Christian Education — Unit 9: Bible Learning Activities

The seven methods of Units 7 and 8 are powerful, but they all use the same channel: words. Lecture is words. Discussion is words. Story is words. Question is words. Even experiential learning is words plus an action that the learner reports back in — words. The Christian Education teacher who has only words is missing several other channels through which God himself has been teaching his people for four thousand years. Stones in a riverbed. A meal eaten standing up with bitter herbs. A song sung after the Red Sea closed. A scroll eaten by a prophet to teach a city.

The LORD never relied on words alone. He gave Israel objects to handle, meals to eat, songs to sing, dramas to enact, and crafts to make. He commanded the people to bind his words on their hands and on their gates and to teach the next generation by the things their hands had touched. The whole Old Testament is a textbook of what we now call Bible learning activities: anything the learner does, sees, hears, or makes that brings the Word of God into a channel besides the ear alone.

Six sections follow. Section I asks what activities are and why they matter for every age. Sections II, III, and IV take three large categories — the object lesson, drama and enactment, and music and memorization — with one rich biblical example for each. Section V handles drawing, mapping, charts, and crafts as a fourth family of activities. Section VI brings the families together and asks how the teacher chooses among them. The whole unit is preparation for Unit 10, where the children's sermon will gather every method and every activity into five concentrated minutes for the smallest learners in the room.

A Bible learning activity is anything that brings the lesson into the body of the learner. The lecture brings the lesson into the ear. The discussion brings the lesson into the mouth. An activity brings the lesson into the hand, the eye, the singing voice, the moving foot, the made object that goes home with the child and sits on a windowsill for a year.

Three reasons make activities matter. First, the learner is a body, not a brain. God did not make a brain in a jar; he made a person. A learner who has used his hands to feel a piece of unleavened bread or his eyes to trace the route of Paul's missionary journey has been engaged at a depth the lecture alone cannot reach. Second, memory has many doors. The verse memorized in song is recalled twenty years later when the verse memorized in silence is forgotten. The map drawn by the child's own hand is remembered when the map shown on a screen is gone. The activity does not replace teaching; it deepens the teaching that has already been done. Third, some lessons cannot be told without being shown. The doctrine of substitutionary atonement is taught best by a Passover meal, which is exactly why the LORD instituted a Passover meal. The covenant faithfulness of God is taught best by a remembered crossing of the Jordan, which is exactly why the LORD commanded the stones.

It is sometimes said that activities are only for children. They are mostly for children, because children learn best through their bodies and their senses. But adults also learn from activity. Adults will remember the missions trip they took for forty years. Adults will remember the prayer journal they kept for one season. Adults will remember the hymn they sang at a funeral when every word of every sermon they have ever heard has faded. The teacher who refuses to use activities with adults is treating adults as if they had grown out of being made of body and soul, which they have not.

One warning is needed. An activity is not a substitute for the Word of God. The teacher who fills the hour with crafts and games and forgets to open the Bible has thrown a party, not taught a lesson. The activity must always serve the truth, not replace it. The aim of the lesson, written in Unit 6, is the master; the activity is the servant; the truth is the apple, and the activity is one more silver picture in which the apple is shown.

Joshua 4 contains the most beautiful object lesson in the Old Testament. The Israelites had just crossed the Jordan on dry ground. The waters had heaped up while the priests carrying the ark stood in the riverbed. As the last child stepped onto the western shore, the LORD spoke to Joshua: "Take you twelve men out of the people, out of every tribe a man, and command ye them, saying, Take you hence out of the midst of Jordan, out of the place where the priests' feet stood firm, twelve stones, and ye shall carry them over with you, and leave them in the lodging place, where ye shall lodge this night" (Joshua 4:2–3).

Joshua picked the twelve men and they obeyed. Each tribe was represented by a stone. Each man bent down in the wet riverbed, reached for a stone, and carried it on his shoulder to Gilgal, where they were piled in a memorial. Then the LORD spoke the line that has shaped Christian Education ever since: "That this may be a sign among you, that when your children ask their fathers in time to come, saying, What mean these stones? Then ye shall answer them, That the waters of Jordan were cut off before the ark of the covenant of the LORD" (Joshua 4:6–7).

Notice every element of a perfect object lesson in those verses. The object was real — twelve actual stones from the riverbed itself, not a model, not a picture. The object was visible — piled in the open at Gilgal, where any child walking past would see them. The object provoked a question — the children would ask, What mean these stones? Without the question, the lesson would be a lecture again; with the question, the children themselves would open the door of their own learning. And the answer the parents gave was specific and historical — not a general moral, but the actual story of what God had done at that exact place. Object, visibility, question, specific answer. Four elements; one lesson that worked for generations.

The Christian Education teacher who uses an object lesson learns the same architecture. Bring a real object whenever possible. Make it visible to every learner. Let the object provoke a question, even if the teacher has to plant the question in the room. Then answer the question with a specific, scriptural truth, not a vague moral. A loaf of unleavened bread brought to the table is a better object lesson on the holiness of God than ten paragraphs about leaven. A grain of wheat held up between the teacher's fingers is a better object lesson on the resurrection than a long argument about death and life. The thing itself, in the hand, will preach what no sermon can preach.

