Word of the Day: Zany
If you work much with kids, you know that a certain amount of zaniness can help hold their attention and drive a point home. My Junior Sabbath School lesson today, 25 October 2008 was a recap of several prior lessons on service:
Service: Using God's Gifts
Service: By Accepting Others
Service: To the Least of These
Service: When Life Sucks (or in adversity)
For each lesson, I prepared a gimmick to help the kids remember, to drive the point home. My gimmick for service under adverse conditions was to wear an Alger County Jail uniform.
Why a jail uniform? Because we'd also been studying the Apostle Paul, who spent two years under house-arrest in Rome. Despite being charged as a criminal and living under guard, Paul worked to serve through his teaching, preaching, and healing. I wore the uniform to motivate the kids to meditate on the social stigma and the adverse conditions that Apostle Paul had to overcome.
An inmate taking up the offering? That's not something you see everyday. I felt awkward at first. Apostle Paul may have felt the same way. But he perservered, and so did I.
My children's story centered around the metaphor of a bicycle wheel to represent the church. At the hub is Christ. The spokes are the members.
When all the spokes are tensioned properly, when all the members are pulling together towards Christ at the center, then the church is successful and can do it's appointed work.
But when the members aren't pulling together towards a common goal, the wheel of the church is warped and falls apart under pressure.
After the sermon came Sabbath School. Here I am in my Junior classroom, pointing to a list on the blackboard recapping our previous lessons.
Here's a gratuitious shot of the backside of my uniform. It was 100% authentic, and remarkably comfortable! Nothing but the best for my kids.
Each kid got a gift-bag, as an illustration of how God gives each of us a set of spiritual gifts to use in serving him.
The goad was a reminder of Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus. Back in the day, "to kick against the goads" was to rebel.
I had four stations set up around the church, one each for the four lessons on service. The orange note above Jeff's head contained a scripture reference for the kids to look up and read. Jeff is the boy in the middle of the photo.
Each of the four stations had one or two scripture passages to read. Plus there were gimmicks -- such as the goad -- from previous lessons to help remind the kids of what we've been studying these past few weeks.
Here's Karl giving me my church keys back. Most people wearing the "big orange" probably don't get the keys so easily.