Stewardship Sunday for Children
Your Stewardship Sunday is just around the corner and you “don’t want to leave the kids out” but you aren’t sure how to explain the concepts of tithing or pledging and you know that they cannot sustain a commitment made for a year since they can barely wrap their little heads around what a calendar even is.
And yet, stewardship, remembering that all we have belongs to God, allows us to give back to God with our time, talents, gifts and service. After meeting with my 84 congregations who are participating in A Time for Children, here are some great ideas to make stewardship “real” for kids.
First, remember that “teaching or telling” about stewardship is not as effective as “experiencing stewardship.” So we need to use the word as we collect trash to thank God for the planet, or help serve dinner for a Sunday School dinner… whenever kids “give back,” use the word “Stewardship” so that they begin to associate stewardship with giving back to God.
Since children have very little understanding of how money works, asking them to pledge money is not as effective as helping them select something they care about, developing a budget, raising the money, purchasing the items for the project, creating the items to share and delivering them. Stewardship takes planning, commitment and happens over a long period of time.
You can also break stewardship down and have a “moment for stewardship” each month. So October might be a month of the “Stewardship of Prayer,” and you might pray for all the hospitalized members of your church. November might be a month of “stewardship for the earth” and you might go outside and feed the birds one week, pick up trash another and plant flowers another. Get the idea?
And if you need a simple Stewardship children’s time, I have a video posted on YouTube at: https://youtu.be/TyGckR7MEQM
God has blessed us all with the earth, friends, family, church, school … stewardship reminds us that all we have, is a gift. Why would we not want to thank the One who gave us all that we have?
