Families For Missions

How to Engage Your Family: Shows About Kids From Other Countries

If you are looking for a great educational program for your kids and entire family to watch, I have found a treasure! One day during quarantine I was looking on Amazon for something interesting for my kids. I stumbled upon a program that is super interesting and is free for those with Amazon Prime. It is called The Most Dangerous Ways to School. (Links in this article are affiliate links.)

Your family will learn about a different country in each episode. The show highlights the challenges that children around the world face as they journey to school. I found it interesting that it also discusses the climate, housing, food, and other information about the country where the child lives.

The first season’s episodes take you to Kenya, Nepal, Oymyakon (Russia), Peru, and Himalaya, but there are three seasons available. (Please note that programs on Amazon may change in availability without notice.)

During the second season, you will learn about Nicaragua, Mongolia, Mexico, Ethiopia, and Papua New Guinea.

Season 3 takes you to the Philippines, Colombia, and Bolivia.

How our Family Engaged with this show:

Our family has watched most of these episodes and we have tried several different ways to engage:

1. We take advantage of talking about how privileged we are and how easy it is to get an education where we live.

2. We discuss any missionaries that live in the country that is featured.

3. We talk about if we have been to the country featured.

4.We get out the globe and make sure we know where the country is located in the world.

5. We convert the temperatures mentioned from Centigrade to Farenheit so that our kids will understand and have a frame of reference.

6. We look up plants and foods mentioned, using the internet, to find out what they are.

What ideas do you have? Have you seen this show before? I would love to know what you thought of it!

Free EBook Resource

For a limited time only, How to Bless a Missionary eBook is FREE on Amazon. You can find the link to get this FREE eBook through December 7, 2019. I would love to hear what you think of the book, whether through comments here or a review online!

Fun Family Activity About Africa From Wycliffe

If you are looking for a fun activity to do with the kids at home, check out Wycliffe.org for a fun safari from home. You can learn about different animals in Africa and even make a 3D cut out animal of three of the fun ones!

Fun Family Activity from Wycliffe.org
https://www.wycliffe.org/blog/posts/lets-go-on-a-safari-right-from-home

Research Some African Animals

In addition to this fun activity, head to your local library to check out some books about wild animals. You might even find some fun books that would tell you more about the countries where these animals live. Here are some examples:

Journey Through South Africa tells a little bit about the Kruger National Park in South Africa and the Mlilwane Nature Reserve in Swaziland. It has a fun map with a journey planner page that older kids can use to follow along as you “travel” through the country.

You can learn more about Elephants with a National Geographic Kids book for early readers. They have a variety of books representing different animals.

If you have little ones that are working on learning their alphabet, the African Animal Alphabet from National Geographic Kids is fun.

There are so many books to choose from about wild animals. Look through the sections about animals and African travel at the library and pick some of your favorites! For a good read about a missionary to Africa check out David Livingstone: Africa’s Trailblazer.

Watch a fun video together

If you have kids that love watch TV (and who doesn’t?), try watching a video about animals together. If you are an Amazon Prime member, you can watch episodes of Wild Kratts for free right now, including one about elephants.

There are also some great documentaries about African animals and their habitats available on Amazon Prime. Check out Growing Up in the Savannah or Strange Encounters in the Savannah.

Have fun making your animals and learning about them!

Sermons About Missions

A sermon about missions can be very instrumental in encouraging the listeners to engage with spreading the gospel. They may feel a desire to become a missionary. They might feel led to donate money to a specific person or project. They might be inspired to pray more diligently for a missionary. One never knows how each listener will respond.

