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How Simply
Jesus© came to be
I
am not a born evangelist. My husband is. I’m mostly just a Sunday
School teacher who loves kids and was terrified of doing evangelism. But
I’ve had lots of evangelism experience. My grandmother taught Child
Evangelism when I was a kid and I was trained in CEF more than twenty-three
years ago. I was also trained in Evangelism Explosion, Campus Crusade,
and Evantell. I went to Youth For Christ in high school, attended two
Christian colleges (Wheaton and Trinity), taught Sunday School and Bible
studies for 30 years. My favorite things to teach are Old Testament overview
and Life of Christ. I could teach up a storm. If anyone could get to heaven
by teaching, I would surely have accomplished that by now. But that is
simply not the case. Somewhere along the line I needed to be able to present
the gospel clearly to people and pray with them. I was terrified and unsure
when it came to that part. Eight years ago I was given the task of developing
an evangelism program for kids. Me, the reluctant evangelist.
I
came to the project with some very strong prejudices. I had two children
late in life. When I found out the second was going to be a boy, I prayed
that he would be a great evangelist (since I never would be) and named
him after one of my favorite. But, alas, David was born with Down’s
Syndrome and is also deaf. All that schooling and theology and Bible teaching
was facing a challenge. How do I bring the gospel down simple enough for
even David to understand it? I went back to school for two years and studied
language development and literacy. Teaching someone to read and write
who can’t hear or speak is challenge. But it certainly taught me
about basic communication. I spent the next ten years teaching teachers
how to communicate with special needs kids. Those are the kinds of serious
concerns I brought to this project.
I
wanted a class that would be open to everyone, of every level, regular
kids, handicap kids, slow learners, non-readers; a class where everyone
would be welcome and meet with success. That meant no homework, no fill-in
the blank, no busy work, no lecturing. I wanted everyone to be actively
involved in the learning, never bored but fully engaged. The vocabulary
had to be simple or explained clearly and checked for understanding. The
best way I could assess if everything worked was if the students could
teach it back to me. I knew that the average attention span is seven minutes
for kids 10-12 years of age and only 12 minutes max for adults. My goal
would not be to “get through a curriculum” but to love, teach
and disciple students. I thought it might be good to listen to kids first
and see what they know and think before I presumed to teach them. So,
I listened a lot, and learned a lot. The things I found out I continued
to teach in other places to see if they worked there too. They did.
It was a two year journey of discovery in how to teach evangelism to kids,
then teachers, then pastors, then missions, then teens, then Christian
schools, then Sunday Schools, then intergenerational, then crusades, then
nursing homes, and for special holidays. It had gotten way out of
hand. Certainly out of the box. It worked everywhere. What was the deal?
Going back and looking at the basic assumptions with which I had started
helped to clarify the overwhelming response: keep it simple enough for
a child to understand, even a child with special needs.
Goals
for Simply Jesus©
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