When it comes to helping kids grow in their faith, we believe there are four spiritual habits to target. These habits are the decisions, behaviors, and rhythms that help us grow spiritually over time. If you’re like most people, when you hear “spiritual habit” you start to think about reading the Bible, praying, or going to church. Sure, these are important spiritual habits, but they’re not the only spiritual habits that matter.
While there’s no definitive list of spiritual habits, we think these four are worth targeting to help your kids grow:
- Spending time with God
- Spending time with others
- Using your gifts
- Sharing your story
These four habits sit at the core of our discipleship strategy (and if you don’t have a discipleship strategy yet, steal ours!). We believe spiritual growth should be the lens through which we see everything else we do in our ministries. So, each quarter, we focus on one of these four spiritual habits with a specific discipleship activity.
Here’s each of the quarterly discipleship activities you’ll find in Volume 7 of Grow Kids Curriculum.
THE GET-TO-KNOW-YOU CARD GAME
The Get-to-Know-You Card Game is a printable, playable card game that will give kids the chance to share more about themselves and learn more about others too. It can be played in small groups at church, or even at home for family game nights. In this game, every player will get to know each other by guessing each other’s favorite things and sharing more about themselves in the process. Kids can keep track of their cards to determine who knows their friends the best, but in the end, everybody wins when kids feel known!
THE WHAT CAN I DO CHALLENGE
We have a big God who has given each of us special talents and skills. They can help us discover what we want to do and how we can make a difference. It’s fun to dream about the impact kids will make on the world when they grow up, but we also believe kids have what it takes to do some amazing things right now. In The What Can I Do Challenge, kids will have the chance to talk about the problems they see all around them and propose their own plans to make a difference. Through a simple worksheet, kids will get to brainstorm in their small groups and with their families about the ways God has equipped them to use their gifts to help others right now.
THE BIBLE BUDDY READING PLAN
We want to encourage kids to practice the spiritual habit of spending time with God by diving into the Bible on their own. Well…not entirely on their own. With The Bible Buddy Reading Plan kids will adopt a stuffed animal buddy for the week and journal about their experiences reading, learning, and growing through the Bible with their new friend. This reading plan comes with daily reading suggestions, prompts to reflect, and a journal to help kids remember what they’ve discovered and share it with their friends.
THE SHOW YOUR STORY CHALLENGE
When we talk about the spiritual habit of sharing our stories, we often think only about using our words to explain the key moments of our lives to someone new. But for many of us, we learn better and remember more details when we get creative and bring visual components to our storytelling. In The Show Your Story Challenge kids will be given a series of prompts and encouraged to find physical representations of the moments, memories, and stories they want to share with others.
Those are each of the four quarterly discipleship activities you can find inside of Grow Kids Curriculum. And if you’re already using Grow Kids, we’ve given you everything you need for each of these activities — instructions for each discipleship activity, editable graphics, shopping lists, flyers, debrief guides, handouts, and more!
In this post, here’s what we’ll cover: