Elementary Bible Quiz

by Matt West

For those of you who had a tremendously busy Bible Quiz week, I can relate. I’ve done a variety of different things, and I’ve loved them all. Bible Quiz is a wonderful event that can teach young men and women the wonderful aspects of losing with dignity and winning graciously.  These are elements I am still working on in my life today, and I certainly know that my development in each was greatly aided by Bible Quiz.  All of that, and we haven’t even gotten to the wonderful benefit of hiding God’s word in our heart.

Despite the differences of the men and women who coach, help coach, create events, sponsor teams, or just talk on a website, all of us want to encourage students to memorize Scripture.  I am one who can see all the benefits of it in my life today.  I am forever encouraged to join Bible Studies and learn more about the theology of the Bible, and my regular reading in these areas is great.  However, as an adult, there are very few times where the encouragement to memorize vast quantities of Scripture in an organized way is there.  My church is in the midst of memorizing (together) John 14-21.  We are doing that over about a year.  Yet even with the congregational and leadership-driven accountability, our adults are struggling to retain learned verses and find continual encouragement to do the weekly work necessary to memorize Scripture.  While many are finding encouragement from the few events each year where they are allowed to lose to the high school kids in an organized quiz (ask me about these later–they’re great), many more are seeking to instill in (or just flat out require) their younger children a database of verses from which they can forever benefit.

As I look at my own history in Bible Quiz, it began as a first grade student, quizzing at Abb Thomas’s Olympic Summer.  While the age, thought processes, and weight has changed since those days, I am forever appreciative of the early memorization.  Scientists say that by the age of 11, almost 75% of the facts we will know forever are in our brains.  I have no idea if that is correct, but I do know that these elementary kids have a tremendous capacity to learn facts and details that they may not yet fully understand.  If that is true, why not make a great number of these facts the Scriptures themselves?

I know many of you are already doing an elementary program.   If this is your situation, we are certainly excited for your group and want to do all we can to encourage you to continue.  If you have considered it and just don’t know where to go, we’d love to introduce you to a program we are familiar with.  In this elementary Bible Quiz program, they quiz over part of the high school material each year.  We have the finals the Friday of AACS week in Duncan each year, which is a little town about 20 minutes away from Bob Jones.  Today, we are expecting teams from at least six states (that are not South Carolina).  This is our 9th year, meaning we have just finished our first rotation through the quiz cycle.  At our national championship tournament, we have had as many as 14 teams come in a year and over the course of that time, teams have come from 13 states (New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, and Alabama) to participate in our championship.

The focus of the FQA, who sponsors this elementary tournament, is to get young elementary kids to study the word of God every day.  One way they do this is by looking at the number of days between September 1 (a general time at the start of the school year) and April 15 ( a general time for our championship tournament) is around 220-230 days.  So, they select a section that is that number of verses.  Therefore, we can tell our students that if they learn just one verse every day, they can learn the entire section.  Now certainly that is not required of all the students, but that is the general philosophy we are trying to promote.  So, we really try to stick to that number of verses. 

Many of you would be amazed at the quality of Bible Quiz that these elementary students can do.  It is astounding!  Some quizzers you may have heard about got their start in elementary Bible Quiz.  But I am even more excited about the specific facts of each student.  As an example, my son, who is 6 years old is just finishing his second year of Bible Quizzing.  He has learned 11 chapters over that time (or 218 verses).  On his team during the year, there are five kids who are all under the age of ten.  Together they have learned over 1000 verses in that span.  Many groups of five adults have not learned that many verses in their lifetime!

This week at BibleQuizzer.net at the time of this writing, we have had 1,055 unique visitors and 41,762 hits.  We are forever striving to make things more exciting and manageable for those who just cannot make it to these tournaments.  Please let us know if you like what we’re doing or if you have ideas for us.  Many people have helped get many different types of content, but we have decided that our coverage is not finished.  We will promote this FQA elementary finals.  We want you to support it (and the other elementary efforts going around)!  And we will commit to assist any team that wants to come to the final tournament next year (the section is John 15-21)!

Count on getting the results of this tournament and hearing about it on this very page.