EDUCATION: Bible Memory for Everyone!!

The other day a friend and I were tripping down memory lane and watching The Partridge Family and when they started singing, I started singing.  I knew that song from the 70s!  My brothers can recite whole sections of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  It's almost a performance!  The reason is simple.  In high school kids listen to music constantly, day after day.  My brothers watched that movie a million times.  In his book, Brain Rules, John Medina says that in order to remember something long-term you need to repeat it over days, not minutes.  Kids listen to the same songs over and over every day!  This doesn't mean every piece of information needs to be a song, it means that in order for something to be stored into long-term memory it needs to be repeated more than once for 5 minutes.

Bible Verse of the Week
Try this:

• Choose a Bible verse for the week.  It can go with the sermon theme or the Sunday School theme for the week.  To start, make it something short but gets the point across. 
• Introduce the verse to the congregation during the sermon or just before or after it.  One of the tactics I use as I teach is, "Say it with me folks..." but, of course, you could introduce it however you want. 
• Put it in the bulletin for them to take home, have a short blurb about saying it out loud 5 times every night to commit it to long-term memory
• Revisit the verse before church the following Sunday as part of the welcome or good morning speech and have everybody say it together.
• Encourage them to say it as a family at dinner, at bedtime devotions, or attach it to a visor in the car and say it while driving.  
• Have the verses beautifully printed and hung on the wall in the education part of the building to remind everyone what they've learned.

Oh, be sure to put it on your website, Facebook page, or even Tweet it so those who miss can check it out!