One of my favorite things that I love about ministering to middle school-aged students is the chance we have as youth workers to push our students into new understandings and better relationships with Christ. One of the most fun and important ways I have been doing this over the past few weeks is through a series on Spiritual Disciplines. Spiritual Discipline and middle schoolers don’t often get talked about, probably because it is not only a daunting task, but it can also be somewhat heavy and stale if we are not careful. So this is how I have tried to take this topic to a whole new level for middle school students.

1) GET HANDS-ON
No one has ever said that one of the spiritual disciplines is being bored. In fact, I love that God has created us to be fun, creative beings. One way we are teaching spiritual disciplines is through heavy interaction. I would say about 50-60% of our teaching time of 25-30 minutes is hands-on. We put into practice what we are learning.

For example, we talked about Simplicity and Solitude. I know you’re thinking how can middle schoolers have fun with simplicity and solitude? Yeah, I was too, but once you get them to put these disciplines into action they have a great time with it! We took about 15 minutes with just Jesus in complete silence. You read that right—15 minutes of middle schoolers in complete silence! I explained the “why” behind the action and then we practiced being silent and listening to Christ together in the same room. Then we got up and went on a prayer walk around our entire campus for another 10-15 minutes. To see the amount of imagination and excitement these activities unleashed was awesome!

2) BE OPEN
One of the biggest ways for us to get middle schoolers to do something is for them to see us modeling what we are teaching. Be open and transparent to them about how you are putting your spiritual disciplines into practice. We accomplished this through a series of Instagram stories and short posts. I would caption what I was working on that day and ask them to DM the Student Page with what they were doing with a caption and a picture to go with it. It was fun to see how excited they were to share their journey with others!

3) DON’T OVER COMPLICATE IT
We want middle schoolers not to only understand spiritual disciplines, but to put them into practice on a daily basis, so we can’t over complicate them. We should not only teach them what spiritual disciplines are but also impart a desire in their hearts to practice them. So, we try to make spiritual disciplines easy to pull off for a middle school student. Make sure each discipline is obtainable for your group of students. This is why we make it hands-on during our meeting time, to show them that you don’t have to take a long time doing each practice as long as you are intentional with each practice.

Here is the list of Spiritual Disciplines that we have gone over as a Student Ministry:
Simplicity and Solitude
Meditation and Study
Celebration and Guidance
Submission and Service
Confession and Worship
Prayer and Fasting

/ˈkäntekst/
noun

1. The circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea; in terms of which it can be fully understood and assessed.

News flash: sometimes we take the Bible out of context.

It can be all too easy to take a single verse (or a fraction of one), pluck it from the other verses around it, and make it mean something in isolation that sounds really nice. But that often twists the text into something that it’s not.

As the definition above indicates, reading the Bible contextually can help us understand and assess what the Bible is really trying to say to us. So what does it look like to read the Bible in context? Here’s a simple three-step approach that many pastors and theologians find helpful:

1. The world BEHIND the text – Look at who wrote it and who the author was writing to, and examine what was going on historically at the time it was written.
2. The world WITHIN the text – Look at the actual words (this may require diving into some Hebrew and Greek lexicons!). Examine what the author was doing in a literary sense and what choices they made as a writer – is this a letter, a song, poetry, history, an allegory??
3. The world IN FRONT OF the text: Think about how your own life and experiences impact how you read these verses. We all have a story – we have our own contexts that shape how we read and interpret the Bible.

One of my professors at Fuller Theological Seminary says this: “Our task is to take seriously the problem of more faithfully hearing Scripture on its own terms, both in its original context and in ours. Much of our agenda for accomplishing this adjustment will involve coming to grips with the filters we unsuspectingly and subconsciously use when we read the Bible.”

As we enter into dialogue with the Bible, we must recognize all the contexts at play if we want to truly understand and assess these words and what they mean for us. This is not as easy as just reading a few words and assigning meaning to them immediately, and it may challenge the notions you have about some very familiar texts, but I’m finding that when I engage in a contextual dialogue with the Bible, it becomes more alive and more powerful in my life than ever before.

Hey, I’m Tim! In the DYM world, I’m probably best known as “the Crowd Charades guy,” and I love it whenever someone shows me a photo of their students playing that game! DYM helped me get through my first few years of youth ministry, and I hope my resources can be that for other youth workers. More than anything, I love the community I’ve found through DYM.

I live in Nashville, Tennessee with my amazing wife, Becca. She’s a Dove Award-winning graphic designer who helps keep my DYM content looking fresh! We love to travel, listen to music, and eat good pizza that’s way too fancy for a lock-in.

I’d love to hear from you – please say hello on Twitter or Instagram: @timwildsmith

See Tim’s DYM Resources here.