Show and tell

Do you like browsing for good ideas? Do you have material of your own that you think others might like to use, too? If so, the Show and Tell website is a good place to look. It's a place where people who are committed to teaching the Bible faithfully to children and young people send their ideas and teaching material so that the rest of us can grab them. The site is run by very busy volunteers - so it's not updated as often as they'd like - but there's some cracking stuff there. Do check it out.

Heard any good talks recently?

If not, there are some cracking ones available from our latest Bible-Centred Youthworker Conference. There's Mark Ashton on Romans 1 - 3; Trevor Pearce on learning from the life of Paul; and a host of terrific seminars for both children's and youth leaders. You can download them all from here. Enjoy!

Mapping it all out

When we teach Bible stories, we want the children and young people to know that they are historical truth - about real people who lived in real places at a real time. That's why I'm a great fan of using Bible timelines to help young people see WHEN a story happened, and Bible maps to show WHERE it happened. Maps can also be of great help to us as we prepare a passage - often helping us to understand the flow of a narrative. So I was delighted a couple of weeks ago when a colleague told me about a new web tool, that uses Google Maps and Google Earth to help us explore the geography of the Bible. There's masses of fun stuff you can do, like zooming in on the details, plotting the distances between cities to find out the length of Paul's missionary journeys or overlaying modern satelite images with ancient maps. And it's all free! You can find out all about it here. Have fun!