5 Ways to Teach Kids About World Missions

Keep a stack of prayer cards on your dinner table. Before the meal prayer, pull one card. Read the name of the people group out loud. Pray one sentence for them. Over a month, your family will have prayed for 30 different people groups, and your children will start to see the world as God sees it.

At bedtime, let your child hold a prayer card as they pray. Something happens when a child says the name of an unreached people group in the quiet of their room. The people stop being a statistic and become real.

Make recipes from unreached nations. Uzbek plov. Iraqi chai. Berber couscous. While the food cooks, talk about the people who eat this meal every day: where they live, what they believe, and how few of them have heard the gospel.

The smell of cumin and cardamom will become linked in your child's memory with the names of real people. That's not a small thing. Sensory memory is the deepest kind.

Read missionary biographies as bedtime stories. Amy Carmichael rescuing children in India. Hudson Taylor trusting God for impossible things in China. Gladys Aylward crossing mountains with 100 orphans. These stories are more adventurous than fiction, and they're true.

For younger kids, picture books about different cultures open the door. For older kids, chapter-length missionary biographies build faith and global awareness simultaneously.

Start a missions journal. Each week, your child writes one paragraph about a people group they're learning about: what they eat, where they live, what they want to pray for them. Over a year, the journal becomes a personal prayer book for the nations.

If your family supports a missionary, write them letters. Real letters, on paper, with drawings. Missionaries on the field treasure mail from kids back home more than you can imagine.

Let your children participate in giving. When they earn money from chores or birthdays, help them set aside a portion for missions. A child who gives $2 from their allowance to support Bible translation has entered the story of God's work among the nations in a way that no lecture can replicate.

Some families keep a "missions jar" on the counter. Others sponsor a child through a missions organization. The amount matters less than the habit; children who grow up giving to missions become adults who give to missions.