Designing a Bible Club Around Baptism

Two of our kids have been asking about baptism. Not in a vague way. They've seen the photos of their older siblings going under the water and heard the stories of the church cheering. They've sat with us on Sunday mornings and watched church family come up out of the water themselves. Now they want to know when it's their turn.

We didn't want to answer that with a date. We wanted to answer it with understanding. So we did what we do with most things around here: we made it a week of Bible Club.

This post is about how we planned that week, what we used, and how you can run it yourself. The whole plan is a free download at the bottom, and if you'd rather build your own version, our planner will do that too.

One Goal, Six Questions

Before we picked a single verse, we wrote one sentence at the top of the page:

By Saturday, our two youngest can answer six questions about baptism in their own words.

That sentence did most of the planning for us. One question per day. Six days. The older kids help teach, drill, and ask. We do not push for a date. We build understanding.

It's a target, not a test. If Saturday comes and they aren't there yet, the week still did its work. Understanding has begun, and the next conversation starts further along than this one did.

Here's the week:

The order matters. Command, then new birth, then the picture, then who, then how, then why. By Saturday the last question isn't a quiz. It's an invitation to say back what they've spent a week hearing.

The Shape of Each Day

Every day runs the same way, so nobody has to wonder what happens next. The same read, sing, pray rhythm from regular Bible Club, with a few extra pieces for the week.

Sing. One hymn carries the whole week - "Christ Our Hope in Life and Death" from the Sing! Hymnal. We sing it every day and add an alternate when there's time. By Wednesday the second verse is doing the teaching for us.

Sword drill. Five references a day, all on the day's theme. The Drill Master calls them, keeps score, and helps the youngest find the book. By Saturday two of them are from memory with Bibles closed.

Read and teach. The day's passage, read out loud, with a few sentences on what it means. Short. The passage does the work.

Mark it up. This became the favorite part. We printed three passages from Crossway's ESV Landscape Journaling Edition PDF, one per kid, and gave everyone the same key: circle every "baptize" in blue, highlight every "believe" in yellow, underline every command, draw waves under every mention of water. The youngest color the margins. All three pages go in a folder, and Saturday we tape them to the wall and walk the week.

Confession. One paragraph from the 1689 London Baptist Confession, chapter 29, read aloud twice - once as written, once in the reader's own words. Then a kid version. "An ordinance is something Jesus ordered. He set it up. We obey it."

Interview. The Interviewer asks the youngest the day's Big Question and one follow-up: "What do you mean by that?" Dad writes down their exact words. No cleaning them up.

Giving the Older Kids a Job

The best decision we made was rotating roles for the older kids: Reader, Drill Master, Song Leader, Interviewer. A different assignment each day.

It turned them from an audience into teachers. Explaining the confession in your own words is harder than listening to it. Asking your little sister "what do you mean by that?" and then waiting for the answer is a real skill. And on Saturday, when the youngest flip it around and ask the older kids "Why were you baptized?", their answers teach more than any of the lessons did.

A Few Hands-On Moments

Interactive doesn't have to mean elaborate. Three things carried the week:

• A clear bowl of water and a toy. Each kid picks their own. Down, hold it under three seconds, up, while saying "Buried with Him. Raised with Him." That's Romans 6 in a way a six-year-old will remember.
• The Two-Births Chart. Fold a paper in half. Left side, the day you were born, with a date. Right side, what God does in the new birth - and no date box, because the wind blows where it wishes.
• Practicing the words. Friday, an older kid plays the pastor with the bowl from Wednesday: "Upon your profession of faith, I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit." Down. Up. Everyone claps, because that is what the church does.

Saturday: The Panel

Saturday is the celebration. The marked-up pages go on the wall. The older kids sit as a panel, and each of the youngest takes the chair. The panel asks the six Big Questions, one at a time, gently. No coaching. No correcting mid-answer. Every answer goes on the tracker, word for word - their own words, this week, at this age.

If an answer is thin, that's information, not failure. We keep teaching.

Then we tell them plainly what comes next: when you can answer these questions in your own words, the next step is to say them to our pastor and the church. Baptism belongs to the church, not to our bathtub. We'll walk there together.

The Listening Tracker

The last page of the plan is a tracker, one page per child, with their name and age at the top and the six questions down the side. After each interview, we write their exact words. Compare Monday to Saturday.

We almost left this out, and we're glad we didn't. It's the part we'll keep. A page of what our kids said about Jesus, in their own words, at this age, is worth more than the lesson plan that produced it.

The tracker also has a short list of what a credible answer sounds like at a child's level - who Jesus is, what He did, why they need Him, what baptism is, who gets baptized, and why they want it. It's not a test to pass. It's a way to listen for Jesus rather than "because my brother did" or "because of the party."

What We Used

Nothing on this list is fancy:

• The ESV Landscape Journaling Edition PDF from Crossway. Wide margins, one column, made for exactly this kind of marking up. We print the passages from it.
• Sing! Hymnal from Getty Music for the week hymn and alternates.
• The 1689 London Baptist Confession, chapter 29. The full text of the four paragraphs is in the appendix of the PDF.
• Printer, highlighters, a blue pen, a folder, and tape.
• A clear bowl and a toy of their choosing.

Download the Plan

The whole week is in one PDF: the week at a glance, the print list and mark-up key, the rotating roles, all six days with target answers and sword drills, the listening tracker, and the confession appendix.

Download Bible Club: Baptism Week (PDF)

It's written for any child who has asked about baptism, and it doesn't depend on the calendar. Start any Monday.

Or Build Your Own

Our week was built for a household with two youngest kids asking and two older kids helping. Yours might look different - one child, different ages, a different translation, five days instead of six.

Our Bible Club Planner will build a week for you. Pick Week Guide, type "baptism" as the theme, tell it who's coming and how long you've been doing this, and choose what to include - memory verse, sword drills, songs, a daily activity. It hands you a one-page guide you can print and put on the fridge.

It works the same way for any topic your kids are asking about. Baptism happened to be ours this week.

Know God. Serve God. Share God.

We didn't set out to get anyone baptized this week. We set out to help our kids know what baptism is, why Jesus commanded it, and what it says about Him. If the answer to Saturday's question is "not yet," that's a good answer. We'll keep teaching, and we'll keep listening.

"Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age." - Matthew 28:19-20

Has your family walked through baptism with a child? We'd love to hear how you approached it.