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Your support of our Bibles for Beach Club program makes it possible for KiDs Beach Club® to give a KBC Explorer’s Study Bible to every child in every Beach Club, but that is only a starting point for the nearly 2,700 volunteers who serve in Beach Club.

Every week, they teach the Bible to the many unchurched children who attend our after-school Bible clubs that meet in their public school. Did you know that more than 62 percent of children who attend Beach Club do not regularly attend church, and the Bible you partner with us to give them is likely the first Bible they have ever received? It may even be the first Bible in their home.

So, it is important that our volunteers introduce them to the Bible and teach them how to use it. We want them to read from God’s word to find out how much He loves them by providing a way to get to know Him through His son Jesus Christ. We want children to know that He desires to have a personal relationship with each of them.

Ivy Lassiter, the children’s minister at First Baptist Church in Richardson, Texas, which sponsors the Beach Club at Northrich Elementary, led the Bible lesson for the club’s Great Treasure Day this past fall. She offered kids a couple of reasons why she loves the Bible and considers it the “best thing ever.”

“One of the first reasons is that every single word in this book – every single word – is there because God wanted it to be there,” she said. “I just think it’s kind of amazing that God, who had the creativity to create our whole universe and had the creativity to create you and has the power to do anything; that amazing God goes, ‘these are the words that I want My people to read; these are the things that I want them to know about Me’ and He puts them in a book for us.”

Lassiter explained that everything people want to know about God and what He thinks about us is in the Bible. “It’s all in there because God, our humongous God, wanted it to be there,” she said.

The second thing she thinks is so amazing about the Bible is found in Hebrews 4:12, which, in the KBC Study Bible, says, “For the word of God is living and powerful.” Another translation reads, “God’s word is alive and active.” She explained that means that the word of God can never get old and even though it was written a long time ago, it remains just as true today as the day it was written.

“I’m reading it to my son Warren, who is 5, and he can learn something about the Bible,” Lassiter told the Beach Club. “But then my dad, who is 65, can read those same verses and those same stories and can learn something from it. I can’t think of another book in the entire world that a 5-year-old can read, and a 65-year-old can read and can still learn something and grow from. That is amazing!”

Lassiter said she has been studying the Bible on her own for something like 20 years, but every time she reads it, she sees something new or finds different meaning in something she had previously read. She asked Beach Club volunteer Sherry Hobbs how long she has been reading the Bible, and she told the kids she has been reading the Bible for “many, many decades,” but learned something new during her devotional time just that morning.

Molly Greenlee, one of the two children’s pastors at CHRIST Church in Irving, Texas, tells the kids in the two Beach Clubs her church sponsors that the Bible is the most important thing you can carry around with you because this is God’s word. Then she showed them her first Bible that she got for Christmas when she was 5 years old.

“My Bible is full of stickers and full of crayon markings,” she told them as she carefully opened the brittle, white-covered Bible to show them. “I might not have always known what I was reading when I first got it, but I kept it because it started me off in my faith.”

She told them that what they are learning in Beach Club will help them be able to use their Bibles. Each week KBC volunteers teach a new Bible verse and show kids where to find it in their Bibles.

“We’re about to give you this book and some of you already have one,” Lassiter told the Beach Club on Great Treasure Day. “But here is the deal, you get to learn and grow, and this book will be exciting to you for the rest of your life and that’s what we want for you guys.”

Then she gave the kids an example of the prayer she reads before she opens her Bible each day and encouraged them to do the same.

“I pray, ‘Jesus, help me understand the words that I’m about to read. And Jesus, help me to know You more and help me experience who You are today. Amen.’”

Greenlee reminded the kids in her Beach Clubs that it’s okay if their new Bibles don’t stay in perfect condition.

“It’s okay if they get bent, it’s okay if they get dirty because that means that you are using it,” Greenlee said. “That is what God wants you to do. He wants you to read it. He wants you to know how much He loves you and you can only do that by actually opening and using your Bible.”

We hope all of our Beach Club kids are using their Bibles this summer by participating in the Hang 10 Summer Reading Program. Each weekly plan helps develop a habit of spending 10 minutes a day with God by reading the Bible and praying.