Children, Children, Children

The past two weeks we had the pleasure of hosting a young couple, David and Kristine Briner, from the States who are interested in children's ministry and missions. Now that's a winning combination from my perspective, so we prepared some activities for them to participate in so that they could get a little bit of a feel as to what children's ministry in Liberia might look like.

We thought that the not so subtle approach would be the best so we asked the pastor at the Mt. Zion church if we could have a couple of days with a special children's activity at the church. He readily agreed so the announcement was made. Around 200 kids came each day. The activity was quite simple:

Songs,

Mark played his guitar for some of the music.

a Bible story using flanelgraph and a memory verse,

a coloring page and a cookie.

Too shy to come in, these kids watched the program through the bars of a church window.

We then repeated the program at the Resurrection Faith Ministries church with around 75 kids or so each day. The first day was a bit more of a challenge because we were outside. While designed for the Sunday School kids (no outside publicity was done) neighborhood kids who saw what was taking place showed up as well. The second day we were in the church building. The same amount of kids, more or less, but with walls. (Walls are an amazing invention in children's work!)

Each of the two Fridays were spent at the World Christian Heritage Children's Home where we again used the same format using the kids' art and chapel time. There were around 50 kids there each day, the kids from the home plus a few community kids who attend the school at the home.

The last Saturday we were asked to hold one more session at the Mt. Zion church, which we did. Between 60 and 70 children came that day. Again it was songs, Bible story and verse, coloring and cookies.

All in all we had a total attendance of around 600 kids with probably nearly 300 individual children involved.

We were also able to gift each of the two churches with a complete set of flannel graph for use in their own children's program.

We thank David and Kristine for coming, we thank the two churches for providing us with the opportunity to minister and we thank the Lord for these precious kids into whose lives we had the privilege to speak about Jesus.