We train teachers so that children like these can be discipled by their own leaders in their own communities.
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Agnes’s News: The Power of a Trained Teacher
Agnes waited for us on a sticky Thursday afternoon last month. She had heard we were going to be stopping by her church and she had news she wanted to tell us!
Agnes is a Children’s ministry volunteer. She was among the 75 teachers who attended a teacher-training seminar in February of 2016, studying why children’s ministry is important, why creative methods are more effective, and practical tools for teaching children creatively.
After the seminar, she began to use what she had learned, and she noticed such an immediate difference that she couldn’t wait to tell us about it.
“I’ve been doing what you taught us in my class-- the illustrations, the teaching games, the storytelling methods. And the parents have been coming to me, saying ‘My children never used to want to come to church. Now they want to come. I used to ask them what they learned at church and they couldn’t tell me. Now they tell me exactly what they learned. Madame Agnes, what are you doing differently?’"
“So I invited the parents to come and watch. They loved it so much that they wanted to stay too. I had to chase them off and make them go back to the adult service!”
Agnes was already in an ideal position to influence the lives of children long before we met her. She lives in the same neighborhood as the church. She encounters the children in her daily life and she understands them. She is able to form relationships with them and to model Christian life in their culture and context. What she lacked was training.
Thanks to your partnership, we are able to provide teacher training to Agnes and hundreds of other teachers like her. Children’s ministry volunteers often work in difficult situations—with little or no resources, curriculum, personnel, space, or recognition. Even just a little bit of strategic training can make a big difference in how much children learn, and this translates directly into more children reached and discipled for the kingdom of God.
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Agnes is a seamstress by trade, but she teaches the children’s classes at Temple El Shaddai in Lomé, Togo.
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Agnes attended a teacher training seminar in Lomé in February of this year.
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The Best Training I Never Did: Multiplying Training by Training Others
Pastor Evu stood at the front of the chapel and said in a loud voice,
“The more you participate….” One hundred and fifty children’s workers responded as one, “…the more you learn!”
As they repeated this call and response several times, Robin and I looked at each other and smiled. This one little sentence is the catch phrase of our basic teacher training course, but we had not taught the conference attendees to say it. As the national director of children’s ministry for the country of Togo, Pastor Evu had completed our Training of Trainers seminar just six-weeks previously. Our children’s ministries training seminars emphasize active learning techniques. They challenge teachers to leave behind the typical lecture-based teaching style widely used across Africa, and to teach in a way that allows children to participate in the lesson. As the teachers learn how to use games, stories and illustrations to make God’s Word come alive for children, we repeat this phrase over and over:
“The more you participate, the more you learn.”
Now we watched Pastor Evu training other teachers and repeating our catch phrase at the National Children’s Ministries Conference. When we asked him about it, he said that he was using our material in the classes he was teaching. Teachers that we had never met were receiving our training. Later, Pastor Evu said to me, “I don’t know how anyone could be trained in these techniques and go back to teaching in the same old way.”
We are just two people and we can’t begin to meet the incredible needs of the children of Africa. We can’t even begin to train all of their teachers; There are thousands of churches just in the West Africa region. The only possible way to train every teacher – to reach every child – is to train the leaders and trainers who can go where we can’t go and train others we will never meet. That’s the reason for my excitement. That’s why the training that Pastor Evu was doing was the best training I NEVER did.
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Robin teaching at the Togo National Training of Trainers seminar, June 2016.
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These men and women graduated from a Training of Trainers and now form the Togo A/G National Children’s Ministries Training Team.
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