For a sermon or talk about missions to be effective, I believe it should include the following things:

A link to the Bible and the call to spread the Gospel – include verses about the Great Commission in Matthew or verses about the nations praising God like in Psalm 67
An explanation of why the listener should be involved – this can be in depth or something simple explaining how we are all called to do the work of making disciples among the nations. Some might choose to emphasize the fact that “some go as missionaries and the rest of us have the responsibility to support them”.
Practical applications for how the listener can actually participate in missions – If they are called to go, there should be an invitation to come talk in more detail with members of the staff. If they are planning to stay put and not move overseas to work in missions, the talk should include practical ideas of how they can help spread the gospel and support missionaries. I do not think that overwhelming the listener with huge lists of ideas is ideal, but giving a handful of well-thought-out ideas can be very useful. Recommending a book like “How to Bless a Missionary: Practical Ideas for Your Church and Family” can help, too. 😉
An invitation – Depending on your church and denomination, some will choose to have an invitation where people are invited to come forward in response to the challenge they have heard. Others will not be as comfortable with this, but I believe that they should still issue a challenge to the listener and an invitation to act. The listener should leave with a conviction to act and an idea for a plan about what they will do. Encourage them to think this way. A sermon about missions without an invitation to respond is missing the boat.

A fun missionary story is also something that many people choose to include in their talk, but probably is not a vital element. It could serve to engage the listener and make a point, though.

Have you attended a great sermon or talk about missions? I’d love to hear what you think should be included! Leave a comment and let me know.

It is HERE! How to Bless a Missionary: Practical Advice for Your Church and Family

I am so excited to announce that my new book (How to Bless a Missionary: Practical Advice for Your Church and Family) is now available on Amazon in paperback and eBook formats! I truly believe that this book will be valuable to anyone involved in missions and missionary care.

I also think that this is something that every pastor and ministry leader will be able to use to deepen and strengthen the care they give to missionaries. But it is not just for pastors! It will help families become more involved in missions by giving them practical ideas that they can put into practice in their everyday lives.

You can find the entire book on Amazon in both paperback and eBook formats. You can also read it for free right now with Kindle Unlimited. The link can be found Here or by clicking on the picture above. (This is an affiliate link which means that if you click on the link and make a purchase, familiesformissions will earn a small commission at no expense to you.)

I would love to hear any feedback from you – whether directly to me by responding to this post or by leaving a review for the book online. I would also love for you to share this with others!

What I Read – Books About Missions

I have been working really hard on my new book, and it is going to be released soon. 🙂 It will be titled How to Bless a Missionary. I am so excited that it will be released and ready for everyone to be a blessing to the missionaries that they know for the holiday season. I can’t wait to tell you more about it!

Today, though, I’m going to let you know about a few of the books about missions that I have read in the last few months. I’m going to share my opinions and an honest review of the books so that you can choose whether or not they might be helpful to your interest in missions. These links are affiliate links to Amazon (which means that if you click them and then purchase something, familiesformissions.com will receive a small commission at no expense to you.)

One book I read was called Missions: How the Local Church Goes Global by Andy Johnson, and it’s part of the 9Marks series of books for Building Healthy Churches. This book talks about how the local church can have the vision for World Wide missions, and it also talks about how your local church can send and support missionaries well. The author of this book really emphasizes that the local church should invest deeply in a few missionaries and not widely in many, many missionaries supported at low rates. He advocates for the church to get to know their missionaries on a more personal level, and he also encourages the local church to consider themselves as the primary source of support for the missionaries. He also talks about the benefits or detriments of short-term mission trips. He emphasizes the need for pastors and elders to visit missionaries, which I fully support. This was a great, short little book, and it is easy to read in one afternoon. It would be great to pass on to your pastor or local Mission leader.

One of the next books that I read is called The Reentry Team: Caring for Your Returning Missionaries by Neil Pirolo. This is a really great book about learning about the returning missionary and the challenges each may face. I highly recommend this to anyone who has a missionary that they support overseas. This is a great book for mission committees and Mission leaders to read as well.

The beginning of the book is written as an introduction and then the remainder of the book is written as a compilation of notes, letters, and first hand accounts of missionaries or missionary kids who returned from serving overseas to their home country (or their parent’s home country). The author then gives some commentary after each short story, and tries to help the reader see the downfalls, errors, and problems the missionaries experienced. He addresses how the missionary could have had a better reentry into their home society.

