Flame: Creative Children's Ministry

Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God.  Ruth 1:16 Ruth is a great book to use to teach children about loyalty and faithfulness.  Ruth stays faithful to her mother-in-law, Naomi, and leaves her own community to join Naomi's.  Not only this, but she takes on a faithfulness to Naomi's God and becomes an ancestor of David- an amazingly important woman! There are so many themes to pick up here... welcoming new people into a family or community who takes care of us and who we take care of (and why we do this) what it means to become one of God's people how God works through unexpected people Here is a craft (inspired by this post on Scrapbooks etc ) to help pick up and explore the theme of the unity that comes from faithfulness to each other and to God: You will need: 4 strips of coloured paper (2 of one colour and 2 of another colour).  Mine were about 1cm thick and 15 cm long; glue. ...

Yesterday, we were thinking about one of our mission partners in South Sudan and the children she works with.  We wanted to make something as a gift to show the children there that we were thinking of them: something that would somehow show a link between us.  We ended up making some friendship bracelets to send to them. While this was a specific craft to show friendship, it opens up conversation about kindness and showing people that you care about them by doing something for them- kindness seems, after all, to be about showing care for others.  It would be a great craft if you were thinking about kindness as one of the fruit of the Spirit because it's easy and it involves connecting things together (beads, wool, pipe cleaners) to show that we are linked to other people by kind acts that we do for them or they do for us. We made the bracelets by choosing a pipe cleaner and... ...threading Hama beads onto them in various patterns  ...winding different colour...