When my wife and I went on our honeymoon, we went to Walt Disney World. Some of you may have been – it’s the best – but whether you like it or not, there’s something that they do there that ministry leaders should take note of.
They have mastered the art of theming.
Check out these pictures of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride:
Well, actually, none of these are about the ride itself – they’re all just pictures of the line area that gets you onto the ride. Look at the amount of detail they put into the line area. From the moment you get into this building, you’ve already begun the transition from the real world to the world that they’ve created for you.
The line is part of the ride.
I read “Be Our Guest: Perfecting The Art of Customer Service”, and I’d actually highly recommend it because there’s a whole lot in here that we can take away as leaders in ministry. There’s two quotes from it that I’d like to show you:
“It’s the little whispers that speak to an audience...If the little ‘wow’s are delivered consistently and continuously, they add up to a BIG wow!”
Now, we’re not selling a product like Disney is, but we are trying to nurture and encourage an experience. We want kids to encounter God, and to do that, part of our job is to create opportunities for kids to put themselves in that open mindset. There’s nothing forced about trying to make a room feel a certain way. It’s as natural as turning on a light.
What I want to do here is give you a few tools that will help your service have a thematic flow to it, in the same way that Pirates of the Caribbean starts with a line, has a ride in the middle, and a gift shop at the end. Not that you should have a gift shop.
Our goal is that every single aspect of your service will serve a singular greater purpose. We don’t just have a game to fill time. We don’t sing songs just to get the kids moving a bit. We don’t tell a story just because it’s what we’re supposed to do. We do all of these things – or at least we should do all of these things – to give glory to God.
The Game
I played a game once on a Wednesday night service that went like this. Two teams sent up one representative each to stand behind a transparent bin of ball-pit balls, coloured red, green, and yellow. The players were blindfolded. They had one minute to move as many balls from the transparent bin to an adjacent bin as they could, under a few conditions. Each red ball would cost them three points, and they could only move one ball at a time. Their team would have to shout something about the ball they were holding to indicate whether it was a good ball or not.
Let's say you're about to play this game with your kids, and your theme is Toys. What would you call this game? I'd like to invite you to take ten seconds and think about that. Better yet, think about what moral or lesson you could pull out of the game.
When I came up with this game, we were doing a theme on Fairy Tales. I knew we had different coloured balls, and when I thought of Snow White, a poison-apple themed game made sense. From there, it just became a question of how to get the most people involved.
Sometimes it works that way, where you can quickly come up with a game that matches your theme. But what I think is much easier is to come up with a game and then force it to match your theme. This game can work with pretty much any theme as long as you put the right spin on it.
I have a game where I throw the same ball-pit balls from the front of the room into the crowd, and the kids have to collect them and put them in their team’s buckets. It’s ridiculously easy, everyone’s involved, and I change it up just a bit each time. If I was doing a space theme, I’d call it “Meteor Shower”. If it was Easter, I’d call it “Scrambled Eggs”. If it was an ocean theme, I’d call it “Fish Food”.
Whatever your game is, I think it adds so much to have a title slide like the one above. It allows you to introduce the game with a sense of pizzazz, and it emphasizes what the game has to do with your theme. Just find a Google image that has something to do with your theme, and then throw some text overtop. It’s a piece of cake.
Game Design
With that in mind, I wanted to highlight a handful of game materials that I use all the time. If you have some of these already, I want you to share how you use them – and if you don’t have them, I’ve included a link on the back of your handout to show where you can get them for the cheapest price I could find. If you don’t wanna buy them, this will still give you some ideas on how you can use items you might already have.
First off, ball-pit balls are terrific. If you have these and some buckets, you can do almost anything.
Colour sorting
Catching or passing
Targeted throwing
Team-based stealing
Secondly, floor mats are fantastic. You can use them to:
Balance a ball
Build a wall
Construct a pyramid
Make a board game
Establish boundaries
Play probability-based games
Thirdly, we’ve been really lucky at our church to get donated “Melissa & Doug Cardboard Blocks”, but even regular cardboard boxes will do.
Creative building competitions (make a cat/house/tree)
Destroy the target (Angry Birds)
Memory verse sorting
Jenga / Human Balancing Acts
Regardless of whether you have these materials or not, a good rule of thumb when trying to come up with a game for your lesson is to try and find a significant action from the story or theme and then make a game around that.
David & Goliath – Target practice
Moses Parting The Sea – Follow a path
Samson – Knock down a structure
Nehemiah – Build a structure
Noah – Sort things out
If you need some ideas for games, check this out.
Setting The Mood
I want to get back to “Pirates of the Caribbean”, because the game can’t happen until your kids have entered the room, and it’s that moment of entering that I want us to focus on for a moment.
Jenna and I have often done it where we have some poppy kid’s music playing and a slide that the curriculum gives us on the screen. This sets up an atmosphere of fun and kid-friendly-ness. But what I absolutely love doing is making those opening seconds of the night getting the kids excited about what’s going to come.
