Here are a few ways you can incorporate a comprehensive missions program into your children’s ministry.

Adopt a missionary. Find missionaries that either has children or works with children and have your children adopt them. Have a mission’s emphasis month where you teach the children about the country these missionaries live in. Have the children write letters to them. Have the children collect supplies that the missionaries need. Give the children frequent updates about how their missionaries are doing. During the opening prayer of children’s church, mention these missionaries’ names in prayer. Constantly bring the adopted missionaries to your children’s remembrances. Give the children in your church names and faces to relate to missions.

Have a missions Sunday. Once a month or once a quarter, have a Sunday where you teach about missions. Feature a different country or missionary each time. Have fun with it, and decorate your room according to the culture you are featuring. You could even serve food from that country. Let the children know that any offering collected that week will go to missions.

Tell missionary stories. Give some thought to how stories of missionaries and the persecuted church, past and present, could emphasis the lesson you’ve planned for children’s church.

If you’re teaching about God being more important than things, teach about Jim Elliot, a missionary killed in Ecuador in 1956, and his famous quote, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”

If you’re teaching about God supplying our needs, tell the story of Hudson Taylor, missionary to China, and how God supplied his needs. This way, you can incorporate missions as a teaching tool.

Pray for missionaries. Pray for missionaries with your children every week. Give the children names of missionaries and countries that need prayer and encourage them to pray every day. Missions is a great way to teach children how to intercede for others.

Have children reach out to their community. Missions isn’t just oversees. Missions is in your neighborhood. Involve your children in your benevolence ministries in your local church. Have them collect canned goods, toys at Christmas, and school supplies in August. Have them wait tables at your soup kitchen. Give them opportunities to be involved in missionary endeavors here at home.

Take a missions trip. There is nothing like a short-term mission’s trip to help you and your children see the great need and opportunity in missions. Check with your denomination to see if there are opportunities for your older children to minister to others in our nation or in another country. A manual called Little Preacher End-Time Missions  can help you plan your missions trip.