Flame: Creative Children's Ministry

Over the summer we are doing scaled down children's work with one group for 3-11s!  It's not an easy task to keep everyone involved but we are having a go! This week, reflecting what the adults were doing in the main church, we looked at the calling of Levi.  Here's what we did... Game:  Ball change! In a bag put 5 red balls, 5 blue balls and 5 yellow balls.  Split children in to two teams- red team and blue team.  Children take it in turns to reach into the bag and pull out a ball.  Red team are looking for red balls, blue team are looking for blue balls.  If children pull out a ball of their colour, they keep it.  If they pull out a ball of the wrong colour, they have to put it back in the bag.  The first team to pull out all 5 balls of their colour is the winner! Story telling with coloured cards: Click  here  to go to the post showing how we told the story in a very visual way! Next we talked about the fact that...

We're always trying different ways to tell stories in visual ways, so here is what we tried today in our scaled down summer group! You will need: small square shaped cards- 1 gold, 5 double sided cards, green one side and red on the other 4 green cards with red stripes Jesus (Gold card) ...met a tax collector called Levi.  In Jesus day people thought that Tax Collectors were not good people and, like everyone, Levi had done things that he was sorry for doing.  Jesus said to Levi "Follow me!" Levi got up, left his things and followed Jesus.  Jesus, forgave his sins and helped him to change his life and come closer to God (turn card over to become green). That night, Jesus had dinner at Levi's house with other tax collectors (red cards). Some Pharisees (stripy cards to show that, though they are following the law, they are not changed in the way that Levi and Jesus' followers are) saw what Jesus was doing and said "Why are ...