If you’ve ever found yourself scrambling to figure out what your women’s ministry should study next, this conversation is for you. In the webinar No More Guesswork: How to Use Scope and Sequence to Build Bible Literacy Among Women, Jen Wilkin and Tina Boesch talk through a long-term, repeatable approach to planning Bible study that takes the guesswork out of women’s discipleship.
Here’s a look at what you can expect when you watch.
Defining the terms: Bible literacy and Bible fluency
Jen opens by drawing a distinction she returns to often. Biblical literacy, she explains, can mean simply knowing about the Bible—a general sense of how the Old Testament goes or how the Gospels flow, often picked up secondhand through sermons or podcasts. Bible literacy means knowing the Bible because you are in it yourself, growing in an understanding of what it says and what to do with it.
She then introduces a term she’s increasingly drawn to: Bible fluency. Using the analogy of learning a foreign language, she describes literacy as the grammar and vocabulary—the mechanics—while fluency is the long-term goal, the point at which you can “dream in Bible” and fully inhabit what she calls the symbolic universe of Scripture: the images, patterns, and story arcs that repeat throughout the text. Literacy, she says, is not the goal itself but a tool for achieving fluency, which is the work of a lifetime.
What scope and sequence actually means
Scope asks, What will we teach?—which also means deciding what you won’t teach, with close attention to the particular needs of your audience. Sequence asks, In what order will we teach it?
Women’s ministry leaders are educators responsible for Christian education, so they should plan with intentionality with a goal to build Bible literacy and ultimately, Bible fluency, among the women in their congregation.
A repeatable framework you can use
Jen and Tina point viewers to a ready-made framework: a six-year scope and sequence, built around studies Jen has created but adaptable to other resources, available here. It rotates between the Old Testament and New Testament.
Jen explains that women commit their discretionary time to things they can anticipate, which is why she settled on consistent ten- to eleven-week studies that fit the natural rhythm of the church calendar. The goal is an “evergreen” Bible study space: line-by-line study through entire books of the Bible that learners never outgrow, because the same book yields new riches each time it’s studied.
Watch the full conversation
Throughout, Jen and Tina return to a shared conviction: when women’s ministry centers on the Word—reading it, praying it, and wrestling with it together—genuine community grows naturally around the text.
Whether you’re starting from scratch or refining what you already have, this webinar offers a clear, sustainable way to plan Bible study for the women of your church. Watch the full conversation with Jen Wilkin and Tina Boesch here, and find the scope and sequence framework referenced throughout here.
Want to learn more about the importance of Bible literacy? Read more from Jen Wilkin.
