Teach Them How To Learn
For tonight’s small group, I asked my guys what questions they had about religion, life, difficulties, etc. We honed in on one question, “Does a good God actually send people to hell?” For our purposes of the night’s lesson, the question and the answer weren’t as important as the process of learning how to find the answer. We landed on a verse that answered our question through collaboration and doing a search using an online Bible.
I am saddened about students who walk away from their seemingly deep faith when they graduate from high school. My hope is by teaching them to study and own their faith they will be less likely to fall away when circumstances of life change. Tonight was fun, but ended on a pretty serious note. I drilled home the fact that once they hit college everything will change. It might be for the better or worse spiritually. They need to nail down the what and why of what they believe before they graduate.
In response to the question in the comments to this post, here is a link to the HABITS production pack. It’s very helpful to get your students to own their faith and continue living it out after they leave your ministry:
HABITS Production Pack:
HABITS Super Series:
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Filed under: Lesson Helpers
Hey Dennis – what are some things that you have done to help students make that transition to college and help with what Fuller Youth Institute calls “Sticky faith”. Love to hear back from you!
Adam J
Adam,
Thanks for your question. While I am not familiar with Fuller’s “Sticky Faith”, we do have a strategy to continue growing in their faith beyond high school.
While they are in our high school ministry, we make discipleship tools available to them. We call them HABITS which stands for: Hang time with God, Accountability with another believer, Bible memorization, Involvement with the church body, Tithing, and Studying scripture.
We have a resource for each one of the HABITS except for involvement with the church body. For that one, we just encourage them to go.
Doing the HABITS is voluntary for our students. However, we do publicize them heavily throughout the year at our weekend services, in small groups and as part of our summer camps and discipleship retreat.
Dennis