HALLOWEEN -The Best Time of Year to Buy OBJECT LESSONS - Kids in Ministry International

The Best Time of Year to Buy OBJECT LESSONS // In this session, we’re going to take a look at the kinds of things that show up during the Halloween season that can actually help us as kids pastors and ministers in our children’s ministries Your creative juices will definitely flow by watching this. Take out a pen and paper to take notes! THIS VIDEO IS NOT MADE FOR KIDS! It is intended to train adult leaders and parents how to be more creative when they are teaching children in churches and homes.

Halloween & Object Lessons

Well, here it is it’s that time of year again. We call it Halloween. I don’t particularly like Halloween, but there is one positive thing about Halloween, and that’s that this is the best time of year to buy object lessons for children’s ministry! So come on! We’re going to go take a look and see what they’ve got. I’ll give you some ideas.

Welcome to my channel. I’m Becky Fisher, and I’ve been in children’s ministry for over 25 years. I’ve traveled to almost 30 nations, teaching kids how to walk in the supernatural lifestyle of Jesus, and I’ve trained their kids pastors and parents how to teach the kids the same things.

So, if this is of interest to you, then click on the subscribe button below and the little notification bell next to it, so you will be notified every time I upload a new video.

Now in this session, we’re gonna take a look at the kinds of things that show up during the Halloween season that can actually help us in our children’s ministries. I’m going to show you several significant object lessons of things you might have never thought of before, so be sure to watch all the way to the end.

Now Halloween is primarily known for its culture of death, gore, horror and witchcraft which, of course, we as Christians don’t want any part of.

Spiritual Messages from Halloween props

But especially when I was first starting in kids ministry, I was constantly on the lookout for ideas to help me get my spiritual messages across to the kids, and I learned very early in my career that, in order to keep my services interesting, and to hold their attention, I needed creative ideas. I didn’t want to be just an entertainer. I wanted to really teach the Bible. ‘cause at my core that’s who I am—I’m a Bible teacher.

And I wanted to go beyond the basic Bible stories that most people think are the only things little kids can understand.  And I wanted to really get down to the deep things of God.

I learned that to find a lot of what I needed; Halloween was when most of it was available. Now, that included masks, wigs, and costumes.

(This looks like Kidmin Charlie! Charlie, what are you doing here?) 

Now today things have changed because, especially for those who live in big towns and cities, this stuff is available all year long now.  And, of course, now we’ve got the internet at our fingertips to find what we want online. But, back in the day, Halloween was prime time for kids ministers to find the best object lessons.

Now most of the time when I’m putting a lesson together, I already have ideas in mind of what I need to get my point across. But sometimes I just like to walk through these stores.  And that includes toy stores, too, by the way, just to get ideas.

The Gates of Hell

Well, here’s one I found.  These are gates of Hell, right?  And Jesus said, “I will build my church and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.” You know, scriptures like this are really important for us to teach kids today. It might be the kind of thing you would completely overlook. But think about it.  Most of our kids have been desensitized to anything demonic or witch crafty.  And they need to know that there’s a real devil, a real hell, it’s not all just make-believe. But that Jesus has already defeated him.

Dry Bones

Skeletons! They don’t have to be a symbol of violence.  But you can use something like this, for instance, to tell the story of Joseph, making his sons promise to take his bones to be buried in Canaan when they left Egypt.

Also, the story of Elijah speaking to the dry bones.  I bought a skeleton years ago where the arms and legs were actually hooked to each other, and you could remove them all. And, during the story, I would hook them back all up together again.  You know—the foot bone connected to the thigh bone; the thigh bone connected to the hip—you will you get the idea!  Visuals! How much more interesting is it to actually show kids a skeleton rather than just talk about it!

Fire!

Now, a long time ago, somebody gave this incredible fire hat to me, and I have used it over and over and over to represent the tongues of fire that fell on the day of Pentecost and sat on the heads of the disciples. Oh, they’re much harder to find now in these particular colors. Like here, in this store, it only came in yellow. But if you’ll do some searching online every now and then, you can find one that’s closer to what mine looked like.

