Richard Nations :: Sunday School Leaders

Jan

Space for the Kids

By Richard Nations · Comments (1)

The most important areas in a church building are the Sunday School rooms for the preschoolers and children. Some might want to argue that point, but it’s important that the kids ministry area be top quality.

This is the area of the church that should be well-equipped and should “shine” as you enter the area. When young families with children come to the church for the first time, they are evaluating the preschool and children space as they drop their children off for Sunday School and for preschool care during worship times.

Unfortunately some churches allow these areas to become cluttered, outdated and are placed in less than convenient areas of the church educational facilities. Don’t let that happen. Lead your Sunday School ministry to make preschool and children’s space a priority instead of an add-on.

There are several reasons for doing so. Here’s a list of a few:

Preschoolers and children need more space than youth and adults (it is recommended that preschool rooms have 35 square feet per child and children’s rooms have 25 square feet per child). This may seem like a lot, but preschoolers need room crawl and toddle around. Children are active and need some space to move and do activities during Sunday School teaching times.
Parents are taking note. If it’s not clean or updated, they probably won’t feel comfortable leaving their children in that room. Make sure the floor coverings are clean and modern. Have bright lighting and colorful painted and decorated walls. Check the safety of the furnishings and equipment. In recent years there have been new federal safety guidelines issued for baby cribs so make sure the cribs meet these standards.
If the preschool and children’s areas are in an inconvenient place or not near the worship center, consider doing a swap with other age groups. With the exception of the senior adult classes (which should also be on a main level near the worship center) you could possibly arrange for adults or youth to be further away or on other levels of the facility. Parents want their children fairly close by and they like the ease of dropping off children soon after they enter the building, so try to have preschool/children rooms in convenient areas.
It’s about the kids! When Sunday School ministry started in the late 1700’s in England, it was a ministry for children. Don’t forget the kids. When children come to Sunday School, it is often an easy step or two to also reach their parents.

If you need to review the safety and security of your kids ministry facilities, here’s a link to a document you can download.

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Richard Nations is the Church Health Team Leader at the Baptist Convention of Iowa. Reach him at rnations@bciowa.org.

Categories : 5 Weeks of Flake, Flake's Formula, Organization, Space and Facilities

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Nov

Helpful How To Resource For Bible Reading

By Richard Nations · Comments (0)

I would like to introduce a resource to you which I think will be helpful for Sunday School teachers and leaders to read. It is Read The Bible For Life: Your Guide to Understanding and Living God’s Word by George Guthrie. B & H Publishers, Union University and LifeWay Christian Resources have partnered together to publish this book and several accompanying resources to support what is being called the Read the Bible for Life campaign. The goal of the campaign is to promote Biblical literacy among the members of your church as well as those who attend.

The leaders of the campaign have found through research that only 16% of churchgoers read the Bible every day. Only 32% read the Bible at least once a week. Only 37% say that reading and studying the Bible has made a significant difference in the way they live their lives.

Personally, I remember the first year of my Christian life as a teenage boy when I read the entire Bible through in 365 days. I had been to youth camp and had been challenged to do this for the next year. I found a Bible with a Bible reading plan in the front pages and I began reading and marking off my progress. The next year, at the youth camp, I went out during personal devotions time and sat under a big oak tree and finished reading the last few chapters of Malachi and Revelation. I experienced a great sense of joy and accomplishment, not to mention a good framework of Bible history and content in those early years of my discipleship path.

So I would encourage you who are pastors and Sunday School leaders to make this opportunity available to your congregations in 2012.

The first thing you could do would be to read through George Guthrie’s book Read The Bible For Life: Your Guide to Understanding and Living God’s Word. Another thing you could do would be to structure a campaign for your church to read the Bible through in 2012.

