DALLAS — Bible Bowl was tough this year!
My wife, Jeanie, coaches the kids from our congregation, the Memorial Road Church of Christ in Oklahoma City, who sign up to do Bible Bowl at the annual North Texas Leadership Training for Christ convention. Jeanie and I are a great team. She teaches the kids the Bible, and I write practice questions and tell jokes.
Leadership Training for Christ, or LTC, is a program where kids memorize Scripture, lead singing, give speeches, sign for the deaf, perform dramas and puppet shows and test their Bible knowledge. It’s similar to the Lads to Leaders program I did growing up in Macon, Ga. Memorial Road’s coordinators strongly recommend that all participants do Bible Bowl, Bible Quiz (an open-book test taken by teams) or Bible Reading in addition to whatever other events they want. Some kids pick two or three events to do before or at the convention. Others, like Wesley and Natalie LaRue, do basically everything on the list.
This year we had more than 60 kids sign up for Bible Bowl. That’s a record. We covered three books from the Old Testament — Joshua, Judges and Ruth. The theme for this year’s LTC, “We will Serve,” comes from Joshua’s warning-laden farewell speech to the Israelites. He told them to “choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve. … But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord” (Joshua 24:15).
Serving 60 kids meant reviewing a host of unfamiliar names and places. The book of Judges alone is filled with hard-to-remember details — not to mention guys like Othniel, Ehud, Jepthah, Shamgar (who killed 600 Philistines with an ox goad), Tola, Jair (who had 30 sons who rode on 30 donkeys), Ibzan, Elon and Abdon.
Jeanie makes learning entertaining by using Lego illustrations of the Bible stories that she finds online. Yes, that includes Jael and her tent peg from Judges 4. We have to censor some of the Lego slides, no joke! And this year we ran into another challenge — there were no slides for the book of Ruth.
For Lucy, our 12-year-old sixth grader, this was an injustice that had to be corrected. So we got our Lego bricks out of the storage closet and went to work recreating the story of Ruth, Naomi, Orpah and their ill-fated husbands. Unlike the slides we used for Joshua and Judges, the story of Ruth had a decidedly Disney princess and “Star Wars” feel. Among the guests at the wedding in chapter four were R2-D2 and Cinderella. And one of the town elders who witnessed Boaz negotiate with Ruth and Naomi’s guardian-redeemer might have been Santa.
Ruth meets Boaz as she gathers grain in his field. The Lego scene is part of Lucy Tryggestad’s PowerPoint presentation for her fellow LTC Bible Bowlers.
We built the sets, placed the Lego mini figures, took photos and put together a PowerPoint that combined the pictures with the Bible verses from Ruth. In addition to teaching our Bible Bowl kids, Lucy entered the presentation in one of the LTC pre-convention events. At the convention on Saturday night, our church hosted its annual banquet and awards ceremony. Lucy got a gold medal for her PowerPoint — and a gold in Bible Bowl, which was no easy feat this year. Despite my best efforts to challenge our students with practice questions, this year’s Bible Bowl was nothing short of brutal. But I was so proud of how much our kids remembered.
Our church’s award ceremony is my favorite part of LTC. Those of us who coach line up and hand out full-size candy bars to the students — one for each year they’ve participated in LTC. This year was especially meaningful for me and Jeanie as we watched our 18-year-old, Maggie, get 10 candy bars. She started LTC in third grade. That’s the first year that students are allowed to participate. For sticking with the program for a solid decade, she got a $500 scholarship from Oklahoma Christian University, where she’ll start this fall.
Maggie is part of an incredible group of high school seniors at our church. We hugged, celebrated and prayed for them all. Maggie cried. Jeanie cried. Chris McKeever, one of our church’s elders who oversees children’s ministry, cried. I took pictures.
The annual, Easter-weekend trip to the Hilton Anatole in Dallas has become a big part of our lives — and will continue to be at least until Lucy graduates from high school. I know a lot of adults who stay involved in LTC even after their kids have left the nest. We all believe in the value of programs like LTC and Lads to Leaders. These programs encourage our kids to dive headfirst into Scripture and to develop fun ways to illustrate God’s Word through drama, puppet shows, speeches and art.
After the LTC award banquet, Maggie Tryggestad, center, shares a hug with her mom, Dr. Jeanie Tryggestad, left, and fellow seniors Olivia Newberry, Annie Compton and Megan Sims.
I always come away from our Bible Bowl studies more well-versed in the Bible. My big takeaway after studying Joshua, Judges and Ruth is the incredible difficulty of staying the course. Time and again, despite having God literally talking to them, the children of Israel lose focus on the things that matter and fall into the idolatrous patterns of the world. The kind of longevity that Lads and LTC promote is exactly what we need.
As much as I’d love to map out a direct path for my children along the straight and narrow, I know that they ultimately will decide whom they will serve. I pray that Jeanie and I have provided Maggie with as firm a foundation as possible as she takes these next, exciting steps.
ERIK TRYGGESTAD is President and CEO of The Christian Chronicle. Contact erik@christianchronicle.org.
