Going for Gold with God's Love
How do you motivate African children to study and memorize God’s Word? At Tenwek Hospital, we have accomplished this by with encouraging their love for competing on a team.
In 2013, nearly 200 children from several local schools, orphanages, and churches joined the fun of our Children’s Bible Quizzing program. Five or six children form a team and compete in 20-question quizzes over Bible chapters studied with their team over a few weeks. Each team is assigned a coach who studies with them, asks them questions, and listens to them quote verses they have memorized, word perfect.
In keeping with an Olympic theme, our quizzers earned gold, silver, or bronze medals at the end of the season by memorizing 50, 40, or 30 verses, respectively, from the book of Acts. Nearly 80 children earned gold medals after quoting, word perfect, all 50 verses we assigned.
We added a second site for the competitions last year at a school/orphanage called Mosop Mission School. One girl who quizzed at Mosop School this year has a remarkable story that the headmaster (principal) told me during one of the competitions. Mary (not her real name) was raised in a Muslim home in Kenya and came in contact with missionaries who were working for Africa Gospel Church and were showing the Jesus film. She was in early grade school at the time and went home full of thoughts of who this Jesus might be. In the middle of the night, she had a vision of Jesus, who came to her and talked to her in a loving way. The next day, she went back to the missionary pastor and told him that the same Jesus in the film had come to her and asked her to follow Him. She gave her life to Christ and then heard of a special school in our area that caters to missionary kids and kids from mission fields in the church.
Mary started attending and became interested in the Bible quizzing program last year. I noticed that she was so full of joy and excitement over quoting scripture and studying the book of Acts. It was great to tell Mary (after the quiz competition) that God must have something very special in mind for her because she had such a personal invitation from the Lord to come follow Him.
Please pray that more children will become involved in our Bible quizzing program and be impacted by God’s powerful, life-changing Word. We are hoping for more than 250 kids in the program for 2014.
PRAY: Join the Bible quizzing team. Over this next year, each time you open your Bible, remember this group of kids in Kenya working hard to hide God’s Word in their hearts and say a prayer for them.
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