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Headed to college? Wondering how to survive the experience? Here is advice from an expert: Professor Ken Elzinga.

Church women’s retreats offer one of the best opportunities of the church for women to step away from their daily responsibilities, rest and connect with other women in the church and spend some concentrated time learning more about the Lord. While retreats require a lot of planning, they are worth it in the long run.

Registration is a chance to collect valuable information about your participants that can help you build small groups, evaluate the success of your program and plan for the future. Here are some questions you might want to include on your registration forms.

The first day of Bible study typically requires a lot of teamwork and cooperation. You probably need leaders to sign up for both refreshments and tasks. Here’s two example sign up forms.

Here are a few of my favorite ideas, tips, tricks and books from 20 years as a Director of Women’s Ministry.

Wondering how to put all the tools and pieces of Bible study together so that you can tackle a specific passage of Scripture? Here’s the overall procedure.

How do you know if you’ve successfully understood a passage of Scripture? Start by understanding and embracing these basic interpretative convictions.

After you’ve done your observation, word studies, outlining and answered the questions you generated, it’s time to start putting it all together. In this step, you want to collect, refine and organize all those details you observed into a coherent meaning.

The first step in Bible study is observation. The goal is to slow down your reading and generate a list of questions that must be answered to understand the passage. I tend to break observation into the following 4 steps which generally correspond to my first few readings through the passage.

You may have heard the “rule” in Bible Study that a text always means what the author intended it to mean. But how do you evaluate whether a particular interpretation hits the mark of authorial intent? You can test any interpretation with the five C’s.

July is the time to start preparing for your fall Bible study. Are you overwhelmed by the details or don’t know where to start? Assuming your study starts in September, here’s my summer ministry preparation checklist.

When learning how to study the Bible, you’ve probably heard the expression “context is king”, meaning context is the arbitrator that rules a particular interpretation valid or not. But how do you use context to decide between possible interpretations?

We use figurative language all the time: “I’ll have to face the music.” “I’m bored to tears.” “She has a green thumb.” “Don’t let the cat out of the bag.” “He died of embarrassment.” Biblical writers also used figurative language and vivid imagery. How are we to understand it?

You may have been taught to create a list of questions, using the “5Ws and H” (who, what, when, where, why, how). If you need some help learning how to use the “5Ws and H”, here are some questions to get you started.

How do I find God’s will It’s a lot easier thank you think, if you avoid the bad advice and focus on the teaching of Scripture.

When you recruit feedback from your students at the end of a Bible study year, don’t forget to solicit feedback from your leaders.