Imagine having a theme on dinosaurs for your Sunday service. As your kids enter the room, they find the space filled with the sounds of chirping birds. On the screen is sharp footage of a faraway jungle, with the camera gliding slowly over the treetops. Over the sound of birds, they can hear the "Jurassic Park" theme playing softly.
That might sound like a lot of work, but putting something like this together is ridiculously easy, so I wanna show you how I do it. The first – and easiest part – is the sound.
Sound
One thing you could do is open up YouTube, and search for an ambience or an extended music loop that matches your theme. If you’re feeling fancy, you can have two or more tabs open at once – one that plays music, and one that adds an ambient track. I’ve created a playlist of tracks that I use all the time that’s on the back of your handout.
Another thing that’s ridiculously easy is an app I use all the time called “Relax Melodies”. You can install the app on your phone right now. It’s free, and it works on all mobile devices. There’s a premium option, but I’ve never used it and never needed it. The app was designed as a sleep aid, and it’s basically a collection of looping ambiences that people can mix and match to create a kind of ‘mood’ to fall asleep to. I started using it as a way of further immersing people in story time, and I even went to the ROM once during a “Pompeii” exhibit to find that they were using the same sounds in their main room.
Lastly, you can find a lot of great mood-setting music on Apple Music, Spotify, or whatever music streaming service you’re most comfortable with. I mainly use soundtrack music from movies because it’s instrumental and packed with emotion, and I’ve curated a playlist with the tracks that I use most often.
Screen
Some curriculums offer images to display, which is great. If you have that, use that. But you might not get that – and for those of you who do, sometimes the images that they give you are kind of lame. I want to show you something dirt-easy that you can do to really make your space dynamic. All you need is an internet connection and PowerPoint.
Think of a movie scene that really matches the theme you’re going for. If nothing comes to mind, think of a simple visual setting. If you’re doing Fairy Tales, for example, you could find a clip from any Disney movie – or you could think of footage of a castle.
Whichever, look it up on YouTube. I find typing the name of the movie and adding “clip” or “scene” usually works best. If you’re looking for footage, type what you’re looking for and then add “footage” or “loop”.
Try and find a clip or video that’s under five minutes. We’re going to be downloading it, and the smaller the file, the quicker it’ll be – and also, we’re probably only going to be using a minute of the clip anyway.
I’ve given you a few links to sites that let you download videos. You do have to be careful with them because they’re usually blanketed in ads, but you’ll be okay as long as you know what to look for.
Once you’ve downloaded the video, open up PowerPoint and drag the video onto your first slide.
Double-click on the video and click “Playback”. Here, you can mute the video and tell it to loop.
Now all you need to do is insert some text over top – and bam, you’ve got a dynamic welcome slide that you can match with whatever musical ambience you’ve come up with!
Finishing Touches
There's two more quick things I want to call your attention to, because they’re very regular aspects of children’s ministry. I want to briefly talk about the worship and about the craft.
When we think about craft time, I’ve heard of some ministry leaders knocking it based on the idea that boys don’t like it. I certainly can’t speak for all boys, but Jenna and I deal with boys at our church all the time who are dying to get to the craft part of our Wednesday night kid’s program. In other environments, I have seen boys that are a bit skeptical about craft, but there’s one key thing that I find makes crafts a sure-fire winner.
If the craft is something that the kid can actually play with, they’re going to be a lot more eager to use it. So if you’re doing some sort of adventuring theme, for example, let them make binoculars out of toilet paper rolls or a construction paper torch. If it’s something they can role-play with, they’ll use it. Decorative crafts are cool too and I don’t want to knock those, but seeing kids play with their craft has always been the most rewarding for me.
At camp I have some hand in the craft-picking, but at church it’s all Jenna, so I asked her how she keeps her crafts on-theme. She says Pinterest always comes first. It’s a wealth of ideas that all look terrific. But if Pinterest lets you down, fall back on relevant movies and significant actions. If your theme has to do with wandering in the desert, make a compass. It’s something they can play with, it allows them to do the ‘wandering’ part, and it’s on-theme. Alternatively, help them design a maze that their friends can try and solve.
For worship, we all try to find music that is engaging and vibrant. Keep doing that, by all means. But more than that, look for music videos that strike the same tone as what you’re going for. You might be familiar with Group VBS – they make a bunch of quality content, and their music videos are all freely accessible on YouTube. You can download these the same way as the other videos, and they’re a great way to make your worship blend in with your overarching theme.
Conclusion
Hopefully this has given you a few tools to help enhance the way your Sunday Service integrates theme into itself. At the end of the day, just remember Pirates of the Caribbean. The ride is not just the ride - it's everything before and after that makes you feel like you're in another world. If your 'sermon' is the ride, what opportunities for encountering God are you missing out on?