I recently had a three-part teaching and small group series published on Download Youth Ministry entitled Strange Things in the Bible, based off a series we did with our high school students a couple years ago. We were, of course, playing off the popular Netflix series, Stranger Things, but the main idea was to cover the stranger parts of the Bible.
The simple goal was two-fold:
- Talk about some weird things from the Bible that would spark their interest to read the Bible themselves.
- Show that God has an overall plan for His creation, and He will resort to some really strange things sometimes to accomplish His plan.
The only hard thing was that we had just three weeks to do it, so I had to cut some stories that I really wanted to cover. In the end, though, I think we settled on three of the strangest stories that also connected together to form a cohesive three-part series. The others we did not have time to cover ended up in my introduction for the first week’s story, as I ran through the list to prove my point that the Bible does, in fact, have a lot of weird things in it.
Not only did this start some great conversations with our students and leaders, it also challenged me. I had to dig back into some of the Old Testament that I had not studied in a while. I had to refresh my knowledge of Israelite history. And I connected some dots that I had not actually connected before. This was not only a great series for the students, but I grew a lot from it as well.
If you’re interested in using this series with your youth group, you can click the link below and purchase it on the Download Youth Ministry online store.
Steve Cullum 