Flame: Creative Children's Ministry

This week one of our focus stories is the Prodigal Son.  The main point we want to get across is that God loves us and wants to be involved in our lives.  This is a craft we will be doing with our 3-5s group on Sunday and also with the 5-7s group at our school lunchtime club.  It takes a bit of preparing but looks good! Cut a heart shape from the centre of a piece of paper (we used A5 size).  Don't throw the hearts away as you can use them for cards later!  Write "God loves me" on the paper.  Stick a sheet of sticky back plastic over the top of the side with writing on it.  Turn the sheet over and stick little pieces of tissue paper onto the sticky side of the heart shape. When finished, stick to a window so that the sun can shine through it! Children will probably choose their favourite colours to decorate the heart, so this is a good opportunity to talk about how people are all different but God loves us all!

The children at the school we visit enjoy a visual way of story telling and when we use a felt board it seem to go down really well.  Here's a retelling of the parable of the Prodigal Son using some basic felt figures stuck onto a board covered in felt.  Amazingly it sticks and you can hold it upright without everything falling off! (a revelation to me anyway!!) A Father and his two sons live and work together on their farm.  The father feels so much love for his sons (the figures are lying on a giant heart shape) The younger son decides to take his share of the family money and go off to a far away place.  He doesn't want to work on the farm any more! (gold card stuck to a small piece of felt) Soon the younger son has spent all of his money and has to get a job looking after some pigs.  Even the pigs have better food than he does! He is so hungry, he decides to go home and ask his father if he can work on the family farm again, even though he knows ...

We used the Jonah story bag today at Tots and it was great!  The Children especially loved the inflatable dolphin and the feel of the shells and the sand!  They really enjoyed playing with the items after the story and the baby we had with us made off with the shiny fabric! The Next bag we are getting ready to go is the 'Prodigal Son' bag. Into the gift bag, we have put happy and sad face paper plates, a red/ brown cloth, 3 play mobil men, 3 toy pigs, some gold and silver card coins, some money bags (made at Messy Church!), a toy tractor, some party horns, heart post it notes so we can talk about God's love and the story book.  Once we've labelled everything, it should be good to go!

As one of our craft activities at Messy Church we built a house out of cardboard boxes.  It turned out brilliantly and even had a door.  The younger children especially liked hiding inside it!  In the celebration section we used the house for a prayer response.  After telling the story and having a short talk about forgiveness, we talked about God forgiving us for the wrong things we have done if we come to him and say sorry, because He loves us so much.  We asked everyone to think of something they'd done that they'd like to say sorry for and then we played some music and people came forward to put a heart shaped post it note on the house as a symbol that God loved them, forgave them and welcomed them into his house.  Luckily the house stayed standing throughout!!

Yesterday we had a buzzing Messy Church at our grand opening of the reordered building.  Our theme was 'The Prodigal Son' and these are the crafts we used to explore the story... Money bags made of felt squares, elastic bands and ribbons Sandals with stiff cardboard soles and string straps Jewellery made from threading cheerios onto strawberry laces Dressing up in 'robes' Family photo frames made of lolly sticks, stickers and card squares Pig biscuits: digestives, pink icing, pink fondant, chocolate chips, mini smarties, pink candy melts The Father's house made of cardboard, brown tape, imagination adults and children.  The most house- like structure we've ever built!!! We also had 'Pigswill' gunge made of cornflour and water, which was a great hit with the younger children especially! All of these crafts were then mentioned in the story during our celebration section, so that the children (and ...