Ghosts & Spirits

Now I never seen one of these before.  But, man alive, I wish I could have gotten my hands on this ghost girl when I was a children’s pastor. Because a regular theme in my sermons is teaching kids about being created in the image of God—spirit, soul, and body. And just try coming up with a visual for a spirit! Well, normally I use balloons for this.  And I can use it pretty effectively, and I’ve put them in a lot of the object lessons in the curriculums that I’ve written.

But look at this! I’d get rid of this icky hair and replace the ghost clothes. But you know, we teach kids that even though there’s a scripture that indicates that our spirit man is down on the inside of us (you know that scripture in the New Testament where it says that out of our innermost belly will flow rivers of living water).  Well, that if we can actually see our spirits they would most likely look just like us, only invisible.

In fact, you could probably dress this gal up in a child’s wig and clothing and say something about if you  removed our layer of skin, this is probably what our spirit would look like.

Oh yeah! These tombstones! Years ago, I was teaching the kids about Jesus coming back again and I used the scripture about the dead in Christ will rise first; then we which are alive and remain will meet him in the clouds. And the Holy Spirit gave me this idea of getting one of these tombstones (now not the icky ones with the ghouls on the front and the gory ones, but the ones like this that say RIP or rest in peace on them), and then to get a  helium balloon. And then I would get the string real short but long enough so that I could hide the balloon behind the tombstone. And I would hide it in such the way that the kids had no idea it was back there. Then when I got to that part in my sermon, I cut the string and the spirit rose in the air!  It was really a cool effect, because it represented our spirits rising again!

Now rubber hearts…they’re also one of my favorites, especially when I teach on the blood of Jesus. I find all kinds of uses for it.  But basically I would use it when I was trying to explain the difference between the hearts in our bodies and when the Bible talks about our hearts, meaning our spiritual hearts.

But one year I took it to another level. When I was teaching on the topic when God told the Israelites through the prophet Ezekiel he says, “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you and I’ll remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.”  So, what I did is, I went to a local butcher shop and I bought two pigs’ hearts. Now they’re the closest in size to a human heart. So, I took them home, and I put one of them in the freezer and I left the other one in the refrigerator. Then, during my sermon when I was talking, I pulled out the frozen heart and I preached on that for a minute and pounded it on the table to show that it was a hard heart. And then I added something about the concept of them being gospel hardened, because they were all Church kids, and it was a warning to them that if they weren’t careful, that even though we’re Christians, we can become hardened to the things of the Spirit.

Then I pulled out the other heart.  It was still soft, and I held it up and I squeezed it with my fingers.  And we talked about how we needed to keep our hearts soft towards the things of God, and that when we got saved God took our hard hearts and gave us soft hearts of flesh. And when the service was over, I let the kids come up and squeeze the soft heart, right? Because don’t you know, they all wanted to touch the pig’s heart

themselves.

Tombstones

So anyway, those are just some of the ideas that I’ve gotten over the years at Halloween time. But you don’t have to wait for October 31st to get creative with your sermons. Just remember, kids want to see, they want to touch, they want to feel, and experience what you’re talking about. And it’s critically important that when you use visuals you don’t use flat pictures, like flannel graphs, and all and printouts. You want to find three-dimensional objects because it’s much more likely to capture their imaginations.

And if any of you are familiar with those old shows of Bill Nye, the Science Guy, I used to watch him by the hours. He fascinated me, because he was one of the most creative teachers I had ever seen for kids.  He got my creative juices going, and he’s an atheist, you know. And he’d probably flip out if he knew that he’d inspired someone like me to teach kids about God more effectively. Oh, well!

I hope you got something out of this video. And if you did, please hit the like button below.  And if you haven’t already done so, click on the subscribe button and the little notification bell to get notified the next time I upload a video.

Then check out the links below to some of my curriculums that I mentioned if you want to get the lessons where I use some of these visuals. Also, we have actually put together visual kits (NO LONGER AVAILABLE) for our curriculums to save you the time in searching for them, and I’ll put a link to those below as well.

So, until next time, let those creative juices flow, and God bless and I’ll see you soon!