Christianity | Jesse Joyner

The Power of a Family Camp

I recently spoke at a Family Camp at Camp Dixie in North Carolina. The idea is simple: create a camp experience that involves the whole family. Most camps offer programs for age-specific groups, particularly children’s and youth camps. But Family Camp is where all the members of the family come to camp together and enjoy the experience as a family. This creates memories that last forever and help families bond in ways that are hard to do in the midst of “everyday life” back at home.

Here are some things Camp Dixie did well: they had plenty of free play time (for the pool, the lake, canoeing, hiking, go carts, etc.). They also had joint worship services for the whole family (music and a special speaker that is geared towards all ages). And there were some times for age-specific break-out times where the adults went to workshops on different topics and the kids went to do crafts.

I enjoyed it and I look forward to returning next year. Here is a video recap of this camp….

Family Camp Weekend 2014 from Camp Dixie on Vimeo.

Prayer Counseling in Children’s Ministry

In a previous post, I explained the idea of worship response stations and their use in ministry to children. I am going to unpack each station in a series of posts, starting with the prayer station.

The Bible teaches us to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17), so I believe prayer is essential to Children’s Ministry – before, during, and after worship services. I’d like to look at ways to use prayer during worship services with kids – specifically when used as a response to the hearing and teaching of God’s Word.

Most of us are familiar with the traditional “altar call” prayer station. This is where the teacher/preacher speaks and then calls people forward for prayer, either en masse to pray with the preacher or to receive individual prayer from pre-selected prayer counselors. The focus of the prayer is usually related to the points of the message, whether a call to follow Jesus or for healing or for God’s strength to overcome a challenge in life, etc.

There is also the method of having people pray in their seats after the message with no call to get up and receive prayer. And some pastors simply tell people to seek out a leader after the service if they have questions or a request for prayer (sometimes with prayer counselors waiting in a particular location, like the front of the sanctuary or in a prayer room somewhere else in the church).

There are many other ways to incorporate prayer as a way of response to the message. But here is the way we did it at camp a few weeks ago:

I preached the message and then closed by inviting the kids to come forward for prayer if they wanted to respond to the message. I had about half a dozen prayer counselors ready and they came forward before the kids so the kids could find one of them. I encouraged all the kids that if they saw a friend come forward for prayer that they were welcome to join that friend and stand beside them in prayer. I also mentioned to the many adults in the room that if they saw their own child (whether in their own family or in their cabin group) and wanted to stand beside them in prayer that they were also welcome to do so.

The worship band came on stage and began leading everyone else in some slower paced worship songs. After about one song, I opened up the entire room to all of the many worship response stations, sometimes having a large group prayer to ask God to prepare us and speak to us during the worship response stations.

The prayer counseling station then stayed open as one of many response station options. Kids took advantage of it at various points throughout the entire response time. Even adults (including myself) took advantage of it.

And that leads me to the next thing we tried with the prayer station – the “kids pray for adults” station. I think it was one of the kids that suggested it to me and I thought it was brilliant. I had led something similar before when I was a Children’s Pastor at a Tuesday night prayer meeting that was led by kids. The idea is so simple and incredibly life-changing.

So on the second night of these worship response stations, I opened up the “kids pray for adults” station. It was separate from the “adults pray for kids” station, which was still there. I told the kids about it and said that any kid who wanted to pray for adults could come work the station and be available to pray for any adult that came forward for such prayer.

We had a few dozen kids come to the station and they stood there ready to pray throughout the worship response time. I even encouraged some of the girls who were there for a long time to go try some of the other stations. They said they wanted to keep working the prayer station. Of course I let them, since all the stations were optional and had no time limits.

