EmailThe Desiring God blog has posted an article about helping kids love missions. Their ideas are geared toward families being missions minded with their kids. Here are the ten ways they pointed out. Click through to their website to get more details on each.
- Pray for missionaries.
- Read missionary biographies to your children.
- Supporting missionaries financially as a family
- Find a missionary kid pen pal for your child
- Welcome missionaries into your home.
- Take risks as a family.
- Encourage the traits that missionaries need
- Teach your children to be world Christians.
- Read missionary prayer letters to your children.
- Use missions fact books and resources
Reading this list reminded me how much work I need to do on this emphasis at our church and in my family. Missions is not top of mind in our small town. This year we’re actually doing our first missions emphasis week and we are getting the kids involved as much as we can.
How do you teach children about missions?
If you have a great idea about teaching kids about missions, leave it below this post as a comment. I’d love to hear your feedback.
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May is going to be Missionary Month in our Church. My son and daughter in law have come up with the idea of making Passports for the kids in church where they get stamps for attending Sunday School etc. I thought what a great idea to show them one of the things missionaries have to get to go overseas.
Great idea…we did this with our kids group. I found these passports for our kids online. The kids loved them. On our first lesson, we issued the passports and traveled to Mexico. Great fun!
http://www.orientaltrading.com/my-passport-sticker-books-a2-9_1081-12-1.fltr?Ntt=passport
We do a Mission’s Carnival the day before our missions conference. We pick 5 countries, and 5 people in our church learn about the country, and share with the children. They have pictures or objects from countries to share with the children. they also have make food from that country and the children get to taste the food. Each child gets a passport with thier picture in it. Then when they go to the country they get a stamp for that country. We take 20 min. and have the children find a the place on the map with a small picture of the country. The others children play another game. Then at the end of the day. We have questions from each country and the children get a chance to answer it. Then from Sun to Wed we have our missions conference. On Sunday and Wednesday we have a missionary come in and share with the children what they do in the country they are in or going to.
Thank you sooo much for the ideas and the link as well as the reminders they bring on the importance of missions. The things we did in Girls in Action (Louisville Ky, US) and Girls’ Auxilliary through to Lydias and now Women’s Missionary Society have kept rekindling my interest in missions. I learnt to make missionary albums and pray for missionaries by name; to write letters of encouragement to missionaries; to be a missionary wherever I am and to read about missions. I also learnt to save towards missions. I learnt through a Children Evangelism Ministry programme in Nigeria to make missions education fun by singing, dancing /jogging around holding streamers and a flag of the country or area you are emphasizing and to do fun activities like practicing food recipes from the area, playing the games the children there play, etc. I have found all these ideas enriching and helpful for teaching missions. As a family and in church we pray for missionaries everyday. I have also taught our children to save a percentage of any money/allowance they get towards missions just as they calculate their tithes. It has brought tremendous results. As they pray and give towards missions and have career missionaries visit, they look forward to testimonies from the mission field.
I have created and make cloth canvas books that spell out the plan of salvation in colors, beads, trims, buttons, jewels, and felt. It is color-coded and goes along with the colors of the powerband bracelet. It is perfect for short term mission trips, VBS, backyard bible clubs, camps, and Sunday School. I have it in English, Spanish, and Swahili. I will be glad to share information on how to make with anyone that is interested. Please email me at jwjoseph320@yahoo.com.
We have a ministry for kids from grade 4-6 called “Action Kids”. We meet 1st & 3rd Sunday of the month and have a structured schedule. Although our attendance is only on average 10 kids, it has been up to 30 at times (free food always gets lots!) LOL.. anyways, the Sunday after World’s Kid’s Mission day, we all delivered cards and gift bags to shut ins in our little town and then we discussed what it must be like to live like that and to have a visitor. It was great to see their faces light up!
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