Imagine a young couple holding their newborn baby. The wife looks at her husband and says: "We need to cook the best meal we have. I want him to grow healthy and strong."

Her husband answers: "That's right. Let's make guinea pig as we always do on special occasions."

So they prepare the guinea pig and try to feed it to their newborn son. But, amazingly, their son does not want to eat! He does not even know how to chew. He starts to cry. The parents look at each other wondering what is wrong with him. Whenever I tell this story in a church, people start to laugh. Everyone here in the Andes of Peru knows that guinea pig is a delicious meal, but that a newborn baby needs milk.

"No one would behave like this couple," I tell them, "but that's what we do in our churches. We try to feed an adult meal to the children, when they need teaching especially for their level of understanding."

To equip the churches for this task, I started the "Jesus loves children" program. Many of the churches did not understand the importance of doing children's work because they had never seen it before. We started with the basics, and soon I realized that a lot of the training material that I had used in the past did not work for people from the villages.

The villager's way of thinking and learning was vastly different from mine. They knew how to read and write, but it was hard for them to sit and listen and try to understand because they do not use these skills in their everyday life. I started to use different methods like telling stories, group work, and dramas. I even tried to write a song to teach the most important points of a certain topic.

We also produced cassette recordings of complete Sunday school classes to give the new teachers examples. Later I found out that some of them had listened to each cassette with the children of their church several times. When I visited a church one day, I was introduced to the children as "the one from the cassette."

Now, several churches have started to teach the children from the Bible. This is not easy for them. Many of the new children's workers struggle with preparing their classes and teaching the children, and they are tempted to give up. Please pray that more and more churches start to care for the children of their village and to tell them about Jesus. Many of these children live in difficult situations and they desperately need to hear that Jesus loves and cares for them.

Read the story of Katia, one of the new teachers