Encouraging Students to Share Life, Faith, and Jesus with Friends
Spiritual Conversations: Sharing Life, Faith, and Jesus with Friends is a seven-lesson course designed for teachers and youth leaders to help high school-aged students recognize and respond to opportunities to have spiritual conversations.
Combining insights from Barna Group research and LHM’s commitment to equipping people to share the Gospel, this course includes interactive group activities, videos, data to consider, opportunities for discussions on Scripture and faith-sharing conversations, and more.
Daniel Kreienkamp is a theology teacher at Lutheran High School in St. Charles, Missouri, and teaches apologetics and world religions. He had known an LHM staff member for a while, but after hearing more about LHM’s Spiritual Conversations: Sharing Life, Faith, and Jesus with Friends program at conferences, he decided to integrate it into his lessons.
“As we are learning apologetics and about other religions, we want to be able to have spiritual conversations and take the time to really walk the students through the basics of how to have a conversation, how to ask great questions, and how to be a great listener,” says Kreienkamp. “The program laid a great foundation for us to build on for the rest of the semester.”
Kreienkamp believes that the best way to share the Gospel is through relationships. “People typically do not get ‘argued’ into believing,” he says. “In life, we have interviews with people from other religions and do visits to holy places where we interact with people of different faiths, so it’s important to be able to have a posture of curiosity and understanding when interacting with non-Christians.”
Students in Kreienkamp’s class use a digital program that allows them to work on lessons collaboratively. The LHM course enhanced this model since some of the curriculum is presented by high school students. “The high school students in the videos are authentic, real, and funny,” says Kreienkamp. “The scenarios they presented were exactly what you’d expect from high school students. My students were able to relate to it and have real conversations. A lot of our conversations have humor, and we don’t need to be serious about everything; having a little levity in our conversations is a great model for us.”
“Our students also gained a respect for listening through the program. The first field trip that we went on was to the Jewish synagogue, and we heard from Jewish students. Our students had the opportunity to listen but also be able to ask questions and really take to heart what they were hearing. I could see that even though it wasn’t a one-on-one conversation, they really listened and wanted to understand what other people believe.”
Visit lhm.org/schs to find out more and register for Spiritual Conversations: Sharing Life, Faith, and Jesus with Friends.