Does your church or small group use books or just only the Bible?
My conviction is that a Sunday School class should be a place where people learn to study the Bible for themselves instead of being captive to a teacher having to explain everything. I think the best way to teach is to conduct whole book, verse-by-verse, studies of scripture so that nothing is avoided and the book can unfold in a natural way, each week building upon the week before it. If students miss a week, it's not the end of the world because they can study on their own, knowing what we are going to look at each Sunday, and they already have a sense of the themes, stories and arguments being made, so they are well-equipped to teach themselves.
In my experience, this way of teaching is quite rich, and students look forward to each week because they are in the middle of a story or argument, and they want to see how it turns out.
As you would expect, the Bible is front and center in our studies. I provide handouts that I prepare for each lesson that provide handy references and connections to other parts of scripture, with the occasional quote, definitions, maps, and other study aids, but we spend 80% or more of our time working with the text, pulling out the meaning.
I have, from time to time, broken up the longer book studies with shorter, more topical series of lessons designed to make connections between various parts of scripture or deal with topics often not explicitly discussed in church. For instance, in recent years I have taught a series on Genesis 1-11 where we looked at the foundational stories of humanity; also a systematic study of the human body, where we looked at the the nature and character of the human body, from Creation, the Fall, what the Incarnation tells us about the body, the Resurrection and Paul's teaching on our resurrection bodies, and the eternal physical state of humanity; and then a study on God's careful and methodical re-approach to humanity after the Fall, through Abraham, the Tabernacle, the Temple, the Babylonian Exile, the Second Temple, the Incarnation, the Holy Spirit, and the Apocalypse and Final Judgement.
While the topical classes are fun to teach because so many people are figuring out how all of their previous knowledge fits together, I think careful verse-by-verse study is a stronger way to make disciples - which is my mission. While I deal in knowledge, I also stress application because head knowledge is useless without faith (action).