Another book written by the same author, Neil Pirolo, is called Serving as Senders Today: How to Care for your Missionaries as they Prepare to Go, Are on the Field and Return Home. Written years ago, it talks about the need for churches and individuals to send missionaries well. It describes the missionary who is going overseas and talks about what they need from their team at home (moral support, the logistics that they will need help with, the financial support, communications support, and then reentry support). Churches and small groups are encouraged to invest in a missionary family and to help them no matter what the need. While it has some great information and good points, I did not enjoy the writing style. I feel like the editing could have been tightened up a little bit. One good thing in this book is that it gives action steps and ideas for your personal involvement at the end of each chapter. This will help you as the reader if you have gotten lost during the chapters to really hone in and focus on what’s important.

Dispatches from the Front Boxed Set: Episodes 1-5

Another book that I recently read was called Dispatches from the Front: Stories of Gospel Advance in the World’s Difficult Places. This book was written by Tim Keesee, and there is also a video series that can be purchased separately from the book. This book and video series document this man’s journey as the person from the mission agency that went to visit workers overseas in difficult or hard-to-reach areas. The book is written as a journal along his journey, so you read short snippets from each step along the way as if you’re reading his journal or diary. But it gave me a big-picture view of what it would be like to try to spread the gospel in places like China, Southeast Asia, Africa, and India. You can see firsthand from his writings the challenges that the mission workers in those areas are facing and the dangers they confront every day. I would highly recommend this book to mission leaders as well as those who feel that they are interested in serving God in hard-to-reach and dangerous places.

Well, I think this post is long-enough for my first installment of books about missions. I’ll pick other books for me next update on what I have read and what you might like to read. What books have you read? Can you recommend some to me?

Missions Class Ideas – Medical Missions

The third week of our missions Sunday School class for kids was about medical missions. We learned about a family from our local church whose dad serves as a doctor in Africa. We also had a young lady from our church come speak to the kids. She is a nurse and spent 6 months serving at a medical mission hospital in Zambia. She was able to show pictures and share about her experiences while living there. (Need an extra activity? Try having the kids color the Flag from Zambia.)

There are several missionary doctors from the past that you could choose to talk about. David Livingstone is one historical medical missionary that explored much of Africa, and there are many books written about him. Helen Roseveare was a missionary to the Congo in the 1950’s-1970’s. She practiced medicine and also trained others in medical skills. She was taken kidnapped and imprisoned, but she was later freed and returned to Africa to continue her mission work.

Here are some affiliate links to books you might like to use:

Our craft consisted of making a “doctor kit”.

We used the following supplies:

Black construction paper
Picture of a medical cross
Cotton swabs
Adhesive bandages
Wooden sticks/tongue depressors
Pictures of stethoscopes, medicine, thermometers, etc.
Tape
Glue
Crayons, colored pencils, or markers

Teachers will need to gather supplies and do a little prep work. I suggest folding the black construction paper in half and cutting out a small circle or rectangle to make a handle before starting the craft with the kids. This helps with the flow of the morning.

Instruct each child to color and cut out the medical cross and glue or tape it to the front of their doctor bag.

This craft was fairly simple, and the kids could customize it according to their preferences. The littlest kids (Kindergarten) did the basic gluing and taping, as well as attempting to cut out pictures. The older kids (4-5^th grades) were able to cut out more carefully and color in some of the pictures, too. Each child had their own doctor kit to take home and share with their parents.

A great way to drive a point home and make sure parents know what the focus of the day was is to print out small papers with verses that the kids can glue to their craft. You could use a verse like Isaiah 52:7 “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news, who publishes peace, who brings good news of happiness, who publishes salvation….”

End your morning with a prayer for specific missionaries and a song. 😉

Missions Class Ideas for Kids – Mission Aviation

In the previous post I talked about how my husband and I helped with a summer missions class for the grade-school kids in our church. It was great fun to help plan activities and crafts for each week…the kids enjoyed it so much and learned a lot! Go here to read more.

For the week that we featured mission aviation, we talked about current Mission Aviation Fellowship missionaries that our church supports in Africa. My husband did a presentation using pictures from that missionary family, as well as pictures that he took on a mission trip to Brazil. The kids loved seeing pictures of airplanes and the runways where they land. They learned why airplanes fly and who they help. If you want more information on mission aviation pilots, you can look here.

