One of our super-leaders serves on staff at another local church in a neighboring county. She shared with me how the church she serves lives out praying for their neighborhood at their weekly prayer meeting. We’ve adapted their system to be kid-friendly for our own community using the 5-finger prayer method for a sticky, holy habit with our students.

5-finger prayer
Thumb – pray for someone closest to me (a local business; local entrepreneurs)
Pointer – pray for someone who teaches me (a local school)
Tall – pray for our leaders (a local public official; local first responder)
Ring – pray for those who need help (another local church/missionary)
Pinkie – pray for our own (a church family facing extraordinary challenges)

We introduce our monthly five on the first Sunday of each month. A new prayer prompt card is shared with the students to take home. We invite the students to hold up that finger (their whole hand for the tall finger) as we silently pray as a large group for each organization/family/person is named. We practice in large group each week, then follow it up throughout the month on social media and by email who the prayer recipients are each month. This time of silent prayer and repeat-after-me prayers naming our neighbors has become one of my favorite moments each Sunday morning. 

At the beginning of each month, we draft a letter to each organization, family, person. The students and our leaders sign their first names in fabulously colored ink to each letter upon arrival in the Welcome Center to be mailed the following week. One example would be:

Dear…..
We consider it a privilege at McEachern Memorial United Methodist Church to partner with and to pray for our neighbors. We believe that it is also a joy to lift up our local businesses and their staff. After all, we are all serving God’s families and that service needs us working together.

This month you were chosen as our local business of the month. During the McEachern Kids Sunday school hour you and your staff will be mentioned by name in a specific season of prayer. We will pray that you will be touched by God’s protective hand as you go about your daily interactions with our community. 

May God’s greatest blessings rest upon you as you faithfully serve in this community.

Seek Him First,
McEachern Kids
K-5th graders and leaders

Teaching students to pray for their neighbors, at church and at home, is a holy habit everyone can practice. Yet most littles don’t know who to pray for outside themselves, making most of their prayers all about themselves. This holy habit also lets our neighbors know that we want to be good neighbors, too.

Who can you pray for today?

When families prioritize a time on their calendar for a weekend retreat for their 3rd-5th graders and discover we are unable to make it happen the way we’d originally planned, we pivot with intentionality because our 3rd graders have finally arrived. Our 4th graders should’ve arrived last year, but 2020. Our 5th graders see everything as ‘the last time’. Asking the question, “What’s in our hand?” and partnering with another local church, we planned a late night event, 4:30-9:30pm on a fall Friday night.

Promotion
– 3rd-5th graders are invited to learn to grow s’more like Jesus as we travel to Mountasia for putt-putt, go-kart, and pizza then back on campus with s’mores at the fire pit. $25 per student. Chaperones free.
– Logo image built on phone through Bazaart app
– Coordinate original chaperones along with new leaders for driving, fire, tshirts, hospitality, setup, cleanup, and space arrangements on a campus used by multiple ministries on a typical Friday night.
– With the ‘bring list’ including non-typical items, we sent 3 emails before event night: one week out, 3 days out, the night before so families could make whatever arrangements were necessary.

Space
Everything was outside except the bus ride. Dinner of 2 slices of pizza and unlimited pitchers of water (my beverage of choice) and unlimited putt-putt and go-cart time for 2 hours cost $25.10. With local Friday night football, we were the only group at Mountasia. Most of our kids were not old enough to ride alone, so this was a time of intentional relationship building between leaders and students to share a go-kart.

Students were instructed to bring
– Gas or food gift card for a mission project – a dear church family battling childhood leukemia would be delivered a gift box filled with notes written by students along with the gift cards the following Sunday
– Refillable water bottle – holy habit to take care of our bodies and the earth
– Bible – Bible study on Luke 2:52
– Closed-toe shoes (can’t go-kart without them)
– Camp/lawn chair – place to keep track of their own stuff, personal space, and to sit for Bible study

Schedule
4-4:30pm Welcome, Rules, Introductions
4:30pm Assign small groups w/leaders
5-7pm Mountasia
8-8:30pm Bible study and teaching
8:30-9:15pm Split into 2 groups, with time then flip
Group 1: S’mores at the fire pit & note writing to mission family
Group 2: Breath prayer Labyrinth
9:15-9:30pm Talk to each other-1 on 1 w/ get-to-know-you and either/or questions
(students stood facing each other so they could move; release nervous energy)
9:30pm Group picture, dismissal

Bible study: Luke 2:52
The one Jesus-as-a-kid eyewitness account was placed in God’s Word especially for kids by Dr. Luke. How do we become s’more like Jesus? We spend time with others who love Jesus together in prayer (labyrinth), play (Mountasia), service (gift cards/note writing), at tables sharing food (pizza, water pitchers, s’mores), and in conversation (get-to-know-you questions).

Scripture memory: Jesus grew in…(chat through ways to grow in…)

• Wisdom – take good care of your mind – hands on head
• Stature – take good care of your body – arms up showing muscles
• Favor with God and man – take good care of your heart – hands over your heart in shape of a cross.

Breath Prayer at Labyrinth w/Bible Buddy (plush s’more distributed by Ambassadors)
Lord, let me grow in wisdom, in stature, and in favor with God and man.
The prayer labyrinth has been a labor of love and gifted by an art teacher in our church. Though unfinished due to the rain, she came to teach and practice the labyrinth journey with the students at it’s inaugural use. 

Weather was the greatest consideration of the entire week preceding, so Plan B was walked through and ready to go: gym reserved if not outside, umbrellas for labyrinth, sterno tins in glass jars for s’mores in small groups (now we can take this anywhere and share), arcade was arranged if no putt-putt/go karts running, gaga ball pit space/covered space for outdoor Bible study with camp chairs. Both Plan A and Plan B were walked through every step the week before and the day before.

Leading ministry with children and families has always required navigating multiple moving pieces, especially people and calendar resources, and requires pivot adaptability and Plan Bs. It’s what we’ve always done. It’s what we’ll always do. When done often, it builds adaptability muscles. When done well, it builds trust and integrity.

How did you spend last Friday night?

The gold-framed Guardian Angel picture followed my maternal grandparents to every home they lived in. They moved from the coal mines of West Virginia to Virginia to Florida then back to Virginia. They also kept a huge, white family Bible on the coffee table. These are the images I recall from my childhood related to their faith.

In Family Driven Faith: Doing What It Takes To Raise Sons and Daughters Who Walk With God,  Voddie Baucham, Jr. speaks of marking the home as God’s territory. He shares the memory of his Buddhist mother. Her regular practice of that belief system involved all five senses: a black lacquer box in the corner of their dining room, a statue of Buddha, a scroll of strange writing, incense, fruit, beads, and a small gong or bell. Those images remain with him to this day even though she became a Christian within six months of his conversion.

“Imagine the impact that Moses’ teaching had on the children of Israel in the Promised Land.” God’s people were entering a new land with new smells, sights, sounds, tastes, yet were expected to retain their distinction as followers of the one true God. How?  Marking their doorposts, celebrating annual feasts with bitter herbs, unleavened bread, and the stories. Oh, the stories, the stones, the Sabbath practices, the music, and so much more.

My BFF-in-the-Lord just set up her new office space with bright yellow chairs and throw rugs to cover floor stains. She has stuffed animals (you know, the holy stuffed animals like sheep, donkey, lamb, plush Jesus which are staples for family faith experiences) on shelves and filled a wall with pictures of remarkable moments with the people of God she has served alongside. Visual reminders of creative, innovative, hard, hilarious moments in time where she served her families in ministry with great zeal and joy. She has marked her space as the Lord’s.

How can we regularly and intentionally mark our spaces and places for the Lord? At home? At church? At work? Sticky faith formation experiences engaging all five senses.

Engaging Eyes
“There was a period in history when anyone who wanted to be considered a serious painter, a grand master, painted biblical themes.”
At this week’s Faith Milestone: Bread & Juice Class, we’ll pull out the jumbo framed picture of Da Vinci’s Last Supper for our kindergarten and first grade students to stand behind for their class photo.

Engaging Ears
“Music is an incredible medium. With a few notes we can be transported to another time and place.”
Preparing for this week’s S’more Jesus Late Night with our 3rd-5th graders, we prepared a Spotify playlist with camp songs. Sent it out ahead of time to the leaders and the children.
Dr. Richard Hunter offered a sermon based on his daughter’s favorite song, at the time, Tim McGraw’s Live Like You Were Dying at my home church. There are some messages super sticky because of a song.

Engaging Taste
“There is no such thing as Christian food.” Well, I beg to differ.
I recall a young pastor at my home church who prepared a summer sermon series based on breakfast cereals. I’ll never be able to look at a box of Frosted Flakes the same again.
Goldfish? Cheerios? S’mores prayers? Bread and juice? 

Engaging Smells
“I could almost smell the Sunday dinner as he described in great detail his vivid memory of every aspect…”
Dr. Doug Thrasher gave a sermon at my home church about Sunday dinner with biscuits and gravy on a communion Sunday. I’ll never forget the intentionality of a mama setting the Sunday table for her family and the planning involved.

Engaging Touch
“Have you ever walked into a home with one of those enormous family Bibles? I mean the kind you have to open with two hands.”
When a local UMC church was closing in our district, one of my moms went to the garage sale the church was having. It was her home church. She asked about the Chrismons which were a sticky faith formation experience of her now art-teacher-of-the-year faith journey. They pulled them out and gave them to her! Even before this, she had led our 3rd graders in October and November for the last four years in a rite of passage to make and learn about Chrismons. She leads those students to decorate the children’s large group space each year for Advent: Hanging of the Greens. Lots of gold beads, lots of white styrofoam, lots of conversation, LOTS of stick pins. The Chrismons of her home church are now enjoyed and shared with her students at her son’s home church. The Chrismons of both churches hang together in our children’s spaces.

In my weekday preschool days, we displayed an apple when we studied apples. We ate apple stuff, counted apples, played with apples, used apple-scented shampoo in the water table, read apple books, painted with apples, and did everything we could possibly think of with apples.

“It all comes down to a simple question: Why are we here?” If our local church, and our family, exists to know Jesus and make Him known, how are we intentionally marking our lives for Him in the stickiest ways possible, through our five senses? At home. At church. At work.

“You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.” Deuteronomy 6:9

Rev. Ken Hagler is widely known as Jedi Pastor Ken. An ordained elder in the United Methodist Church currently serving a local church in Alaska, he records video, writes a blog and books, speaks, and prays like a coach and teacher to help spiritual pilgrims along their way. He is a real Jesus follower in the trenches of life who experiences great joy, great grief, great redemption, great wonder, and has faced head-on some of life’s greatest challenges. 

A jedi is someone trained to guard peace and justice in the universe. 

Ken is one of my favorite Jesus guys. He’s just written a new book and it comes out TODAY and you can get it FREE for two days on Amazon. You can download it for free on your Kindle app on September 7 and 8, 2021. Hardcopies can be ordered, but this can get you started.

“Prayer: Simply Breathe” is a compilation of 52 Breath Prayer Devotions including a short, closing section on how to create your own prayers. “A breath prayer is intended to ‘drill’ down to the cry of our heart. It is not so easy to discern what the cry of our hearts might be though.” (pg 112) 

The book is framed around praying Scripture as you breathe. A short sentence or phrase prayed as you breathe. Repeated over time as a holy habit. Short…holy habits…prayer…scripture…it’s the perfect model for teaching and practicing prayer with little people. 

“Prayer is the act of turning our mind, our emotions, our body, and our spirit to God.” (pg 5)

Ken writes in short, simple sentences introducing each breath prayer with a short ‘something to think about’ as you prepare to practice each breath prayer:

Sometimes, your week gets out of hand.
There is no shortage of news related to those in power.
I have spent a lot of time out in the woods hiking and camping.
You have had it happen, no doubt, when things did not go as planned in your life.
It hurts when people lie to us.
There seems to be no end to the evil that human beings will do to one another.
Our lives are meant to show out what God is doing.

There is scripture all over. There are people quoted all over from all walks of life. Ken is deeply knowledgeable about sacred practices of following Jesus to help the people of God of all stages and all ages. He is one of my teachers. 

Ken led a workshop on prayer at a retreat for 5th graders. When Ken led the prayer workshop, the boys hung on every word he had to say.  I remember a conversation Ken and I had on our way to the dining hall. I asked him about boys and prayer. He spoke of the importance of physicality, short words and phrases, and prayer postures. I heard his words again on page 116, “It is my hope and prayer that if nothing else, you leave here with a prayer you are not bored to pray.”

Order your free Kindle edition on September 7 and 8 here.  Check it out and let me know what you think. I’d like to chat with you about how you might use this resource to teach your littles and their bigs to practice the holy habit of prayer. 

“Faith is fun.” Rev. Ken L. Hagler, Jedi Pastor Ken, Prayer: Simply Breathe, pg 116.