Why short studies?

 

Why are we only taking on small chunks of scripture at a time?

As a part of the camping ministry, I am involved with we offer both children and teenagers the chance to join a follow-up Bible study programme at the end of camp. In the past when a someone signed up we would send them a book with 8-10 lesson in it, and then we would wait months to see them come back to us for marking (if they ever came back at all). For example, at the start of September, we received back a booklet that a child had been working on since February. That’s seven months before she had any feedback or interaction on the work she had done.

The problem was because we expected each book to take weeks for someone to complete; we wouldn’t follow them up regularly. It was easy for people to; get a book from us, do 2-3 lessons, and then let it slowly disappear from sight and mind.

But in 2018 we updated our teenage programme and started using shorter lessons from Streetlights. Because of Streetlights generosity, we were able to deliver lessons from their Divine DNA and Blueprint curriculums individually to our teenagers and straight away, we noticed a massive increase in people completing our follow up Bible studies. By sending out lessons one at a time, we got to interact with the teenagers more and could follow up any outstanding lessons before they became completely lost or forgotten.

When it came time to look for a series of short lessons that we could use for our children’s follow up programme, we couldn’t find anything that was affordable (we had a quote of USD$10,000 to adapt one set of studies for our use), attractive or thoroughly Biblical. So that’s what we set out to create through How Can This Happen, a series of Bible studies for children that would be attractive, affordable and thoroughly Biblical.  

By working through small easily digestible chunks of scripture, we hope to avoid a feast to famine pattern and see studies from How Can This Happen be a part of building up steady habits of Bible study in children.