During craft time, we used the kid’s activity book that MAF has on their website. You can download it here. Kids can pick from mazes, word finds, decoding, or just color in some of the airplanes. We had ages from kindergarten to fifth grade and everyone was able to find something to do. If you want some more activities and coloring pages, you can find them here.

The missionary from the past that we talked about was Betty Greene, the first pilot that flew the first MAF flight. She was able to transport two Wycliffe missionaries that needed to reach Mexico. You can read about her here.

Of course, we finished out the time by praying and singing our song, Be a Missionary Everyday. 🙂

Mission Class Ideas for Kids – Japan

I am so excited to be back and blogging again after taking a little time off over the summer for some projects and commitments. I have been very busy working on a new book that will be released in the coming months, and I have been soaking up some extra time with my kids.

I also helped with a summer missions class for the grade-school kids in our church. It was great fun to help plan activities and crafts for each week…the kids enjoyed it so much and learned a lot! I’ll be sharing more about this over the next couple of weeks.

Each week of the class we picked a different set of things to focus on: each week had a featured country, a past missionary story, a current missionary, a prayer station, and a craft. Small groups of kids rotated through each of these and spent about 10-15 minutes in each area. We also had an opening and closing time with song and prayer.

Here is a link to the song that we used (but we added lots of clapping between lines and some motions, too.) 😊 “Be a Missionary Everyday”

One of the weeks, we focused on Japan. Our missionary from the past was Jake DeShazer. He was a prisoner of war during WWII in Japan, and he hated his captors. After being freed, God helped him to forgive them and called him to return to witness to them. You can read more about him at http://www.jacobdeshazer.com/.

Each of the kiddos received a Japanese flag to keep. You can get one for your home or let your kiddos color one easily by making a circle in the middle of a white piece of paper and letting them color it red.

Our church has a current missionary that is working in the country of Japan that happened to be visiting during the summer months, so we arranged for the mother of this family to come speak to our kids. It was fun to have a real person there that was familiar with Japan. She even brought some dried seaweed for the kids to taste. Each child received a prayer card with this family’s picture on it, so they could take it home and remember meeting the missionary. Hopefully they will pray for them, too.

Our craft was to make koinobori. This is a Japanese flying carp that is frequently made or bought to be displayed around their children’s day in Japan. Many times, there is one for each family member. The dad’s is usually black, and the children have red or many different colors for theirs.

Here is a fun song in Japanese about the koinobori.

You can make one of these at home pretty easily. You will need a toilet paper roll (or paper towel roll cut shorter), some glue sticks, scissors, tissue paper, and string. Sticker eyes are optional (You can draw in your own.)

Use the scissors to cut circles or ovals out of the tissue paper and then cut each one in half. Let the kids join in with the cutting if they are old enough. The half-circles do not have to be perfect. Start gluing the half circles onto your toilet paper roll at the bottom and make sure the rounded part of the paper is facing the bottom. Overlap your pieces as you go, and continue around and up the roll til you reach the top.

Draw some eyes or use stickers. Make a hole on opposite sides of the top, and attach your string. Cut some straight pieces of tissue paper and glue or staple them to the bottom edge of the toilet paper roll.

Now you are ready to display your koinobori!

I’ll post soon about the other weeks and the activities we did…in the meantime, happy crafting! If you want some great information about Japan, check out Operation World’s website!

Missions Music for Kids

Want a great album of music for your kids to listen to? Check out Psalty the Singing Songbook‘s webpage which features fun songs and stories for kids (of all ages) 🙂

This one is very mission-minded and teaches kids about how to learn and care about people in need all around the world. It also introduces them to the concept of different kinds of missionaries – all with a fun story and great music. Check it out by clicking here or on the image below!

You can even use a song or two from these albums in your children’s Sunday School or VBS! Purchase the CD’s, DVD’s, or download the music from the Psalty website.

Do you know of another great mission album for kids? I’d love to hear about it!