Bible class teachers are often volunteers with little experience in classroom management skills. The temptation is often to allow children to behave in any way they wish in order to insure they enjoy attending Bible class. Unfortunately, this often leads to chaos, making it difficult, if not impossible, for your Bible students to learn what you wanted to teach them. In order for your students to get the most from your Bible lessons, they need to trust you. This makes them feel safe and they can relax and learn. Trust can also encourage them to open up and ask the important questions they have ..read more

You can teach the best Bible class in the world, but if your students don’t remember the lesson, it really doesn’t help them. Since giving tests in Bible classes for children and teens won’t work well, we have to find other tools to encourage memory of important content and scriptures. A study found that when students attempted to memorize a list, saying it aloud increased their memory of the list from 65% to 77%. It’s only a few points, but can make a significant difference for many of your Bible students. So what are some ways to encourage children and teens to say important scriptures and ..read more

A few years ago my husband and I began teaching a Bible class of elementary students at our congregation. We gave each child an index card and encouraged them to write down all of their questions about God, the Bible, Christianity, etc. The questions we got back were extremely deep and nuanced. I might add we had been told this was a class of children that didn’t seem to care about learning anything about God at all. It’s easy to assume that children have no deep spiritual questions because they are usually concrete thinkers. Or that young people with special needs don’t have complex spiritua ..read more

If you’ve been in ministry for very long, you’ve probably heard of the 80/20 rule – 20% of the people connected to your ministry will do 80% of the work. Whether that’s actually true or not is debatable, but it feels like that (or worse) most of the time. The truth is that it doesn’t have to be that way. Making a few changes to how you recruit and manage volunteers can increase engagement and enhance results. One of the biggest mistakes contributing to the 80/20 rule results is the process of recruiting. Many ministries view positions like Bible class teacher as a slot that needs to be filled ..read more

When you look for employees and volunteers for your ministry, for what skills are you looking? If listening skills aren’t currently on your list, they need to be. In fact, your ministry would greatly benefit from spending time training everyone connected to it to be better listeners. Why? Studies are finding time and time again that today’s children and teens don’t feel as if they have anyone in their lives that will truly listen to them. It’s easy to assume that the children and teens served by your ministry are from “great” homes and have plenty of people in their lives who listen. Some may ..read more

You are probably familiar with the idea of life skills – skills that children and teens need to learn to make it easier for them to live independently as adults. Usually this list of skills includes things like the ability to do laundry or cook a simple meal. Although we don’t really talk about it, young people also need Christian life skills – skills that make living the Christian life a little bit easier. If we were to make a list of God’s expectations and commands for us, we would find that many of them would be easier if we had certain life skills. For example, the command to be generous ..read more

Before you start posting critical comments on social media, the Bible is technically the only book you need to truly minister to young people well. You are probably reading all sorts of books on ministry – when you have two spare moments. The problem is there are too many people out there who either claim to be Christians or who were Christians who have taken it on as their mission in life to do everything in their power to destroy Christianity. It’s not enough to reject God and the Bible as the standard for their lives. They want to take as many people with them as possible. It’s a movement t ..read more

Remember the Creation story in Genesis? After God created Adam, he realized Adam was lonely and created Eve for companionship. Later, the Israelites were organized by family based clans that operated as a unit. And of course, one of the stated functions for the Church (discussed throughout the New Testament in various ways) is this idea of Christians supporting one another spiritually, emotionally and physically. We were not meant to live in solitude for very long. Yet, your Bible students in late childhood and adolescence have had solitude first thrust upon them by COVID and then exacerbated ..read more

Recently, my husband and I had dinner with a Christian couple from another state. We feel like we have known them forever and technically we have known them for almost a decade now. The truth is that although we feel really close to them, we have only spent a few hours together a few times a year. So why do we feel so close? Yes, we have many things in common – in large part due to our shared faith. I believe there is another reason that can help the various constituencies in your ministry. Our times together are spent sitting around a table sharing a meal. We have shared our hearts as we ate ..read more

One of the struggles many ministries to children and teens face is trying to encourage students to become close emotionally to each other when they often attend different schools, live in different areas of town and have different interests and personalities. It is crucial to teach them how to discover points of connection with each other so they can begin building those deeper relationships we want them to have. Being able to quickly find things in common with people we have just met is also a crucial skill set for Christians as we serve others and share our faith with them. It is a skill se ..read more