I come from a very small, rural church. When we decided to use Wonder Ink’s The Wonder of the Cross experience for our Good Friday service, I was so excited! This resource consists of six interactive prayer stations, designed to help kids and families understand and reflect on Jesus’ experiences in the last few days of His life on earth.
The stations begin with Jesus teaching and the Jewish leaders plotting against Him, moving then to Jesus’ last evening with His closest followers, His wrestling in prayer in the garden, His betrayal and arrest, and ultimately His death on the cross, as He gave His life to save us from our sin and bring us close to the God who loves us.
As small groups journey through these events, each station includes a Scripture passage, a reading, questions for further thought, an interactive worship response activity, and prayer.
Kids who don’t always have the experience and insight of spiritually mature adults were able to learn from them, and adults who don’t always have the refreshing influence of childlike faith and honest, uninhibited questions were able to learn from the kids.
A Whole Church Experience
As we prepared for this experience, I was even more excited when we decided this wouldn’t just be for our kids, but for the whole church together. This type of event was very unusual for us, a step beyond the comfort zone of what most of our church is used to in any service or event, including Good Friday.
The hope was that it would cast a fresh perspective for all ages of all that Jesus did for us on the day He went to the cross to save us.
And God used it in incredible ways! Our church gathered together in the sanctuary on Friday evening, beginning with a time of worship and a brief explanation of what was to come. Our pastor then helped everyone form small groups of 5–8 people. The groups would later be dismissed from the sanctuary to experience the stations throughout the rest of the evening, one group at a time.
In the meantime, groups remained in the sanctuary and enjoyed times of music and worship, mixed with times of informal fellowship and conversation with one another.
Intergenerational Ministry
When it came to forming these small groups, a wonderful opportunity for intergenerational ministry was presented.
We have a handful of consistently attending families with children, and they were encouraged to experience the stations together as families. But we have several older church members whose kids and grandkids don’t live nearby or don’t attend our church. We also have young people from the local neighborhood in our kids’ and youth programs, who have been coming to church regularly on their own for a few months now, even though their parents don’t attend.
So, some of our senior church members, who love young people but don’t always get much of a chance to interact with them, were grouped together with a ministry leader and with these local kids who don’t have their own family’s adults at church.
As a result, every small group had a mix of ages from pre-school or elementary up to senior adult, and families got to experience the evening together.
Kids who don’t always have the experience and insight of spiritually mature adults were able to learn from them, and adults who don’t always have the refreshing influence of childlike faith and honest, uninhibited questions were able to learn from the kids.
These are some of the best aspects of intergenerational ministry, and we got to see those happen in our church on Good Friday.
Unity in the Church
As a kids’ ministry leader who was directing traffic between stations, I had a front row seat to see and overhear parts of each group’s experience as they moved through The Wonder of the Cross.
I got to see our families reflect on the events of Jesus’ last week together. I got to watch some of our church’s adults washing each other’s hands and serving each other, reminding each other what Jesus went through for our sake.
I got to hear older church members, who are wise and mature in their faith and who love God with an overflowing love, as they taught and poured out that wisdom and love into kids who may have been hearing about these things for the first time.
It was a beautiful thing to see and experience, and I’m so thankful that God allowed me to be a part of His working in these ways. I hope our church will have more opportunities to do similar things in the future.
Wonder Ink’s 3-year, 52-week children’s ministry curriculum offers kids space to fully find their place in God’s Big Story. Children discover they are Known by God, Loved by Jesus, and Led by the Holy Spirit.