LifeWay Christian Resources is also publishing some accompanying resources that would help with such a campaign. Those resources consist of a small group video study that surveys the Old and New Testaments in chronological order. Several discipleship groups or small Bible study groups could offer this curriculum in the coming year. There is a new B & H Bible being published called Reading God’s Story: A Chronological Daily Bible. Or if you prefer using your own Bible, there is a resource being published called A Reader’s Guide To the Bible that leads readers to read the Scriptures chronologically and gives tips for application.

I would encourage you to lead your congregation to jump in on this and encourage people to read the Scriptures through in 2012. I think you will find it will deepen the discipleship path of the people and help them understand the God whom they serve and follow.

Let’s read God’s Word through in 2012 and make it a habit. Approximately 3 chapters a day (2 Old Testament and 1 New Testament) will take you through the Bible in a year.

For more information you can visit on to www.readthebibleforlife.com.

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Richard Nations is the Church Health Strategist for the Baptist Convention of Iowa. E-mail: rnations@bciowa.org

Categories : Sunday School, Theology

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Aug

Helping People Find Their Comfortable Space in Sunday School

By Richard Nations · Comments (0)

I went to a minor league baseball game with a friend one night this past week. We cheered for our team on a pleasant summer evening. The ball park was not packed very tight and we had room to spread out a couple of seats apart. There were only a few other people sitting in our row and we didn’t have to get up once to let someone slip by us. So we enjoyed the space we
occupied in the public arena and our team won. But I could not tell you the name of another person who went to that
game with me, except for my friend. It was a public space.

David Francis, in his book Transformational Class, tells about his love for Panera Bread stores where he gets coffee and writes (pages 22-23). He may know a few of the regulars and someone may call him by name, but by and large it is a social space where he is comfortable, but yet allowed to relax and do his business.

He mentions there are also personal spaces such as a gathering of family or friends (even friends you haven’t been around in a while, but you enjoy seeing them). And most people have an intimate space, such as your own home, or a place where you share with a close personal friend or a small group that is accountable and highly relational.

Francis argues that Sunday School operates on that social space level and allows people to come to the class, attend, be somewhat comfortable, but does not require them to get too personal or intimate with the class unless they are ready to go to that level. Sunday School classes that allow people to freely come in (an “open” class environment) will help people find their comfortable space in Sunday School.

Think about the ways you can help you Sunday School classes be a safe, open and friendly space (but not too personal) for first-time guests:

Have well-marked rooms that are not too hard to find.
Have a couple of class greeters, but don’t “smother” people when they arrive.
A good cup of coffee or some orange juice available provides a “safe” way to mingle (and if you are a little timid, you
can “hide” behind that Styrofoam coffee cup).
Have plenty of seats, so folks can spread out and keep their personal bubble of space around them.
Use name tags and make introductions, but allow people the freedom to be semi-anonymous if they wish.
Give opportunity, but don’t push for a repeat commitment to attend the class again or to enroll if the person seems slightly hesitant.
Please don’t embarrass persons in this “social space” by calling them out or asking them to read out loud or pray without determining if they would be comfortable doing so.

Note: David Francis quotes Joe Myers in the book The Search to Belong for the discussion on the four kinds of spaces.

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Richard Nations is the Church Health Strategist for the Baptist Convention of Iowa, Des Moines, IA. Contact him at rnations@bciowa.org.

Categories : 31 Days of Transformational Class, Sunday School

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Jun

VBS Yields Souls for Jesus

By Richard Nations · Comments (0)

I am a big fan of Vacation Bible School. I think it is one of the most effective evangelistic tools we can use to win boys and girls and their parents to Christ.

This month at SundaySchoolLeader.com we have been blogging about the benefits of and the great advantages we have by using VBS as an effective outreach tool. Here’s a quick story to show how VBS connects with people and why your church should have a VBS or a backyard Bible club this summer.

I was pastor of a church in southeast Iowa several years ago. We always had VBS every summer. We would work hard to register unchurched kids and we made sure that we had an evangelism day and we attempted to lead the lost children (the older ones anyway) to Christ during the week. And then we followed up with these children and their parents and tried to enroll them in Sunday school and encourage them and their parents to come.

