Scripture Sunday

We had the opportunity to do something a little more special for our second Summer Theme Day. When I found out that JumpStart3 was going to be in town and they were available to do our services on July 12th, I couldn’t pass it up! I was originally planning on doing a Christmas in July theme for this week, but I decided to change it up to fit JumpStart3 doing our services. Scripture Sunday was born! Since JumpStart3 was handling the majority of our services, I did not prepare a lesson or games. You could easily use this theme without having JumpStart3 by incorporating some verse games and teaching on the importance of memorizing Scripture based on verses like 2 Timothy 3:16 and Psalm 119:11.

 

What’s Your Favorite Scripture Verse?

The whole point of Scripture Sunday was to get our kids more excited about reading their Bibles and learning God’s Word. For our costume contest, we encouraged the kids to come wearing their favorite Scripture Verse somewhere on their clothes and/or bodies. The kids who came wearing their favorite Scripture got a fun candy bag full of Scripture chocolate, Scripture gum, and Scripture Tangy Tarts. We gave a JumpStart3 CD to the winner in each service. A lot of the kids didn’t have favorite verses so it really got them digging into their Bibles to figure out what their favorite verse was. To extend this idea even further, I decided to make a giant Bible that would be part of our set design, but would also open up for the kids to put their favorite verses on during the service. We got these conversation bubbles from Target and attached double sided tape to the back for the kids to write their verses on. The kids loved it! You can see pictures of the outside and inside of the Bible below.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The materials to make this awesome life-size Bible were practically free. I used 4 large pieces of straight cardboard I got for free from Sam’s Club to make the outside of the Bible and the pages on the inside of the Bible. We simply trimmed the two corners on the outside edge of the Bible to make them more rounded. We cut the pieces for the inside down to be smaller than the outside pieces to give a border around the “pages”. We painted the two outside pieces with black paint and the two inside pieces with cream paint. I would suggest using regular paint with a roller brush instead of spray paint for this project. It would take a lot of spray paint to cover this Bible! Once the base coats were dry, I traced around foam letters with a pencil then outlined and filled in the letters with a gold sharpie to make the words on the outside of the Bible. You could use a stencil for this if you have one, but I had foam letters on hand so that is what I chose to use. I made an outline for where I wanted the pages and the bookmark in pencil, then filled those in with gold and red craft paint. Once all of the paint had dried, it was time to assemble the Bible. I started by attaching one “page” to the inside of each of the black outside pieces by taping a a border of black gaff tape around all of the edges except the edge with the gold pages. Then, I attached the two assembled pieces together using a long strip of black gaff tape on the front and back of the inner edges. The coolest thing about this Bible is it can stand up “closed” or “open”. We used it in the “closed” position for the majority of the service, then when the time came for the kids to come up and put their favorite verses “in the Bible” we opened it up and brought it to the center of the stage, as seen in the pictures below.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Set Design:

I have to admit that I felt stumped when I first started to think about a set design for this theme. However, once I got into it, it all started to come together. Since JumpStart3 is Scripture set to music, I decided to use some of my favorite verses from JumpStart3 songs and musical notes for the decorations. This was a completely DIY set design because there was nothing pre-made that I’d found, but that made it all the more fun and affordable.

You will see a lot of the same elements all over the room for this set. On Stage Left and Right we used a couple large black musical notes, the giant Bible, and several of the Scripture signs we made. The large musical notes were made out of black foam board. I created templates for eighth, quarter, and double eighth notes. I traced the templates on black foam board, cut the notes out with an xacto knife, outlined them with silver sharpie, and sprayed them with craft glitter to make them sparkle. The Scripture signs were made out of different colors of foam board. We made several different shapes for these signs, and cut them out using an x-acto knife. We decorated them with our favorite JumpStart3 Scripture verses, outlined them in marker, and finished them off with some small musical notes made out of craft foam.

We made double-sided musical notes and Scripture signs to hang from the ceiling, so no matter where you are in the room they would still look great. We made them double-sided by attaching colored poster board to the blank side of the foam board and cutting it out to fit the shape. These were decorated and embellished in the same way as the notes and Scripture signs on the stage. We chose to use pages from the Bible as the pictures on our side banners, and decorated between them with more Scripture signs and notes. You can’t see them very well in the pictures, but we also made some black eighth and quarter notes out of poster board to hang from the trussing above the front of the stage.

 

On our TV at the main entrance to the kids room we attached an eighth note and a flat using gorilla tape. We also put a Scripture sign directly under the TV. The info table in the hall way featured more of the black foam board notes, and some even bigger notes we made out of card board and spray painted red and black.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our kids had a blast on Scripture Sunday learning Scripture songs with JumpStart3 and sharing their favorite verses with each other. What are you doing in your kid’s ministry to get the kids excited about learning God’s Word?