KBC Blog (2021)

Kids begin hearing about Great Treasure Day – the day they receive their very own Bible – when their Beach Club first meets. By the time a Beach Club meets for the fifth time, kids are beyond excited to receive their own copy of God’s Word.

“My students came in and they were just so excited,” Sheila Fortenberry, a third-grade teacher at Cooper North Elementary School in Lubbock, Texas, said the day her club passed out Bibles. “They came over to tell me, ‘Miss Fortenberry, today is the day we get our Bibles.’ It just melted my heart.” 

Children are definitely excited to get something they can call their own. A girl who received her first Bible at her Beach Club at South Athens Elementary School earlier this month couldn’t wait to start reading her Bible at home. 

“I’m definitely going to read my Bible,” she said. “I’m going to get a flashlight and sit up on the top bunk and read it because it’s awesome. I love the Bible and it helps me when I read it.” 

Aside from the reason kids embrace their new Bibles, school administrators, teachers and pastors love the benefits kids get from reading the Bible and the impact they can have on other students. 

“I think it’s incredible,” said the principal of one Beach Club school who asked to remain anonymous. “For them to have their own Bible so that they can read and study the Word of God is a precious gift that all children deserve and need. 

“I think Beach Club benefits our students in a lot of different ways. Our job is to instruct and help to mold them as a whole person and helping them develop their spirituality is a very important part of developing them as a whole person.”

A boy, who also attends the Beach Club at South Athens, likes his Bible for the messages from God and on life’s lessons.

“The reason I love the Bible is that I get to read about God,” the boy said. “I get to read his love message. When I have problems, there are people in the Bible who have experienced that so when I go to it and I read about how they handled my same problem, I can use their way to help me out. 

The KiDs Beach Club® curriculum promotes good character which is supported within the KBC Explorer’s Study Bible and its tip-in pages.

“The kids associate those character qualities with righteousness and not necessarily only with morality,” said Courtney Cain, a co-club leader at Hanby Elementary School in Mesquite, Texas. “I would hear the kids kind of speak up, ‘that’s not what you listen to (at Beach Club),’ so I definitely saw them being advocates for doing the right thing with the perspective of doing it to glorify God and not to just do the right thing.”

Cain, who taught at Hanby the previous four years before moving to a middle school this year to teach reading, thinks kids understand the impact and meaning of Great Treasure Day.

“I think that saying it was a Great Treasure Day is not over-exaggerating because for these kids in particular, being given anything just means so much to them,” Cain said. “Being given the Word of God obviously is the greatest thing you can give them. I don’t think they’re unaware of that. I think they will just value and remember this day.”

“One of the exciting things about handing out all these Bibles is that many of these students don’t even have access to a Bible, so to give them the opportunity to have a Bible to call their own, means a great deal,” said David Griffin, a pastor at Community Life Church in Forney, Texas. “How awesome is it that we get to come into a local school and get to hand out Bibles to people and they’re just longing to have those.”

The Beach Club at Hanby even gave away highlighters so kids could begin marking in their Bibles to identify their favorite verses and stories they learn about in Beach Club.

“One of the kids came up to me after he had been given his Bible and asked me, ‘do I really get to keep this?’ and that was probably my favorite moment,” Cain said. “Even after we had given the Bible to him, he really couldn’t believe it. He was just so excited to be reassured he was going to get to keep it.

“The spiritual implications are huge because the kids are literally being taken from death to life. We saw several kids come to know the Lord last year. Obviously, that is going to have an impact in the classroom.”