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With your help, KiDs Beach Club® distributed 17,777 Bibles in 2015 and is poised to deliver God’s Word to hundreds more children this spring.

At least seven new Beach Clubs – five in Texas and one each in Tennessee and Louisiana – will start this spring, putting approximately 600 more Bibles into children’s hands between now and March when those new clubs hold their Great Treasure Day.

That’s the exciting day when each child receives his or her very own Bible. They begin hearing about it on the first day of club and it’s usually celebrated when the club meets for the fifth time.

“My students came in and they were just so excited,” Sheila Fortenberry, a third-grade teacher at Cooper North Elementary School in Lubbock, Texas, said the day her club passed out Bibles this past fall. “They came over to tell me, ‘Miss Fortenberry, today is the day we get our Bibles.’ It just melted my heart.” 

Children are definitely excited to get something they can call their own. A girl who received her first Bible at her Beach Club at South Athens Elementary School in October couldn’t wait to start reading her Bible. 

“I’m going to get a flashlight and sit up on the top bunk and read it because it’s awesome,” she said. “I love the Bible and it helps me when I read it.” 

Aside from the reason kids embrace their new Bibles, school administrators, teachers and pastors love the benefits kids get from reading the Bible and the impact they can have on other students. 

“I think it’s incredible,” said a principal of one Beach Club school. “For them to have their own Bible so that they can read and study the Word of God is a precious gift that all children deserve and need.

“I think Beach Club benefits our students in a lot of different ways. Our job is to instruct and help to mold them as a whole person and helping them develop their spirituality is a very important part of developing them as a whole person.” 

The KiDs Beach Club® curriculum promotes good character which is supported within the KBC Explorer’s Study Bible and its tip-in pages. 

“The kids associate those character qualities with righteousness and not necessarily only with morality,” said Courtney Cain, a co-club leader at Hanby Elementary School in Mesquite, Texas. “I would hear the kids say, ‘that’s not what Jesus would do,’ in class, so I definitely saw them being advocates for doing the right thing with the perspective of doing it to glorify God and not to just do the right thing.”

Cain, who taught at Hanby the previous four years before moving to a middle school this year to teach reading, thinks kids understand the impact and meaning of Great Treasure Day.

“I think that saying it was a Great Treasure Day is not over-exaggerating because for these kids in particular, being given anything just means so much to them,” Cain said. “Being given the Word of God obviously is the greatest thing you can give them. I don’t think they’re unaware of that. I think they will just value and remember this day.”

“One of the exciting things about handing out all these Bibles is that many of these students don’t even have access to a Bible, so to give them the opportunity to have a Bible to call their own, means a great deal,” said David Griffin, a pastor at Community Life Church in Forney, Texas. “How awesome is it that we get to come into a local school and get to hand out Bibles to people and they’re just longing to have those.”

“The spiritual implications are huge because the kids are literally being taken from death to life. We saw several kids come to know the Lord last year. Obviously, that is going to have an impact in the classroom.” 

The impact is real. A total of 361 children made Jesus their Forever Friend in Beach Club this past fall.

KiDs Beach Club® will celebrate its 10th birthday at the annual Bibles for Beach Club Benefit Dinner & Auction April 16 at the Hurst Conference Center. Your monthly support combined with the funds raised at the last Benefit Dinner & Auction in 2014 allowed us to provide 20,000 Bibles. Please help us purchase an additional 20,000 Bibles to provide Bibles to every Beach Club child the next two academic years. Thank you for your continued support.