Cool Kids Ministries - Cool Kids Ministries: Where Every Kid is a Cool Kid!

Prayer Cards: Crossroads Baptist Church is a church plant, slightly over a year in existence! We have faced many exciting challenges in the children's ministry, the most obvious being the range in ages of the children we're called to minister to in the same setting - Kindergarten through sixth grade. One idea that the Lord gave us to encourage unity in this diverse group was to teach the children to pray with and for each other. We have prayed in small groups, corporately, listed prayer requests, praises, and answered prayer on walls, etc..., but the one thing that has gotten our children most excited is to actually take their prayer cards home and pray for their friends each week.

Use any desk-top publishing program to make a sheet of bookmarks. Ours simply say "Prayer Card" at the top with our class logo, followed by the word "For:", and "Their prayer request:” We pre-print these, and sometime during the 2 hours between Sunday school and Kid's church we hand write each child's specific prayer requests on the bookmarks (one child per bookmark). Often we're able to have one of our junior helpers (jr.-high or high-school age) do this for us. At the end of class each child who wishes to pray through the week for their friends, takes a bookmark on the way out. They are always eager to take their friends petitions to the Lord, and even more excited to hear answers to the prayers they've offered up!

It's been a special blessing for us to see the older, "cool" kids soften to the needs of the little guys, and the little guys blossom with confidence as they grasp the concept that their prayers matter to God, no matter how old they are!

Submitted by Bob and Natalie Jones