already follows the RCL closely, you will find some weeks where the IBL passage selections differ slightly. You can substitute the RCL passages if needed. The Parkhurst commentary notes are written to work with the four-passage structure, so cross-referencing will require a bit of manual adjustment. I recommend keeping a single copy on hand for reference rather than printing every lesson each week. Print only what you plan to use. The full packets run roughly thirty pages per Sunday. Over a twelve-week unit that adds up to three hundred and sixty pages of paper that most of the congregation will not read. Extracting the passages, the commentary highlights, and the revised questions onto one double-sided page per week is far more practical. If you want the actual text files, start with the United Methodist Archives online collection. Search for the Parkhurst International Bible Lessons volumes. The digitized copies are searchable, which helps when you are looking for a specific passage across multiple years. For newer editions with updated commentary, the Church Publishing storefront is the most reliable source. Avoid the third-party sites that repackage old PDFs without clear copyright information. Some of those files have OCR errors that turn verse numbers into garbage characters and make the text nearly unusable.
