It is always amazing seeing children connect with God in prayer. We love to encourage our children to actively engage with prayer, and one great way to do that is to make it creative and fun!

Have you ever considered using games to encourage and enthuse prayer within your family life? The Kitchen Table Project recently spent time with lots of families at The Big Church Day Out, where we had a giant prayer Jenga set up. If you’ve never seen prayer Jenga before, the idea is that each time you pull a block from the tower, you take a few seconds to pray for what’s written on it. Once you’ve prayed, you put your block on the top of the tower and then it’s the next person’s go.

It may sound like a simple idea, but it’s surprising how much kids (and parents!) wanted to engage with prayer, and even pray out loud for everyone to hear.

We had parents share with us how they’ve never really heard their child pray out loud before, because they never seem to want to. Yet through one simple family game, confidence was found, and prayers were shared! What an encouragement to parents, and what a way of connecting prayer to family fun!

Other ideas you could try:

• Play-Doh prayers – Make a representation of what you want to pray for. E.g. make a mum, dad or grandparent and pray for them. Or make a home, school or church and pray for the people who live, work, serve there.
• Lego prayers – If your child loves to build things, ask them to build their school, or their church and then pray for the people in those places.
• Paint prayers – If your child’s creative, why not ask them to paint something that they want to pray about. Or use finger paints and make a small family tree out of fingerprints that you can put up on the fridge. You can then ask them who they want to pray for in the family each day.

There are so many creative solutions to help our children find prayer engaging and exciting as they grow up in the faith. We hope you have fun trying some of these ideas out at home!

We’ve created a list of suggested ideas to create your own prayer Jenga – you can download it for free here.

For more creative prayer ideas check out GodVenture and the Flame Creative Kids blog.

To stay connected to the Kitchen Table Project and have access to fresh ideas, articles and resources, join the movement here and check out the Inspire Session!