January 2007 Monthly Newsletter

To the Bible Quizzing Family,

The January quiz usually seems to be a bit difficult, so soon after the holidays, but I thought we had an excellent day of quizzing a couple weeks ago. A special note of thanks to those who helped us with setting up and cleaning up afterwards. Jim Benson mentioned that the cleanup went very quickly, and that it was well done.

We still have open slots for people to sign up to help us with setting up in March, and cleaning up in February and March. Please volunteer to help with these, to make the load a bit lighter. Thanks.

We had 30 of our quizzers participating in the tournament at Crown College, and they represented us very well. Here are the final placements for our teams:

A Division (with gold and silver sub-divisions):

B Division (with gold and silver, sub-divisions):

And the following quizzers placed among the top 22 individually:

Congratulations to everyone, and a big thanks to all of the coaches and officials who went as well.

We would like to make a special effort to invite potential next year quizzers and families to join us during our March quiz, as spectators. They would be free to come and go throughout the afternoon, and would be especially welcome to join us for our pizza party at the end of the year. If you know of people whom you would like to see be involved in quizzing next year, start thinking now about how to include them in our March quiz. I am particularly interested in having more Little League quizzers next year.

The Chicago Tournament is on the horizon, the weekend of March 31. We will start making registration plans during our February quiz, and will plan on wrapping up all of the details in March. We can register at a lower rate if we register before the March quiz, so I would like to register our teams after the February quiz, and make any necessary updates to the rosters after our March quiz. This tournament is for both leagues, and I would like to encourage as many of you to go as possible. The tournament will be at First Baptist Church in Geneva, Ill, in the Chicago suburbs, where it was last year. Besides the opportunity to quiz against other teams, just going to a place like this as a group is a lot of fun. As I mentioned at the January quiz, we need someone to volunteer to coordinate our registration for this tournament, especially since Martha & I will not be able to attend. If you're thinking of going, please consider volunteering, and contact me about it. The job includes coordinating the teams, registration, transportation, and housing. Thanks!

The Chicago tournament is a bit expensive, mostly because of two nights in the hotel. Costs divided among the participants include $65 for team registration, somewhere in the $80 range per room per night for the hotel, plus meals and transportation. Here are some suggestions for reducing the cost, or 'earning' the money for it:

• Sometimes it helps to go as entire families and make a mini-vacation weekend out of it.
• All of the quizzers are welcome to participate in the Verse-A-Thon. Much like a Walk-A-Thon or a Bike-A-Thon, a quizzer would invite people to pledge a certain amount of money for each verse from this year's material that he would quote from memory. This is a way to raise a lot of money. The money a quizzer raises would go first to cover his expenses, and the rest would go to the benefit of the Quizzing Program. Think about all of the verses you have memorized. There are probably a lot more than you realize.

Our next quiz is coming up on February 10, at Emmanuel Baptist Church at 1:00 pm. Points earned that day will be multiplied by 180% when accumulated toward the yearly total. The A/B League will be quizzing over Acts 14:1 - 17:15, and the Little League over Acts 8:26 - 9:43.

The January standings are included below, in case you haven't seen them on the web page yet.

Karl Kirkman
Bible Quizzing Director