Flame: Creative Children's Ministry

This craft will give children the chance to creatively and visually reflect on the make up of the body of Christ- different people with different gifts but belonging to the same Christian family and working together for Jesus.  Plus it involves paint and that's always good!  This probably works best after some discussion of 1 Corinthians 12: 12-27.  You will need: cotton buds, card or paper, paint   Cut the card or paper into a cross shape or  faintly draw a cross shape on the page. Ask children to dip their cotton buds into the paint and make dots of colour to cover the cross shape. You will need lots of cotton buds so that colours don’t accidentally mixed together!  Children can use colours and patterns that reflect themselves and the personalities of other Christians that they know. Think about: How many parts of the human body can you name?  What jobs do they do?  How are they different from each other? Are there any...

I came across some ideas for crayon melting on Pinterest recently and couldn't resist having a go! Click here for the original idea on The Kinder Kid .  Here is my take on crayon melting with a message...   I happened to have a silicone mould with people shapes that I'd picked up at the pound shop, though really any kind of mould would be fine.  Silicone worked with no mess, but I'm probably not ever going to be using it for baking again! Break or cut crayons into small pieces and get children to arrange various colours in the moulds.  Don't fill right to the top or you may have spillage!.   Talk about the different colours representing different skills and gifts that different people within the church or within the group have.  Children might choose specific colours to represent what they know of certain people. Now put the mould into a preheated oven at about 200 degrees (e.g.quite hot!) and bake for anything between 5 and 8 minutes. ...

Using our hands we decorated a person size sheet of paper and the outline of a lifesize person...  Then we cut the person out and stuck it onto the background!  We all contributed to the picture in the same way that we all contribute to the body of Christ. We next discussed how we, as a church, represented the body of Christ.  To help the children to engage with the idea, we talked about the various things Christians do inside and outside of church and what body part that job might represent e.g. mouth= teaching, worship, prayer; hands= serving drinks, welcoming, helping others, making worship art. Children then thought about what their interests, personality and talents were and which part of the body fitted best with what they could bring to the church community.  They chose a body part picture and wrote their name on it to add to the poster.  It was great to also go round and invite other people to suggest what they thought represented their...

Today at Powersource, we looked at what it means to be the body of Christ.  As a warm up we played some games... Build a body relay: Each team collects body parts of a different colour and sticks them to the background.  The first team to build the whole body and bring it to the leader wins!  (we hadn't told the children what our subject matter was when we played this game so they had to work out what they were making!) Photo booth pictures:  Use the collection of wigs, glasses and hats to make yourselves a new character! Hands, feet and mouth race: Assign roles within each team.   FEET are the only ones allowed to collect pieces of memory verse from the pile at the far wall.  They cannot speak or touch the pieces once they have been brought to the team base. MOUTHS are the only people allowed to speak throughout the whole game (but cannot move and must have hands behind their backs- no pointing allowed!) HANDS are the only people al...