We Believe: The Three-Year Rotation

A three-year rotation for Armenian Sunday Schools, ages 5 to 17

What Has Changed in This Edition

The two earlier We Believe curricula have served our Sunday Schools for a generation, and parishes teaching from them today are teaching sound material. This edition is not a correction of them. It is a response to conditions that have changed since they were written.

The lessons are shorter by design, so that children can enter the sanctuary for the second half of the Badarak rather than spend the Divine Liturgy in a classroom learning about the Divine Liturgy. Children are grouped in four age bands on a three-year rotation rather than in a separate book for every grade, so that a parish with twenty students and a parish with two hundred can teach the same material in the same season, and a family that moves between parishes continues without interruption. And the prayers, hymns, and Armenian terms our children are meant to carry with them are written into every lesson rather than left to be picked up elsewhere. The aim has not changed. Only the shape of the hour has.

We will not hide them from their children, shewing to the generation to come the praises of the Lord,
and his strength, and his wonderful works that he hath done.

-Psalm 78:4