School starts soon. While your Bible classes may not be back to normal, you can still point your students towards God and begin preparing for the eventual return to regular Bible classes. Here are some ideas from our social media posts this week to get you started.
Monday: Have a student that is particularly “prickly”? Chances are he or she is in a lot of emotional pain and believes toughness will prevent future pain. Treating the “prickly” child with love and patience consistently, will over time bring down those walls. Most likely you will find a sweet, hurt or frightened child behind that tough exterior. If you don’t break down that wall with love, most likely you are confirming to them they need that wall – and they will fortify it.
Tuesday: How are you getting important information to your Bible students and their parents? Take some cues from advertising. Companies spend millions of dollars making sure the people they want to use their products see their advertising. They analyze where those people get their information and where they read ads. Then they make sure their advertising contains as much information as possible to help people seeing it take advantage of their offer or business. Find out how students and parents want to receive information from you (telling them how you will communicate is useless if they don’t regularly use that platform). Make sure you give them all of the information they need in your communication. Most people won’t spend extra time looking for missing information. Changing how you communicate can bring better results than you are currently getting.
Wednesday: Vines may look pretty on walls and trees, but over time they kill and destroy. Your Bible students will be tempted by Satan with things that look amazing, but over time will destroy their lives and their faith. Teaching young people how to identify and avoid these destructive elements to their lives and their faith needs to be one of your top priorities. Your class may be the only place they are taught how to avoid Satan’s traps.
Thursday: There’s been a lot of talk lately that often boils down to something along the lines of “I deserve a perfect life, full of anything and everything I want at a given moment.” Spoken in a culture where even the poor are richer than the vast majority of the world. Yet people around this world are ecstatic to be given six eggs and a few cups of grain to feed their families for two weeks. Young people need perspective and to gradually learn to see life as God sees it, not as man does. They need help developing an attitude of gratitude. Otherwise, they will make their choices, see the world from culture’s selfish mindset – only leading to a life of misery.
Friday: This room can look very different depending upon what furniture and decorations are put into it. Your Bible students are impacted by their experiences. Even identical twins will differ because they don’t have the exact same experiences their entire lives. Those differences can mean your lessons are heard and interpreted differently – even though every student is hearing the exact same words. Questions can help determine whether or not every student learned what you wanted them to understand from your lessons and give you an opportunity to clarify any misunderstandings.