Why I LOVE teaching the Bible to middle school students

A lively bunch, sometimes even wild, middle school kids are not everyone’s favorites.  But here are three reasons why they are a joy to me.

• Middle school students are energetic.  They have not yet developed that jaded, sleep-deprived look of the 17 year old.  They are awake and full of life.  Kids this age love to move, act things out, speak up, and play games. 
• Middle school students are ready to learn.  For the first time in their lives, they are not in with the little kids.  In school they are now carrying around heavy textbooks on everything from Spanish to Biology, and absorbing information on all kinds of things, both academic and social.  They want to be treated as more mature than those elementary kids, even though they may not act that way. 
• And middle school minds think “outside the box.”   They are still discovering what the world thinks is normal, so at times they come up with completely novel ways of thinking.  They ask outrageous questions.  They wonder wild things.

It turns out that middle school kids really DO want to know what the Bible says.  After all, this is where all those great stories came from – like Noah’s ark, David and Goliath, Christmas, and Easter- the ones they learned about in Sunday School as children.  I love to let them see those well-known stories in the Bible, in context, and introduce them to new characters.   The quick creative energy in a group of middle school kids makes it a joy to dig into scriptures with them.   They are eager to find out if what they learned as children holds up in the world of grown-ups.  

If you enjoy teaching middle school kids from the greatest book on the planet, you need good study materials.  That can be a challenge, since I have found much of the available curricula for this age group are either too childish or too adult.  Don’t shy away from giving them some meat.  Middle school kids are looking for substance.  Encourage them to get INTO the Word.  Look at the