Bible Club Antics

Are you a teacher of Scripture or Sunday school?
What do you need to do to prepare?
Each week, I need to:

1. Write the lesson. As my group has an age range of 3 yrs-15 yrs, this can be very challenging.
2. Choose a memory verse and then print it out on strips for the children to take home as most have no access to a Bible.
3. Choose songs. If David happens to be home, I am grateful for he will lead the singing. He has two gifts I do not have: a strong singing voice and the ability to sing in tune! The children’s all-time favourite is ‘King of the Jungle’. I play a Colin CD to help me but, when David is available, we have a bigger repertoire. Bible songs specifically for children is a basically unknown concept here. The CD player is put on the window sill.
4. Rake the sand in the garden in the shadow of a tree. It is Autumn and there are dead leaves falling. Bible club is always outside.
5. Fill up and take out a barrel of water with some cups.
6. Sweep the front porch and set out the library books for the day. Using our own and donated books, I have a weekly library for the children. Schools do not have a lending library and the children are always very keen to get their books renewed.
7. Take out all the props I will need, including stickers or sweets as rewards for memory verses etc.

I encourage the children to arrive earlier (they do not need much persuasion!) so that they can play and get a little tired so they will sit through the lesson more easily! Children tend to drift in during the first 15 minutes of the lesson as no one has a watch.
As they arrive, I take in their returned library books and mark them off. At the moment, the children are doing a Bible study series sent up from South Africa (The Mailbox Club). The response to this has been amazing and children are bringing friends and even adults to sign up. Such enthusiasm is very rewarding.
So, I also take in completed Bible studies and prepare the next one to hand out – very confusing for me as they are all at different stages!

And then we start!
1. We open in prayer.
2. We sing some songs (lots of actions)
3. The children recite last week’s memory verse.
4. We have the lesson.
5. We play a game or do an activity.
6. We do library.
7. The children play for another hour (taking turns on the trampoline, soccer)
8. Home time for them and tidying up time for me.

This week, however, a number of children asked if their friends could come. Of course, I welcomed them but soon had over 40 children!!! David was away doing a workshop so was not there to help with the singing but we carried on quite well until the game time. I had planned to do ‘pin the tail on the donkey’ but one can hardly have a line of 40 children waiting for their turn so I brought out paper and told the boys to make aeroplanes whilst the girls went first. Soon, the garden was littered with discarded prototypes.
Whilst the boys ‘pinned the tail’, the girls chose their library books and got their next Bible study lesson. Bedlam is a mild word to describe the scene.
At that point, Super Dad came home and agreed to take the boys round the side of the house for plane-throwing competitions to discover whose was the most aerodynamic. (He sometimes also plays soccer or cricket with them. In this culture, fathers rarely play with their children and, as Aune tells us, most are scared of their fathers. The boys LOVE it when he plays with them.)
Then the boys chose library books (the library rule is that children must come 3x before they can borrow so I can [sort of] sure I will get the books back). The new children looked enviously at the books so I may well see them next week. But I enrolled them in the Bible study. For children who have zero books at home, let alone any books in their home language, lending them these books is very rewarding (though, as they do not know how to care for books, I do find myself doing lots of repairs). The library helps them with their English, teaches them to enjoy and care for books (they are not used to reading and this is always a problem when they get to high school and college), and expands their horizons.
I am always shattered after Bible Club but I delight in teaching children who want to come each week. It seems I rarely print out enough Bible verses as I can never know how many will come. However, when children come to me and ‘complain’ that they do not have a memory verse to learn (!), I print out more and stick the strips on our gate from whence they are taken during the course of the week.
Please continue to pray for these children, as they hear the Gospel each week, that it would change their lives. And for their families, too. And pray for me, that I would teach clearly and be strengthened for this weekly task.