"Each year I learn and grow in so many ways."

Dear Josh,

 

I have been teaching middle school Sunday school for 26 years now, and each year I get more and more excited. I am so blessed to be involved with such a great ministry.

 

Each year I learn and grow in so many ways. I believe these students do as well.

 

I have used material from your books several times in different lessons. I must have loaned my book, "Evidence Demands a Verdict," because I cannot find it now. It was very helpful to me as I did my personal Bible study, and spoke with many people on the Internet. God has blessed me in such a way that your material, and that of others, has come across my desk just at the right time.

 

This just happened, as a matter of fact. I feel God leading me to do something new within our Sunday school class, and maybe even the youth Sunday school in general. The email that I just got from you about keeping kids in church after high school* has confirmed that God is indeed pointing me in this direction.

 

Here is what I believe God has directed me to do. I am to buy Bibles for each member of my class, for them to use in Sunday school, and leave there each week. I want to teach them how to underline, highlight, and write in them so that they can keep learning. I will also teach them how to do an interactive prayer list in the back on the blank pages. Since I teach 8th grade, I will be doing this for them. After the year is over, they will take these Bibles to their ninth grade class, and if I have taught them well, and they have developed a habit, they will do the same thing during that year, and the rest of high school.

 

By the time they graduate, they will have a great study Bible with even their own notes. They will also have a living history of their time in the youth department Sunday school, in their prayer list, and all of the notes and special scriptures they mark. When they leave for college, I pray that they will take this with them, and it will their forever connection to what God has done in their teen years. I believe this can help to either keep them in church after high school, or it will serve as the connection that will cause them to return once they mature and settle down after college.

 

I believe God has already provided me with the resources for these Bibles, and that they will be study Bibles that will continue to teach them as they move out on their own. I want to do this every year, and I believe God will do awesome things with this part of the ministry.

 

So, God used you to confirm His direction on my life in this matter.  Thanks for being His servant. He does use you. Pray for me in this effort. I am sooooooo excited.

 

God bless you,

In His grip,

Ernie Smartt 

 

 

* Recent studies have shown a mass exodus of teens from the church after graduation.  The Barna Group found that two out of three Christian teens will not return.

There is a book by George Barna, Third Millennium Teens, 1999, which states on pp 56, 57 that about one out of three teens is likely to actually attend a Christian church after they leave home.  This is based on the fact that only 2 out of 5 teens said it was “very likely” or “somewhat likely” that they would attend church on a regular basis after leaving home. 

Barna states that questions of this type typically produce an overestimate of future behavior.  Applying a “correction factor,” he arrived with a figure that two-thirds of teens will be drop-outs.  This is not to say that many, at some point in the future, may not return.  Barna did not say that two-thirds will not return, but that two-thirds will drop out.  It is not possible to give a figure on what the return rate may be.