For the last 20 months, our church has hosted a Sunday evening service designed for Christ-followers called Deepen. Over time this service has just lost momentum and currently we’re exploring other opportunities to engage more people who want to take next-steps in deepening their relationship with God. One of the challenges to this situation is that we’ve stopped offering programs for elementary aged kids during many of the deepen services, mostly because there wasn’t enough support from those who attend. We felt that not offering an elementary program would be best for these services, especially if we could adapt components of the adult services for kids.

So, a few weeks ago we held an “All-Pray” service where the evening was dedicated to prayer. In this All-Pray, we had stations set up around the room where people could pray about the topic at that station and even write their prayers on the paper. We decided that we’d take advantage of the service and offer the same experience for elementary-aged kids. We created a kids prayer guide to mirror the adult prayer guide. In all honesty, parents didn’t need the adult one as the content was virtually the same.

It was so cool to see kids scattered around the auditorium, writing and drawing pictures on the paper represnting prayers they prayed for people with their mom’s and dads.

Here is the adult guide and here is the kids guide.

The only downside is that there weren’t very many kids. I think that parents made the assumption that their kids wouldn’t like it or that it would be too much trouble brining their kids to a prayer meeting. Hopefully we’ll be able to take some of the stories from this all-pray and really promote the next one. It was a great shared experience.