It’s a Friday afternoon inside the Douglas Elementary School library, and students are gathered for a lesson. Instead of hearing about math or science, though, these kids are hearing about God.

“God saw that people were using their creativity and intelligence to do what they wanted, not what He wanted,” volunteer teacher Mary Adams said while telling the story of the tower of Babel from the Bible’s Old Testament.

In the story found in Genesis 11, God scatters people all over the earth and confuses their languages after the people in Babylonia decide to build a tower that reaches to the heavens, so they can make a name for themselves.

“Do our own lives bring glory to God?” Mrs. Adams asked the kids.

The Bible story is just one component of the afterschool Good News Club put on by volunteers with the Child Evangelism Fellowship Piney Woods Chapter.

Started in 1937 in California, the nonprofit organization started an East Texas chapter in the 1960s.

Through its Good News Club, Five-Day Club and Truth Chasers Club, the organization seeks to “evangelize children in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, to disciple them in the word of God and establish them in the local church for Christian growth,” Rebecca Sorge, director of CEF’s Piney Woods Chapter, said.

The local chapter serves more than 300 children weekly through its outreach events. These include 10 Good News Clubs, two that meet in churches, seven that meet on elementary school campuses and one that meets at an intermediate school campus.

The Five-Day Clubs happen during the summer and the Truth Chasers Club is a Bible correspondence club where students mail completed lessons to the organization and receive them back graded and with the next lesson.

The Piney Woods Chapter comprises five counties, including Smith, Anderson, Henderson, Van Zandt and Cherokee. The chapter has one full-time paid employee in Mrs. Sorge and one full-time missionary, Carolanne Anderson, who raises her own financial support.

 

Outreach

The primary outreach in this area is through the Good News Clubs. The clubs are programs children can voluntarily attend with parental permission. The clubs happen once a week after school and typically last from one to one and a half hours. Adult volunteers teach the programs.

Each program typically comprises a Bible story, memory verse, songs, games and a missionary story.

The children also receive devotional books they can take home. The books are intended to encourage them to have a quiet time with God.

The first club of each semester starts out with teachers sharing information about core beliefs including information about who God is. The teachers then build on that through the rest of the year.

A Bible timeline with pictures helps show the children how all the people and places they learn about fit together.

The curriculum runs on a three-year cycle and covers stories from throughout the Bible with the option of plugging in special lessons for religious holidays.

Mrs. Sorge, the local CEF chapter director, said the children respond to stories and basic storytelling methods along with more modern presentations involving technology.

The program is not without controversy. News stories posted on several websites show the organization has had to go to court to fight for the right to be in schools and schools have questioned how much involvement they should have (as far as busing of children, providing snacks, etc.)

A 2001 Supreme Court Ruling allowed Good News Clubs to meet on public school campuses.

In 2013, more than 160,000 children attended an after-school Good News Club at one of more than 3,200 public schools, according to the Child Evangelism Fellowship website. Good News Clubs are held in other locations as well.

 

Response

Third-grader Simon Muoz, 9, who started participating in the club last year, said he likes the activities they do, the stories he hears and the Bible verses he memorizes.

Fourth-grader Angelica Martinez, 9, who also started attending last school year, said she likes singing songs about God and hearing the teachers explain what Jesus did for people and who God is.

Mary Adams, 73, who leads a group of five volunteers at Douglas, is a retired teacher, former missionary to Brazil and the widow of Mackie, a pastor and missionary, who died in 2013.

Although she used Child Evangelism Fellowship materials for many years while in Brazil, she didn’t start helping with the Good News Clubs until about seven years ago.

She said one of the things she finds really neat is that some of the students have come their entire elementary school careers to the clubs.

“My hope is that they just get a better understanding of God’s word and that they come to love God’s word and want it to be a part of their lives,” she said.