I feel as if I’m bribing the 5th/6th grade students to come to Ascent because this week and last week because I just gave out cash. No reason (at least for now, I’ll talk about that next week) but it’s interesting to see their reaction. They want the money…they don’t know what to do with it, but they want the money. The purpose of this series to get them thinking more about what they do with their money. This is our basic format for the series.
I won’t lie, weeks 1- 4 are pretty easy, I’ve been using material from the past, info we’ve discussed as a staff and put them into different presentations. Those weeks are pretty solid. The difficult part is week 5… helping them put this stuff into practice. It’s not always clear how that’s supposed to work. We can give them little banks where they can put God’s plan into practice, we can have them sign commitment cards to show them the seriousness of the issue, but in the end it’s up to them what they will do with the money God gives them.
Our hopes is that by the time they graduate high school this will be ingrained in their mind. So we will talk about this while they are in 5th grade, again in 6th grade, again in Resurrection and all the way through Uprising. We’ll also tackle this in small groups and Confirmation to really help them see that their relationship with money strongly affects the relationship they have with God.
As a staff, as an individual we’ve seen what the love of money can do to relationships, we’ve seen what it can do to families and what it can do to one’s faith…we want to make sure that these future generations never have to fear that.