Building Boys and Growing Girls postscript

My talk to the GEMS group went very well. If you haven't already, you can read it in four installments here, here, here and then here.

A lot of the questions people asked were about how to teach older children (ones who can read with relative fluency) to study the Bible for themselves. I have some ideas, but first, here's our latest memory verse from Acts 8:30-31 & 35:

Then Philip ran up to the chariot and heard the man reading Isaiah the prophet. "Do you understand what you are reading?" Philip asked.
"How can I," he said, "unless someone explains it to me?" So he invited Philip to come up and sit with him. ...
Then Philip began with that very passage of Scripture and told him the good news about Jesus.

We read this story last Monday in Circle Time, and Joshua and Anna already have the passage memorised. Even though I knew it was important when I decided to include it as one of our memory verses, it has only been this past weekend that it hit home to me. On Friday, I did my talk, and then we went to the Perth Children's Convention all day on Saturday. The speaker was Tony Willis, who is the assistant to the Bishop of Woollongong, and has trained workers for youth and children's ministry. A lot of the convention sessions revisited things I had considered when writing my talk. Other things were new. But from both of these events I was reminded that our children will not understand the truth about Jesus Christ if we do not explain it to them.