Flame: Creative Children's Ministry

This Summer we are experimenting with a 'board games cafe' once a week at the local community centre. It's probably wrongly named because none of the games need a board, but they are all popular and readily available children's games! It got me thinking about how we could use the games as a church activity as well, so this is the first instalment of some prayers and activity ideas based on games... You will need : A Hungry Hippos game (or more than one!) Play the game and get your hippo to collect as many of the balls as possible. Prayer Idea 1: Count the number of balls you have and, for each ball, say thank you to God for something or someone. Prayer Idea 2: Count the number of balls you have and, for each one, say thank you for a food you like Story Link: The parable of the rich fool (Luke  12: 13-21) The hippos are greedy and try to get as many balls as they can. What things in life are worth having? What does the story say about storing o...

In this month's Messy Church we looked at the story of the sheep and the Goats in Matthew 25 and thought about what it meant to serve others and to serve God.  This involved lots of practical activities! Cafe Role Play area  Polishing the church brass  Litter picking in the church yard  Praying for refugees  Gathering leaves  building furniture (this one was strictly for the adults!)  Making biscuit boxes... ...and baking biscuits to put in them!  We also had a take-home sheet so that we could continue to think about serving and helping others during the rest of the month.   Click here to download the sheet!

It's sometimes really hard to keep the attention of the children at our school lunchtime club.  They've been learning hard all morning so it's no wonder they need to let off steam! It means we have to be creative in our story telling.  This method we tried today was the best we've found so far because you can hold the board up for everyone to see and the felt won't fall off! The base board is a piece of board with a sheet of felt glued to it.  All the other pieces are cut up felt and that's it!  It literally took 10 minutes to cut out the pieces and make the board.  Because none of the other pieces are stuck down you can use both them and the board again and again!  There was once a beautiful place where everyone wanted to be.  It was bright and sunny.  No one ever cried or died or got sick.  It was amazing!  To get to the beautiful place, you had to go through a gate...  The gate was guarded by someone who made the de...