CONTENT

– From the Editor 

– Transforming Youth - The Road to Remember

– Book Review  – Ishmael My Brother 

– Classified Ads

From the Editor,

In my last issue of MIM, I mentioned that we had a new columnist joining us. In this issue of MIM Ezine I'd like to welcome Shane Parker, our new youth ministry columnist.  Shane's column is called Transforming YOUth (with the emphasis on you.)   Welcome Shane. We all look forward to your valuable insight.  It's exciting to see how God is using different individuals with unique gifts and interests to minister to others in ministry. 

We've grown so much that we've got  too much info to jam into a once-a- month edition of MIM so this marks an official change for us. If all goes as planned, we will now have bi-monthly edition of MIM in order to accommodate our growing contributor base and resources. 

I also wanted to remind everyone that you should be getting an email notice (if all goes well) that you've been re-subscribed to the MIM ezine.  This is something we have to do in order transfer over to our new newsletter management system. If, for some reason, you stop getting our issues, then just go to the MIM website and re-subscribe yourself.  Be sure to add us to your Internet Service Provider's "white list" so we are not filtered out as Spammers, as well as checking your Spam controls on your computer to make sure our issues don't land in your Spam folders.  If you still can't get our ezine, then you can read it in our archives on the website. We are sorry for the inconvenience, but it is getting harder and harder for legitimate businesses and organizations to use email due to the people who continue to abuse it.

I pray that God will bless your ministry endeavors this month,

Teena Stewart

Consultant/Editor for Ministry in Motion

---

Books and Resources to Help You In Ministry

Find books and resources to help you in ministry on MIM's new Bookshop page.  Topics include:

• discovering your spiritual gifts, skills and abilities,

•  getting volunteers involved in ministry, organizing and promoting ministry 

• pastor appreciation

• dealing with discouragement

• creating a benevolence team

http://www.ministryinmotion.net/MIMBookshop_Books_Christians.html

--
Transforming YOUth

The Road to Remember: Getting Your Students to Retain What You Teach

By Shane W. Parker

“They just don’t remember!” How many times have you recited this mantra in frustration? You’ve poured your heart, effort, and time into a lesson that communicates life-changing truth, only to realize the next day that students have already forgotten it. Reasons for this include: competing interests, inattentive hearts and minds, or your teaching strategy and approach. 

Wait a minute, how did that last one get in there? Let’s be honest, as student ministers, we are greatly concerned with content-retention, application, and overall understanding in the lives of our students.  However, most us never give serious thought to a long-term strategy that will make these characteristics a reality. Here are a few foundational strategies to making sure that our students get on the road to remember:

1. Get to know the passengers. An accepted, yet overlooked, element of teaching for retention is to understand your students. Knowing what your students already comprehend will improve your ability to teach them what they do not yet know. Many times we assume that students know certain truths because of their age; however, if assumptions are dangerous, this one is lethal. In order to have an indicator of what they know, test them. 

Give them a simple assessment at the beginning of a content unit, and especially at the beginning of your ministry. By evaluating their current knowledge, you can better understand what you need to emphasize. This evaluation can happen in an informal interview, or a paper-based exam. Make it fun and non-threatening. What’s better than a test for which you don’t get graded! 

An organizer can be anything that allows students to see, in advance, where the road is going to lead. A common type of organizer used each week in many churches is a sermon outline. The big difference between an outline and a traditional organizer is that an organizer should offer something which the student doesn’t yet know. This allows the student to see where she is going, and it gives her categories into which she can place the information you are giving her. An organizer could be a brief outline of the unit of study, a multimedia graph that depicts the categories of study, or it could simply be “The Big Idea” of the study unit. 

For example, at the beginning of a study of “Christ in the Old Testament,” I handed out a sheet of electric lime green paper with the text of Genesis 3:15 on it. I had a student read the verse, and we spent one session understanding God’s promise of the “seed,” and the nature of the Old Testament in light of that promise. After that meeting, students were pumped about following the promise of God and how he was going to fulfill it. 

They discovered that there were now four Sunday School answers that may be employed at almost all times: God, Jesus, Love, and the Seed. In all seriousness, they knew that we were following the progression of God’s central promise, and we were studying the Old Testament as it pertained to the emergence of the promised Seed -- Jesus. 

It is crucial that you refer to the organizer, in this case it was the lime green sheet, or simply Genesis 3:15, on an ongoing basis. This leads to the next tip.

3. Use the same road signs over and over again. My college mentor always said that, “Repetition is the handmaid of learning.” What he meant is simply that in order for you, or your students, to retain information for long-term use, the truth must be repeated. 

Repeat the central truth until you think you have repeated it to death! A good rule of thumb is to repeat the central idea or truth around which you are focusing your teaching until students begin stating the idea or phrase when unprompted. 

During my days in a previous student ministry, our brief statement of purpose was “Developing Ministries throughout the World.” During a two-year study of the Acts of the Apostles, I mentioned that statement of purpose, as it became the central idea of the teaching series, almost every Wednesday night for two years, usually multiple times. 

One day, I asked one of our most committed students, who had been there for almost every session, what he thought about the vision statement. He said, “I don’t know what the vision statement is.” 

Let’s do the math. If I had only mentioned the statement once on each Wednesday night, I would have stated it 104 times during that study. I usually mentioned it a couple of times on Wednesday nights, and Sunday mornings.  The figure is probably closer to roughly 400, give or take a few! Although we may think we repeat a concept or statement too frequently, in truth we cannot repeat a central truth too often.

4. Some stops along the way deserve more time.   When teaching through “The Doctrine of Scripture,” with my students, my inclination was to just get through it in three weeks. After gauging my students’ retention, we eventually spent three months in the study! The difference was that two years later when we were studying Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, the students (on their own) made application of the categories of general and special revelation as noted in Romans 1. 

Some of them offered Psalm 19 as an Old Testament reference to this distinction. This amount of retention probably would not have taken place if we had covered the forms of revelation in one session. Lingering on the nature of the Bible allowed them time to devote profitable time to this foundational aspect of teaching. 

You can only linger for so long on a topic or element of study.  However, not lingering long enough may be more costly when you get to your destination and realize you left some students back at the first rest stop.

These tips are not exhaustive, and they are not meant to replace acknowledgement of and dependency on the Holy Spirit to establish and perform the teaching task in you. If you devote prayerful time to analyzing your teaching approach, the lives of your students, and the organization of your teaching, you may find that “the road” to teaching success becomes a lot less bumpy. Enjoy the ride!

Shane Parker has been involved in multiple areas of student ministry for close to a decade. He has served as a Student Minister in North and South Carolina, and as a student event and conference speaker in the Carolinas, Tennessee, Virginia, Florida, Pennsylvania, Washington, Utah, Wyoming, and Southeast Asia. He is a graduate of Columbia International University (B.A.); Columbia Seminary (M.A.); and Southeastern Seminary (M.Div.). Shane and his wife, Lydia, reside in Louisville, Kentucky, where he is currently engaged in Ph.D. studies in the areas of Education and Student Ministry. He has a central passion to equip students, and student pastors, for the uncompromising glorification of God in intensive study and ministry. If you would like to schedule Shane for an event, or just talk about life and ministry, you may reach him by e-mail: swp76@msn.com. 

---