Flame: Creative Children's Ministry

This is an activity to help children to explore the meaning of and to remember memory verses.  Plus, it's a great way of decorating!  I got my inspiration from this lovely post at  Pink Stripey Socks. You will need : Contact paper (sticky back plastic), permanent marker pens in various colours (available in the pound shop) Give children small (A6ish) size pieces of the contact paper.  Make sure that you haven't yet removed the paper backing!  Get children to write out the memory verse on top of the plastic side, along with a picture that will help them to remember the verse.   At home, the children can take the paper backing off and stick the contact paper onto a window or a mirror as a decorative reminder.  Don't worry, because the contact paper is easy to remove from the glass!

Sometimes it can be tricky to come up with interesting ways to teach and recap on memory verses we want the children to learn.  Here's an idea we will be using this Sunday as we revisit a memory verse about worship! Step 1:  Write out your memory verse in a grid (as far as possible!).  You may need to split the Bible reference into several different squares or group words together so that it fits into the number of spaces you have.  Give the children some time to memorize where the words are! Step 2:  Cover each word with some post it notes (I needed 3 layers for each space so the words didn't show through). Step 3:  Split the children into two teams and give each team a different colour pen.  Get teams to take turns in choosing a space and saying which word should be under the post it.  If they are correct, they can circle the word in their team colour.   They can discuss answers in their team but a different person must speak...

On Sunday we are going to think about worship with our 5-11s.  As with all of our work, we want to show the children that there are a variety of ways of worshipping God and that all are valid.  Singing is not the only way! As part of the first session we will be looking at the verse John 4:23: True worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth. As last week's memory verse game with the 5-7s proved quite popular we thought we'd give it another go.  We will by no means do this every week, but we're on a roll at the moment! Again, we've taken symbols to help the children remember key parts of the verse Worship= two hands (our children are used to seeing people raise hands in worship!) Father= blocks spelling out 'Dad' Spirit= Dove, another familiar symbol to the children for the Holy Spirit Truth= a green tick Rules are the same as for the previous game.  Children roll a dice and move that number of squares.  If they land on a picture s...

This term our focus is the Fruits of the Spirit so our first session looked at LOVE. We've done a lot of work on God's love for us, so I thought we'd look a little bit at how we show love for each other. As we have a lot of non- readers, I wanted to use symbols rather than words to give the message and I wanted the session to be interactive!   First we discussed what we thought love was.  Between ourselves we decided that love was showing someone we really cared a lot about them.   Then we found the symbols that would help us to understand a bit more about the example of the early Christians who were showing love to each other (the verse we looked at was Acts 2: 44-46).  I wanted this to be a surprise so I made some 'punch bowls'.  We often put things in balloons and pop the balloons to reveal words or items, but some children don't like the popping sound.  This is much quieter but still fun! First I got a cardboard bowl and drew round it...

As part of our lesson looking at endurance (a link to athletes at the Olympics starting next week!), we used some Duplo to put together the memory verse we were looking at... We gave the children labelled blocks, each showing a word from the verse and asked them to try and work out what it said.  Two rather enterprising children worked out before anything else that the verse was Hebrews 12:1 so requested a Bible.  The rest of the group tried to make sense of the words while they looked it up.  Everyone else then had to listen carefully and put everything in the right order.

A fun way to learn and remember a memory verse.  It works roughly along the same lines as a beetle drive, only in this game you have to throw a 1 before you start because you always need the first word! Memory Verse Dice Game  1.       You must throw a 1 to start 2.     When you throw a 1, colour in the first word of the memory verse 3.     Throw the dice again.  Colour in the word that matches your number. 4.     If you have already coloured in all the words of that number wait until your next turn and try again! 5.      The winner is the first person to colour in all of their words. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Give thanks to the Lord and pray to him Psalm 105 verse 1 For a printable version of the game and some blank grids click  here.

When it comes to learning memory verses, anything that keeps the children actively involved is best!  One of the methods we use is to print out the verse, cut the paper into pieces and mix the pieces up.  The children then reassemble the jigsaw and read the verse.  If you want to keep the jigsaws long term, laminate them before cutting up!