Diagramming

I did something crazy and probably extremely boring in my youth service this past Tuesday. I took a large chunk of my teaching time and showed my students how to make a rough diagram of a sentence. Now I know that there is an actual method for diagramming a sentence which is fairly in depth, but I ran more with the idea of breaking the sentence into basic portions of thought that you write on following lines of the paper. A thought that clarifies or answers a question from the previous thought is placed underneath that thought.


I had a lot of questioning stares of "why are we doing this?" I questioned it myself until we started working through our passage of Scripture. The two verses we had were full of prepositional phrases and it was so easy to become lost in them. Even in reading the verse aloud didn't make much sense. However, once we diagrammed it together, it became much easier to see the the main thought of the passage and even how all the extra phrases added more clarity to it.

It was one of those lightbulb moments for several of the students. I saw it on several faces and so did my wife. With a little effort, what once seemed complicated became easier to grasp. I even had one of them tell me the next night that they didn't understand why I was teaching what seemed to be nothing more than an English lesson, that was at least, until we got to the end. It clicked for them. I even had another student want me to assign a passage of Scripture for them to attempt to diagram for next week.

As a pastor, one of my main roles is to study the Word and then share that truth. Just as vital though, I must strive to teach others how to study the Bible for themselves. Hopefully a small part of this was accomplished.