Some lessons cannot be told. They have to be done. The Passover meal is the longest-running, most carefully designed Bible learning activity in the history of God's people. Exodus 12 records its institution on the night God's people came out of Egypt. They roasted the lamb. They put blood on the doorposts. They ate standing up, with their loins girt, their shoes on their feet, their staves in their hands — ready to leave. They ate unleavened bread because they had no time to let the bread rise. They ate bitter herbs because their lives in Egypt had been bitter. Every action of the meal carried a meaning. Every meaning was tied to a moment in the salvation God had just performed.

And then God did the most striking thing of all. He commanded that the meal be repeated every year, forever, with the same elements, in the same order, on the same calendar date, until the end of the age. "And it shall come to pass, when your children shall say unto you, What mean ye by this service? That ye shall say, It is the sacrifice of the LORD'S passover, who passed over the houses of the children of Israel in Egypt" (Exodus 12:26–27). The same line as Joshua 4. The children would ask. The parents would answer. The meal itself would be the question that opened the answer.

Notice why drama and enactment matter so much for teaching. The Passover did not just describe the Exodus; it put the children inside the Exodus. The child standing at the table with bread that had no time to rise was, for an hour, a child of the Exodus, a child who had been delivered. He felt in his body what his ancestors had felt in their bodies. The doctrine of redemption was not given to him as an idea; it was given to him as an experience he could remember every year for the rest of his life. By the time he was a grandfather, the Passover had been impressed on him so many times that the meal itself was a kind of teaching unit running through every Jewish home in the world.

The Christian Education teacher cannot institute new ordinances. The Lord's Supper, given to us on the night before the cross, is the New Testament's continuing Passover. But the teacher can use small dramas every week. Have the children stand and act out the parting of the Red Sea. Have the youth play the parts of Joseph and his brothers and let them feel the moment of forgiveness. Have the adults read aloud the speech of Joshua at Shechem and let one of them choose for the household. Drama is not theater; drama is theology with the body included. The teacher who uses it well will form learners whose deepest doctrines are remembered in their muscles, not just in their minds.

Of all the methods of teaching God has used with his people, the one that has stuck longest in human memory is the song. Words alone fade. Words set to music last for generations. The first sermon ever preached in praise of the LORD, on the day Pharaoh's army drowned, was a sung sermon. "Then sang Moses and the children of Israel this song unto the LORD, and spake, saying, I will sing unto the LORD, for he hath triumphed gloriously: the horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea" (Exodus 15:1). All Israel sang. Miriam led the women with timbrels and dances. The deliverance was preached the only way a national deliverance can be preached — by the whole nation, in unison, with melody.

The LORD knew how memory works. Forty years later, just before Moses died, he gave Israel one more song. Deuteronomy 32 is sometimes called the Song of Moses; it sums up the whole covenant story, the whole history of Israel's rebellion, the whole faithfulness of the LORD. And the LORD said to Moses, "Now therefore write ye this song for you, and teach it the children of Israel: put it in their mouths, that this song may be a witness for me against the children of Israel" (Deuteronomy 31:19). Notice the verb. Put it in their mouths. Not put it in their books. Not put it in their minds. Put it in the place where words can be sung, repeated, passed from one generation to the next. A book can be lost. A mind can forget. A song in the mouth lasts.

The whole Old Testament is filled with songs put into the mouths of God's people. The Psalms are 150 songs, given to the church in a volume bigger than most of the prophets, because the LORD knew his people would need to sing what they could not always remember. Hannah sang. Mary sang. The angels sang at Bethlehem. Paul and Silas sang in the Philippian jail at midnight. Heaven sings in Revelation. The Christian Education teacher who never sings with the learners is teaching against the pattern of the entire Bible.

The same is true of memorization. The verse memorized in childhood is the verse that surfaces in the heart at sixty years old when life is hardest and a Bible is not in the room. The Christian Education teacher who builds memorization into the lesson — even one verse a week, recited with motions for children, sung for any age, repeated by the whole class in unison — is putting the Word into a place where it cannot be lost. A song and a memorized verse cost almost nothing to teach, and they will outlast every clever activity the teacher could design. The teacher who learns to use them well has gained a method that has been working for the church since the day it sang the first hymn at the seaside.

Some lessons land best when the learner has drawn them. The fourth family of activities is the family of the hands at work: drawing, mapping, charting, and craft. Each of them takes a truth that arrived as words and presses it through the learner's eyes and hands until it comes out the other side as something the learner himself has made. The making is the learning.

Drawing is the simplest of the family and the most underused. A child handed a sheet of paper and asked to draw the day Jesus calmed the storm has to think about the storm. He has to choose where the boat will be, how big the waves will be, where Jesus will stand, what the disciples' faces will look like. By the time the drawing is finished, the child has done the work of imagining the scene that he could not have done by hearing it. Adults can draw too — not always pictures, but diagrams. Ask an adult class to draw the structure of the church at Antioch from Acts 11–13, and they will think harder about the text than any lecture could have made them think.

