Is a kids Bible study that important?
Nineteenth-century evangelist D. L. Moody once said that if he could relive his life, he would devote his entire ministry to reaching children for God. A look at the statistics would tell us that Moody was right. The National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) found that 63% of people surveyed became a Christian between the ages of 4-14, with the median age being 11.
What Moody understood, and what we need to pay attention to today, is that involving kids in Bible study at the time they are most likely to make a decision to follow Jesus is the most important ministry our churches can have.
Although Lenten practices vary depending on denomination and congregation, it generally includes three primary areas of focus: Prayer, Fasting, and Giving.
Right now, we’re in a sort of global denial about the actual cost of these hard years (which are not over). We just want to get past it all, so we’re currently trying to comfort ourselves with some sense of recovery and relief. But folks, we haven’t yet paid the psychological bill for all we’ve been through. We would never tell a survivor of abuse that the trauma must be over now that the abuse has stopped. And yet that mentality is at play in our collective denial of the trauma we’ve been through.