Grade School Revivals
About ten years ago, a mission team with doctors and children’s teachers from Alabama had an unscheduled day on their hands. The accompanying missionary thought to ask the director of the rural grade school if he would like the team to spend the day in the school, serving the children. As an unforeseen result, that school continued with weekly Bible studies under a local volunteer. And soon other schools were seeking the same kind of help. This year, national volunteers teach the Bible to school children in over 1,000 classrooms every week in a movement that is spreading fast in three Central American countries. The pace is increasing, and the current goal is to be teaching 100,000 children within three years at the most. This, like other Church on the March ministries, seemed to begin by accident, but the Holy Spirit made the accident happen and showed God’s obedient people how to follow through.
This year, a school in one of the most crime-ridden towns in Guatemala, started the program. Within weeks, the school contacted the Church on the March. “Can you also send us (Read more) books from previous years? We want to teach the Bible every day and not just once a week!” Everyone is amazed at the powerful effect that even one Bible lesson a week has on the children. The first schools to enter the program now have graduates that studied the Bible every year they were in school. Many children are bringing their parents to the churches, and communities are changing visibly as a result. The lessons are non-sectarian—they simply tell the Bible stories and lead the children to talk about what the lessons mean. They not only lead the students to Christ, but lead them to divine standards of living. The goal in all Biblical disciple-making is saved lives in the full transforming power of Christ.
For many decades, religion was not taught in the public schools. Central America, however, was sliding into a chaos of criminality in which many schools have become places of juvenile terror. Nothing seemed possible to stop this until school directors began to pay attention to what had resulted from that first rural school and others that had followed its examples. The classes are called “Ethics and Morality,” and their sole base is the Scripture. The Church on the March already had in its disciple-making library a series of 208 “Bible stories for all ages,” covering the entire Bible. These are highly interactive studies that can be taught at every grade level. At first, the teachers were volunteers from the churches in the community. Now, increasingly, faith-inspired teachers in the schools themselves teach the lessons that are now a formal part of the school curricula.
The plans and materials for the Schools for Christ effort are available for free publication by any Christian ministry that chooses to use them. The lessons are self-explained, not needing special teachers’ guides. They are printed on both sides of a half-sheet of paper. Even the financially weakest organizations can afford to teach thousands of children every week—transforming whole communities in the process. The Schools for Christ effort is strongly supported by Guatemala’s National Women’s Missionary Union and the national convention. Other Christian organizations are joining the effort.
