Church
New Study: Young Adults Leave the Church between 18 and 22.
According to LifeWay Research, two-thirds of young adults who regularly attend church stop attending between the ages of 18 and 22. First off, they had to do a study to figure that out?
I found a link to that article today at the NAMB Center For Missional Research. It reminded me of a conversation I had this past weekend on a related topic. I was talking with a local youth pastor about his youth group (my son attends — he is the only middle schooler at our church). We were talking about how different his group is than many others in town. His Wednesday night event centers around Bible study. They are currently working their way through Romans. Most of the youth groups seem to focus on entertaining kids, and throwing in a quick devotional to “sanctify” the evening’s event. The entertainment model was what I saw at several churches when I was in high school (and even college).
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Small Group Inductive Bible Study
The last couple of posts have been about the inductive Bible study that our small group is doing. As a starting point, an inductive study is a great tool to help an individual study a passage of Scripture. It is also a tool that can facilitate a small group discussion of a passage. There are several ways that small groups can do studies. Within our church, we have small groups where one person leads the study, with a lot of teaching interspersed with some question and answers. We have also done some videos where the group watches a video and then someone facilitates a discussion of the video. A couple of groups have done studies of particular books. In fact, we have a group in our church that is doing a study of Randy Alcorn’s book, The Treasure Principle.
I think that in some ways, doing an inductive study facilitates even more discussion and participation than most of these other types of studies. Here is why: › Continue reading
Inductive Bible Study - followup
We had the first small group meeting tonight to actually go through the Inductive Bible Study. We had a much smaller group than normal. Only 7 of us were there. Two families were traveling, another had other plans with family.
We are studying 2 Peter. We looked at 2 Pet. 1:1-15. It was probably a little too long to study all at once. We would have done better to just cover up through verse 11. I think that the study went well. I am definitely out of practice at leading this type of study. I will need to brush up on my skills. There is some really good stuff in that passage about maturity, the imporance of pursuing maturity, and the motivation to seek maturity.
I really enjoyed the process of preparing. I hope that preparing to lead will help me be more consistent studying the Bible for myself.
Inductive Bible Study
When I was in college, I was active in InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. Through my involvement with IVCF, I learned how to do an inductive Bible study. It is a great tool to allow a passage of Scripture to speak for itself.
Fast forward to today. In our small group at church, we are getting ready to start an inductive Bible study. My co-leader and I thougth that it would be good to teach our group this tool as a way to study the Bible. We introduced the topic last night at our meeting. It turns out that none of the other participants had ever been taught how to do an inductive Bible study. I wonder whether anyone has ever taught any of them how to study the Bible other than to just read a passage? › Continue reading
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