Iron Sharpening Iron

I'm excited to be presenting in two workshops at the Conspire Conference this year. One is on new practices for small groups. I'll be sharing about how we're approaching small groups differently in Bridge 45. I've loved the conference calls with Mindy Stoms and Chris Boss and hearing about what they're doing. I've even been able to put some of their practices to good use!

With the start of Adult Education Classes on Sunday mornings, we're now having quite a few more children attend multiple services. For our Adventure Ranch (preschool) classes, Lucy is using the Promiseland "In the Beginning" curriculum first service and is creating a simple, activity and game based program for the second services. In two months, the two services will swap what they're doing, and so on. We've found that preschoolers have a really hard time sitting through the same thing twice in a row. So far the new system is working well (even though we've only been doing it 2 weeks).

But figuring out a way to change things up in Adventure Mountain (k-3rd) was a little more complicated. Each lesson builds on each other so much, and a lot of our kids go back and forth between which service they attend, that we couldn't just do something completely different in the two services. We've been using Promiseland's "Looking at the Pieces" curriculum written for 2nd/3rd, and we make a few adjustments here and there to help it reach the kindergarten and first graders.

That was when I remembered what Chris shared about how they approach small groups at his church. They still have large group teaching and small group time, but not as segmented as we do it. The kids sit in their small groups during the teaching, and as each point is made, the groups do an activity, have a discussion, or look up the story in the Bible. This way, each point is presented and immediately applied, rather than expecting the kids to remember 3 points 20 minutes later. I don't think it should be too hard to use this concept with our current curriculum. We'll just break up the teaching and slightly adjust the activities. So the elementary kids will still get the same message twice, at least they'll experience two different methods.

I love being able to learn from other people who do ministry to children!