Bible Heroes series for Kids by Becky Lawrence, Youth & Childrens Worker, St Marks MK

During lockdown 1 of the pandemic we moved all our kids and youthwork online rapidly and didn’t have much chance to plan ahead for the content.

Our kids group is from year 1 to year 6, we have about 10 children with a broad mix of ages and it can be a challenge to engage with them all at the same time.  When our kids work moved online in March we decided to change our content to begin a series on Bible Heroes, focusing on a different figure from the Bible each week on a Zoom kids hangout (parents log on and join the Zoom and leave their kids with our two leaders).  Our Sunday morning all age online church theme was going over the whole story of the Bible from the beginning so the Bible Heroes theme tied in really well.

To keep things interactive we played a couple of games and chatted over a BYO lunch before screen sharing a YouTube video on our Bible Hero and summing up the main points in a 2 minute bitesize pep talk and finishing with prayer and sometimes a challenge or goal for the week ahead.  We chose excellent existing videos that linked in by ‘Saddleback Kids’ or ‘Crossroads Kids Club: God’s Story series’, who both have cool & engaging animation videos on Bible heroes.

Our kids really enjoyed watching the videos and seemed to engage well with our bitesize talk afterwards too.  Zoom was a novelty for our children but in the end we had to disable the chat feature as it was proving too tempting and distracting!  It did work really well for getting to see each others faces and feeling like a group when we were unable to meet in person.

This term since September, when our children started school again we stopped weekly kids zooms as we lost a lot of engagement and a weekly kids zoom was unsustainable.   When Lockdown 2 started we began creating our own on demand YouTube kids videos each week continuing our Bible Heroes series.  The weekly videos are scheduled to automatically appear on our YouTube channel at 6am on Sundays.  The content of our videos is a 2-4 min summary of the ordinary Bible hero and how God used them for important things, with a question or challenge for kids to think about – the end of each video still links to a cartoon YouTube video by Saddleback or Crossroads.  Along with these on demand videos, we also meet our kids once a month for a catch up on Zoom before church on a Sunday morning.

Feel free to use our videos with your childrens group or to recommend them to families to watch at home.

St Marks MK Kids YouTube Playlist

Saddleback Kids YouTube channel

Crossroads Kids God’s Story YouTube channel