Sharing Your Faith Story with Your Clubbers

As a T&T director, I wanted to do something different for Large Group time. We had about 40 girls in our club, a good mixture of church kids and non-churched kids from the community. Many different backgrounds were represented, some were from strong, Christian homes, others came from families who went to church now and then and still others came from such chaotic backgrounds that God was not even in the their vocabulary.

I came up with the idea of asking each leader to share how she came to trust Christ as Savior … because I realized that my leaders had backgrounds as diverse as the girls we taught. One leader told how her family disowned her when she became a Christian, a second told how she had grown up in a moral home, but did not know anything about God and a third had a story of a home so messed up, she drowned in the brokenness. Other stories were somewhere in between. My own story was quite different, because as a kid, I was in Awana just as the girls in my group were. The series was successful because different leaders resonated with different girls and many trusted Christ as a result.

We set up some parameters for the series. Maybe you could use them in your own club.

1. Start with a leader who is comfortable talking to the group. Not all leaders are. As surveys show, public speaking is one of the biggest fears. So, choose someone who is comfortable. Others can follow his/her lead.

2. Be brief. Don’t go on forever. Be concise. (Get to the point.)

3. Limit details. Names of people, places and dates when it all happened aren’t necessary. Clubbers don’t care if it happened on a Wednesday or a Thursday. Skip the details and get to the point.

4. Highlight one aspect of the situation. For instance, the leader who was disowned by her family, focused on that, rather than taking rabbit trails to other situations.

 5. Explain circumstances in clubber language. Don’t use “Christianese” or words kids can’t understand.

6. Share age-appropriate details. If you trusted Christ as an adults, you might have been through a difficult time. Clubbers don’t need to know all the details, a summary is all you need. A simple “I took drugs and am sorry that I did because they did a lot of damage to my body” is enough.

7. Focus on what it means to be a Christian (and not on your past.)

8. Focus on one or two verses that mean a lot to you. Don’t overwhelm the clubbers with dozens of Scripture references.

9. Encourage leaders to bring childhood pictures, trophies, objects (toys) etc. that are talked about in the story. Kids love to learn about their leaders as kids.

 10. Allow a leader to record her story ahead of time. I had one leader who didn’t like to speak in public and had a very difficult story to share. She wanted to be part of what we were doing, but was very nervous. So, she sat home at her kitchen table and her teenaged son recorded her lesson. The result? Very effective. The girls needed to hear her story because many were in similar circumstances.

Again, this worked well for us. All our leaders participated. If you have a large club or aren’t sure about someone’s capability, you could chose two or three leaders to take part and share.