Our First JBQ Meet

For the very first time, our church has put together a Junior Bible Quiz team and last week we had our first competition.  It was exciting and scary and encouraging all at once if you can imagine such a thing.

Junior Bible Quiz (JBQ) is a national organization that helps kids learn Bible truths through healthy competition. Each team is made up of 2-4 kids with up to 4 substitutes.  Children who want to compete in JBQ must be in 1st through 6th grade.  Each child is assigned a variety of questions and answers to study from the Bible Fact Pack.  The Bible Fact Pack is filled with 576 questions and answers about the Bible and Bible doctrine and this is where the competition questions come from.  (Although this is put out by the Assmeblies of God, there are several other denominations who use it and go to competitions as well.)  All the teams have several meets per year and then best teams move on to regionals and so on.

Within Junior Bible Quiz there are two leagues:  "A" League which is made up of kids who have been in JBQ for a while and "B" League for kids in their first year.  Age doesn't matter and I have seen this to be true as my 6yo daughter (one of the youngest kids there) made 8th place in overall score her very first meet!

Fortunately we had plenty of support with us including the other mom of our team and my oldest daughter who is too old for JBQ.  (They do have a Bible Quiz version where they have to memorize books of the Bible if you are interested for older kids.) 

I was a little nervous before the meet but once we got there it was easy sailing and I had no problems.  The organizers do a great job of keeping everything simple and flowing right along.  The kids were also nervous but I didn't notice it in them until they were actually IN their first round.  Prior to that they were playing and happy and only concerned about when they would eat next.  LOL  So once in the first round there was some "stagefright" going on but since they had to compete in four rounds, they were able to work through it by day's end.

DH came to support the team too.