This Lent, we’re encouraging the entire church to participate in a daily devotional for 40 consecutive days (excluding Sundays), spanning from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday.
We're recommending two great resources for this:
1. The YouVersion App - Praying the Scripture Through Lent
Each day, the plan offers a few verses to read along with simple prayer suggestions. Depending on your level of engagement, it can take anywhere from 2 to 15 minutes.
2. Lectio 365
This app offers daily audio devotionals for the morning, midday, and evening, each lasting between 5 to 10 minutes. You can choose to do one or more, depending on your schedule.
Let’s embrace this season of Lent as an opportunity to build good habits and strengthen our spiritual disciplines, so we continue growing into the people the Lord calls us to be.
Lent Studies for Our Children and Youth
We all know that reading our Bibles and praying at home are important to help us grow in our faith. What we may not realise is that these spiritual disciplines are skills our young people need to be taught and discipled in. To assist our children and youth in developing these healthy habits, through Lent we are seeking to equip our families with discipleship materials to use at home.
Lent begins on Ash Wednesday, which is on the 5th of March this year. It marks the 40 days before Easter (not including Sundays). It is a valuable time to do something that helps us focus our hearts in preparation for Easter and all it means for us as Christians. So while there is no compulsion to engage with any of these resources, we wanted to provide something to assist our families during this season.
Each age group has something slightly different tailored to their needs and developmental stage. See the following for further information:
Creche
For our children aged 0-5 we have a beautiful prayer prompt chart. With colourful pictures they can select and place on the chart, this is a wonderful hands-on step in their faith journey. Please note: I will be putting these together for our families. They will be available for collection on Sundays at church.
Kids Church (Primary School)
For this age group we are looking at different types of prayer: thank you prayers, sorry prayers, and please prayers. This provides a well-rounded and scripturally sound approach to their prayers. We will be providing a very simple prayer journal to our children with prayer prompts to assist them. They are encouraged to write or draw in it each day as and when they are able.
To support this, we also encourage our children to read a Bible story regularly. This could be the full Bible with the family over a meal, or an age-appropriate Bible story book before bed. If you don’t have anything suitable, we recommend The Bible App for Kids. It’s the children’s version of the app our teens and adults are using. With clear messages, great graphics and fun games, it’s sure to engage our children.
Youth Church (High School)
Living in a digital age, we wanted to meet our high schoolers right where they’re at. With this in mind, we’ve selected an online Bible study for them from the YouVersion Bible app. This app is the most commonly used Bible app which features many plans and resources. We are planning to go through 40 Daily Devotionals for Lent. It will take approximately 10 minutes per day and looks at topics such as: why spend time with God, attributes of God, ways God speaks, and putting our faith into action.
We recognise that device use is a challenging topic with this age group. However, there are many ways for our teens to engage with this: they could have it on their own personal device, view it on a parent or family device, or access it via the website. Alternatively, we could arrange to print the plans and provide hard copies to anyone who requests them. We want to make this as accessible as possible.