I then encouraged adults to come receive prayer from a child. One man told me it was the highlight of his week – as he came back to the station for prayer five times in one night. Here is why I think this station is so powerful:

1. It humbles us adults to hear the prayers of a child.
2. Children pray very sincere, concise, heartfelt prayers. They are not like us adults who pray like the Pharisees with prayers to sound super-spiritual that go on and on.
3. Children pray with childlike faith, which is the model of faith Jesus teaches us to have (Luke 18:17; Mark 10:13-16). Don’t you want prayer from someone with strong faith? Then have a child pray for you.
4. It empowers children and it is our way of telling them that they are as much a part of God’s family as adults and have just as much (if not, more) to contribute to the Kingdom of God and ministry to others.

It is this last point – about empowering children by letting them use their spiritual gifts – that I think we most often get wrong in Children’s Ministry. We usually view Children’s Ministry as the time for us adults to download information into the brains and hearts of kids. But Jesus told us to be like children in our faith. So why don’t we more often let kids teach us and give them opportunities to use their gifts and bless both adults and other children? It goes against our intuition, but so also does the Gospel of grace.

Let the children come to Jesus – and let them pray!

How to Memorize Scripture

Making an "L" with our hands for the word "Lord" in Ephesians 6:10-11. — Photo: Forest N. Morrell 2014. Making an “L” with our hands for the word “Lord” in Ephesians 6:10-11.

I personally learn how to memorize things better when I associate the thing I want to memorize with something else that is unique and/or familiar to me. For example, if someone tells me their name is John (a very common name), I might quickly imagine that person dressed up as John the Baptist baptizing Jesus in the Jordan River. Every time I see John, I’ll see that unique and familiar image in my head – and ideally remember his name.

I have found through experience that children can memorize Bible verses (and retain them in their memory) very quickly by using a similar method. I use a method I picked up at a Children’s Ministry Conference I attended about a decade ago (I think it was sponsored by Group Publishing). I have since created my own style of this method. Here it is:

Pick a verse that is relevant to the teaching and/or theme you are covering. Try not to pick a very long verse (usually 30-40 words maximum). There is a time and place for memorizing longer passages and that can be done in smaller groups or in one-on-one training. Right now, I am talking about large groups of kids at camp or at church on a Sunday morning or other weekly meeting time.
Show the verse on the big screen or have the kids look up the verse together. Make sure you pick a good Bible translation that has a smooth reading of the verse (I usually like the NIV ’84 and the ESV, sometimes the NLT).
Have the kids stand up.
Attach a motion to each word and/or phrase. I will make up motions (some silly, others just straightforward) to go along with each word or phrase in the verse. I then teach the motions and words to the kids and have them repeat it after me several times. Sometimes I will use a motion from American Sign Language while other motions I simply make up for the purpose of the verse at hand.
Once the kids know the words and motions, the trick is just repetition from this point on. You may want to have a “Memory Verse of the Month” (as my friends at The Village Church in Flower Mound, TX have) and review the verse before and after the teaching each week for a month. When I’m at a week-long summer camp, I will call it the “Memory Verse of the Week” or “MVOTW” (pronounced ma-vah-twa). The kids love saying silly words that are really an acronym. When I do the MVOTW, I will open up every teaching session with the kids standing and reciting the verse. They don’t even need the verse on the screen after the first teaching session. Every time after that, they have it all memorized because they have the motions along with it.

As a word of encouragement, this is something that anyone can do. You don’t have to be a juggler or a magician. You can make up some silly motions for the verse and teach away. If you have fun with it, the kids will have fun with it. And they will remember (and so will you).

I had a group of girls approach me at summer camp a few months ago and they recited the memory verse I had taught them three or four summers ago! They did the verse along with all the motions I had taught them. That is the power of memorizing something along with motions. It drastically increases the retention rate.

And retention is what we want when we memorize Scripture. When we or these kids are faced with challenges in life or a temptation to sin, what better thing than to recall God’s Word from our minds (that we memorized) in order to resist temptation or pray through a challenge in life? Even when times are good, Scripture is something we want to meditate on all the time.

When Jesus was tempted by Satan in the wilderness (Matthew 4), he was tempted three times and all three times he responded to Satan with a memorized Scripture verse (“it is written…”).

Let’s teach kids how to memorize scripture!