One of those little boys that came to Christ that week was named Tony. Tony accepted Jesus and his parents weren’t too interested in him being baptized because he was of a different religious background, but they said he could come to Sunday school if he wanted. He did and we ministered to his family through our church van ministry for a few years (kind of off and on attendance).

I moved away from that church and served in another state and then later moved back to Iowa to serve in the state Baptist offices as a church consultant. So one day, about ten years later, I found myself driving into southeast Iowa on a Saturday afternoon to preach at a nearby church the next day. I stopped at a hotel in this same town and spoke to a nice young fellow about checking into the hotel for the night. That day I had put on a Vacation Bible School t-shirt with the current LifeWay VBS theme on it.

So I’m standing there absent mindedly checking into the hotel and this young man says “I recognize that t-shirt. Isn’t that about Bible school?”

I said, “Yes, that is our church’s Vacation Bible School theme this year.”

He said, “I know, they had signs for that hanging up at the Baptist church here in town last week. My grandmother’s funeral was there. That church really helped our family out when she died.”

He had my interest now. So I asked him his name. And sure enough it was Tony, the little boy that had accepted Christ in Vacation Bible School a decade prior. Now he was a young man, running the front desk of the local hotel. And he and his family had been ministered to by that same church where he attended VBS many years earlier.

So of course, I got in touch with the current pastor of the church and told him the story and encouraged them to follow up on Tony and minister to him.

These are the kind of things that happen in VBS. I hope you plan to have one this summer. If not a church-wide VBS, consider having a Bible club on a picnic table in a park or in your backyard? You will invest in the souls of little boys like Tony and you will find it well worth your time and efforts.

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Richard Nations is the Church Health Strategist for the Baptist Convention of Iowa, Des Moines, Iowa. Contact him at rnations@bciowa.org for more suggestions on effective VBS ministry.

Categories : Vacation Bible School

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Apr

A Transformed Life – It Began With Sunday School

By Richard Nations · Comments (0)

Maria is a single mom in our church in West Des Moines, Iowa. She has a little boy who is in elementary school. About a year ago, our church asked the guidance counselor at the elementary school where our church meets to give us names of families needing a little help with food during the Christmas holiday season. Maria and her boy were identified to us and we helped them with a food basket. Later they started attending our Sunday school.

I met Maria in our class one day and I was surprised at the refreshing, honest questions she was asking. She would ask questions like “Why would God do that?” and “So how does a person know God?”

Our adult class encourages discussion. We sit in a circle and the conversation, questions and stories are always lively. Maria is Hispanic and was Roman Catholic. She knew of God in only a distant way. After several months of studying the Scriptures and hearing the Word preached, she responded to the gospel invitation one Sunday morning to ask Jesus to come into her life in a personal way.

She has been baptized and is actively sharing her new faith where she works and with her extended family. It began in our Sunday school class where open discussion and real-life application is always stressed as the Bible study unfolds each week. Our class members are a diverse mix of long-time believers and brand new seekers of the Lord. We have a couple of ladies from a halfway house attending. A few of the members struggle with addictions. Some of our folks have been believers for a long time. But in the class all the walls come down and the discussion flows around the Bible passages. Our teacher is quick to tell stories that reveal his own honest struggles. As he often says, “We are on this journey together.” His stories of spiritual transformation are often followed with honest stories and questions from the class.

Are you seeing lives transformed in your Sunday school ministry? Encourage members to share, to ask honest questions. Don’t be in a hurry to always finish the Bible passage for the day. Help your class be a discussion-oriented class. Reflect on what the Bible passages mean for our lives. And by all means, reach out to the lost, those struggling with life, those who hurt, who are hungry and need the Lord in their lives.

Are you seeing lives transformed in your Sunday school ministry? Leave us a comment and tell us about spiritual transformation in your church and class.

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Richard Nations is the Church Health Team Leader for the Baptist Convention of Iowa, Des Moines, Iowa. Contact him at rnations@bciowa.org.

Categories : Sunday School, Transformation

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