The Bible offers a huge and beautiful array of images for God, but too often we fall back on the same few terms, narrowing our ability to appreciate God’s expansive being and, by extension, God’s expansive love. At the back of All Creation Sings, there’s a section of scriptural images for God, and the ACS Kids Celebrate bulletins help children explore the worship supplement and get to know God better as a multifaceted, trinitarian being.
The Kids Celebrate: The Trinity bulletin has many activities that help kids imagine God in broader terms than they may be used to. Page 2 of the booklet is called “Our 3-in-1 God,” and it describes the Trinity in both words and images to help visual learners grasp what we mean when we call God the Three-in-One. This part of the bulletin also refers kids to different pages of All Creation Sings that contain liturgy that names God in all three parts of the Trinity, showing kids that there’s more to discover in ACS than hymns and songs.
Page 3 of Kids Celebrate: The Trinity refers children to hymn 948 in ACS: “Womb of Life and Source of Being.” This page invites kids to write or draw the images for the trinitarian God that appear in each stanza of the hymn, providing a three-way Venn diagram that mirrors the art of the Trinity from the previous page. Page 15 has a similar activity with hymn 947, “Source and Sovereign, Rock and Cloud.”
Meanwhile, Page 9 of the bulletin is a word search full of different scriptural images for God listed in the back of All Creation Sings, including “composer” (Deuteronomy 31:19) “hiding place” (Psalm 32:7), “midwife” (Psalm 22:9), “monster-slayer” (Psalm 74:13-14), and “serpent” (John 3:14). This activity urges kids to dig into some of the less well-known images the Bible gives us for God. This theme continues on page 10, where kids are encouraged to find surprising scriptural images for God in All Creation Sings and ask fellow members of the congregation if they think the image comes from the Bible or not.
The Kids Celebrate: Creation bulletin also helps kids imagine God in more expansive ways. On pages 4 and 5, an activity called “Imagine God as an Element of Nature” asks kids to dig into that same section in the back of All Creation Sings and focus on scriptural images for God that depict God as something from nature. This helps connect faith with creation care in addition to conveying an expansive view of God.
All Creation Sings and its attendant Kids Celebrate bulletins are meant to help us think about God in ways that are both faithful and surprising, both biblical and new. We hope that these resources can help refresh, renew, and sustain faith in your worshiping community.