One Big Story - Through the Roof

Every once in a while we want to give you a snapshot of what we did in our children's programs. This helps you to know what we are teaching and how, and it helps you to prayerfully consider how you can help!

This past Sunday, February 14, we taught an interesting story of four men who cared enough for a friend who was paralyzed that they went out of their way to bring him to Jesus. This story appears in the Bible here: Matthew 9:1-8; Mark 2:1-12; Luke 5:17-26.

This is a fascinating story because while Jesus was walking on earth and teaching about Salvation from Sin not everyone believed what he said or even liked what he said. In this story, Jesus healed a man’s body and forgave his sins, making clear that he had the power to do both - and preparing everyone to understand that he would have the power to face and defeat both death and sin.

To teach this story we did several things:

Story Telling

During service one our children are all in one large group for story telling. The goal of this setting is to answer the question: What Do We Know? by showing them the who / what / where / when / how of the story so that they know the facts. This Sunday, Mrs. Lori, our storyteller, used a simple object lesson that you can see here:

Large Group

During our large group time we try to connect children to the meaning behind the story. We aim at the question "What Do We Learn?" This week we invited a paramedic from our church family as a guest to learn about how he cares for people and carries them to the help they need [aka the hospital]. Also, because it was Valentine's Day and because we were talking about helping friends and family who don’t know Jesus get healed from their sin, we had children write names of people on hearts and we prayed for them by name in groups.

Also in our large group, whenever we can we show video clips to help children visualize the story. We use videos from a variety of sources online, here are the two we showed this week:

Small Groups

In our small groups each week we finish the morning with the question "What Do We Do?" It's here that we encourage the children to put legs on their faith. We ask questions that challenge us to apply what we are learning about Jesus to the lives we live between Sundays.

This week we finished the morning by asking - What did everyone do when they saw the man was healed? (“They were all amazed and praised God, exclaiming, ‘We’ve never seen anything like this before!’” [Mark 2:12]) As small groups we prayed, thanking God for this story, and for reminding us that he has the power to forgive our sin!