One thing that has been of importance to the church since the in-filling of the Holy Ghost on the day of Pentecost is reaching out to people who have not heard the truth of God's love for them. That is why we decided to take some time to teach the children about some of the missionaries that we support, and to teach them a bit about each country.
One of the first things that I tried to do was to help the children visualize how many people there are in the world, and for this I used the information that Megapenny Project has put together. By their estimation, one billion pennies stacked together is equal in size to five school buses. Since there are nearly seven billion people living in the world at present, that would mean that the population of the world in pennies would take up the same amount of space as thirty-five school buses. By using this example, I was able to help them understand how many souls there are out there.
I then explained to them that, out of these billions of pennies, if we were to take all of the pennies that are representative of people claiming Christianity, and put them by themselves, we would still have twenty-five school buses worth of pennies that are unbelievers.
If we are then to apply the same process, but this time only separate out those who are Pentecostal, we pull away from those thirty-five buses only one and a quarter. That means that, out of the seven billion people on the earth, only around two-hundred and fifty million of them are Apostolic in faith.(source)
In explaining all of this, I was attempting to show them the importance of what the missionaries were doing, and also show them that their task was a very large one. I then concluded the introductory lesson by telling them which missionaries that our church is funding, and what countries that they were called to.
I think that it is very important to take the time, either in a lesson series, or once a month, to tell the kids about the missionaries around the world, and in particular the ones that your church supports, and to even attempt to open a line of communication with them, perhaps learning about some of their Sunday School students while they in turn learn about your students.
Thank you for reading, and as always, please let me know what you think.
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We always tried to make Mission Sunday a special event. Doing different countries each Mission Sunday, dressing up, cooking special treats, anything we could think of to relate to the country. I like that you've taken it a step futher in baseing a Lesson Series on Missions.
ReplyDeleteWe also got in contact with the Missionaries and found pen-pals for our kids, with email, myspace, facebook, and other networks available now this would be much easier.