Mapping is the geographer's version of drawing, and it pays back enormous dividends in Christian Education. The child who has drawn his own map of Paul's missionary journeys remembers Antioch, Iconium, Lystra, and Derbe in a way the child who has only heard them named never will. Maps are concrete; they give shape to a story that otherwise floats. The teacher who keeps a Bible-lands map on the wall and points to it during every lesson is doing for the learners' geography what the song does for their memory: turning what was abstract into something the eye can find.

Charts work the same way for time and structure. A simple chart of the kings of Israel and Judah, side by side, with each king's name and one fact about him, will fix into a learner's mind in twenty minutes what twenty years of preaching may not have fixed. Family trees from Genesis. Timelines of the prophets. Side-by-side comparisons of Matthew and Luke. Each of them takes the abstract structure of the Bible and lays it out where the eye can see it whole. The eye sees in patterns. The chart gives the eye a pattern to see.

Crafts bring the lesson home. The child who has built a small clay tabernacle has thought about the tabernacle. The youth who has folded a paper boat and named it the Mayflower while studying Pilgrim history has done what no lecture could do. The adult who has copied a verse of Scripture in his own handwriting onto a card and pinned it above the kitchen sink has put the verse in front of his own eyes for the rest of the year. None of these crafts is sophisticated. None of them is the point in itself. Each of them is a small handle by which the learner can pick up the lesson long after the teacher has gone home.

Four families have been laid out: the object lesson, drama and enactment, music and memorization, and the work of the hands. The teacher with all four in his kit must choose, the same way he chose among the seven methods of Units 7 and 8. The choice is shaped by the same three factors: the lesson, the learner, and the moment.

The lesson still comes first. A passage about the temple may call for a craft (build a small tabernacle) or a chart (map the courts). A passage about salvation by the cross may call for an object (a small wooden cross handed out) or a drama (read the dialogue of the centurion at Calvary). A passage about praise may call for a song. A passage about the conquest of Canaan may call for a map. The shape of the text often suggests the shape of the activity, if the teacher is paying attention. The activity that fits the text turns the text into something the learner can hold; the activity that fights the text turns the lesson into a craft hour with a Bible verse on top.

The learner shapes the choice second. Children love everything in this unit and would happily do all four families every Sunday. Youth are more selective — they will sing, but they may resist crafts they consider babyish; they will love drama and discussion of cases. Adults will tolerate or even welcome activities chosen with respect for their dignity. An adult will gladly draw a diagram of an epistle's argument; the same adult would refuse to color a paper sheep. The teacher who knows the learners chooses activities they will not feel insulted by.

The moment shapes the choice third. The opening of the lesson is often best with a song or an object lesson, to gather attention. The body of the lesson can use a map, a chart, or a drama, to develop the truth. The closing can use a memorized verse, a hymn, or a small craft to send home, to fix the lesson in the learner's body and house.

One last note. An activity badly done is worse than no activity at all. The craft that takes thirty minutes and leaves no time for the Bible has stolen the lesson. The drama that becomes silliness and never returns to the truth has buried the lesson. The song chosen for entertainment instead of instruction has wasted the lesson. The teacher prepares the activity with the same care he prepares the lesson plan, because the activity is part of the lesson plan. Apples of gold rest in pictures of silver. The bowl matters because the apple matters more.

Nine units lie behind us. The course began with the calling of the Christian Education teacher and the example of the Master Teacher. It moved through the learners and the learning environment. It built the lesson plan and filled it with seven methods. It has now added the four families of Bible learning activities, and the teacher who has worked through this whole course is no longer empty-handed.

The teacher's quiver is full. There are arrows of lecture and discussion, of story and question, of question and answer, of case study and experiential learning, of object and drama and song and craft. There are aims by which to choose, plans by which to deliver, and prayers by which to depend on the One who is the only real Teacher in the room. The teacher who has done the work of these nine units is ready, by God's grace, to go and do the work for which the LORD called him in Unit 1.

One last unit remains. Unit 10 is the capstone of the entire course, and the form of the capstone is the children's sermon — five minutes spoken to the smallest learners in the room, on a Sunday morning when the rest of the congregation is watching and listening. The children's sermon is small enough that every method and every activity can be tested in it. It is short enough that the teacher cannot waste a sentence. It is high enough in stakes that the lazy teacher will fail and the prepared teacher will preach a small sermon that the church will remember for thirty years.

Unit 10 will gather all of this together. The aim of Unit 6, the methods of Units 7 and 8, the activities of Unit 9, the learners of Unit 4, the environment of Unit 5, the Master Teacher of Unit 3, the teacher of Unit 2, and the calling of Unit 1 — all of it converges in five minutes of speaking to a child. The children's sermon is the smallest unit of Christian Education and the truest test of every other unit in the course. The teacher who can preach a good children's sermon can preach. The teacher who cannot is still in training.