Family Guide: Witness
At Bridgetown, our goal is that every person – adult and child – would be with Jesus, become like Jesus, and do what Jesus did. But these things don’t just happen overnight; they take time, intention, and repetition. So, with this in mind, we will be releasing a Family Guide during each teaching series to help you engage a particular Practice from the life and teaching of Jesus together. Since these Guides are aimed at kids of multiple ages, please skip or adapt anything that does not feel age appropriate. These Guides are written conversationally, so feel free to read through them. Italicized words are notes to parents and bolded words are questions to take some time with.
Have you ever heard the word “witness”? What do you think it means to “witness” something?
Parents: Pause here for your child(ren) to share their answers.
A “witness” is someone who sees something important take place and tells other people about it. You can witness fun and happy things like your soccer team winning a game or an amazing sunset, and you can witness sad or scary things like a car accident or someone at school being mean to your classmate. What is something that each of us has witnessed this week?
Parents: Pause here for each person to share their answers.
Imagine if you saw Jesus heal someone whose eyes were blind. Wouldn’t you want to tell everyone you knew, and maybe even strangers? The Bible has all kinds of stories about people having really awesome experiences with Jesus and then telling all of their friends about it. In fact, back before the internet and cell phones existed, the only way the Good News that Jesus was King could be spread was by witnesses – people who had experienced this Good News and told everyone they knew about how much God loved the world.
Let’s read through a Bible story about a time in which someone practiced Witness. This story is about a man who was not able to see for his whole life! But then he had a cool encounter with Jesus. Let’s see what Jesus did and how the man responded.
Parents: Pull out a Bible and read John 9v6-11. After reading the story, work through these questions together:
What did the guy in this story “witness”? (He witnessed Jesus healing his eyes!)
What did he do afterwards? (He told people about it!)
Who would you want to tell if you saw Jesus heal someone like this?
Sometimes we witness Jesus do things outside of us like healing people. And sometimes we get to witness Jesus do things inside of us like make us not afraid at night or help us make new friends. What has happened in your life with God that you would want other people to know?
Did you know that, since we are a part of God’s family, we get to be witnesses too? Just like the guy in this story, we get to tell people about Jesus! There are so many ways we can do this: we can pray for people, we can be really good friends, we can cook food for people, we can talk to them when they’re sad, we can invite them to church, and so much more!
Some people really love to tell people about Jesus. Some people feel kind of scared about it. And some people haven’t really thought about it before. All of these things are totally ok! There is no wrong way to feel about it. When each of us thinks about telling people about God’s love, how does that make us feel?
Parents: Pause here for each person to share answers.
There are no bad ways to feel about this. It’s ok to feel a little bit scared or to not really want to try it. It can be hard to do something, especially if we’ve never really tried it before! One thing that helps us to do hard things is to try them with other people. Maybe there are some ways we can practice Witness together as a family!
To start our brainstorming, let’s talk about who in our life doesn’t know Jesus. These can be anyone: friends from school or an after school club, neighbors down the street, friends at mom/dad’s work, family members, etc. Can we make a list of 5 people in our lives who don’t know Jesus?
Parents: Pause here to fill out the “5 people we’re praying for” list below.
Next, let’s talk about how we could share with these people about God. Remember that there are so many ways to share about Jesus with people. We can tell them a story about how we have felt loved by God, we can invite them over to play with us, we can say something really nice to them (like a blessing), we can share something a toy with them when we’d rather not, or so many other things!
Practicing Witness is like practicing riding a bike or playing piano or dribbling a basketball or speaking Spanish – we learn it best when we do it over and over again. So rather than just doing something once, it can be helpful to pick something that we do on a regular rhythm.
Here is a list of three specific ideas for us to explore that are simple and repeatable. Let’s discuss them and pick one to try for a season!
Idea #1: Pray through our list on Sunday after church – One of the ways we could practice Witness could be to spend our car ride home from church each Sunday praying through the list of 5 people that we made. This could be done in a few movements:
Discuss what we witnessed at church. What did we hear at church? How did we encounter God?
Pray through our list of 5 people. Let’s take some time to pray together, asking that God would save the people on this list and that they would come to know his love for them.
Ask God to send us. Let’s pray and ask God to send us to be part of their salvation stories. This could look like asking God for any fun, creative ideas that he would have us be part of, and then waiting in silence for God to put ideas in our minds and hearts.
Thank God. Finally, let’s close the prayer thanking God for the way he speaks to us. And let’s take some time talking about any ideas that God seemed to give us.
Idea #2: Invite someone over for dinner – Another really fun idea could be to pick one night every month to invite someone from our list over for dinner. Some months we might invite a friend from school and their family, other months we might invite mom’s coworker and their family, or some month’s we might invite a neighbor from down the street. Whoever we invite over, the goal of these dinners would simply be to share the love of God through hospitality. Whether praying for them before they come over or taking time to bless them at dinner with kind words of what we appreciate about them or perhaps even telling them about what God is doing in our life, we want the people who sit at our table to know that they are loved by our family and by God.
Idea #3: Invite someone to come to church with us – Church is a really cool place to witness God. We witness God through the songs that we sing and the Bible stories we learn and the friends that we make. Could we invite someone to witness God with us at church on Sunday? Perhaps plan to invite someone from our list once a month. We can decide at the beginning of each month who we are going to invite and which Sunday it will be. And then we could have conversations with them about where we all witnessed God at church.
Which of these three do we want to commit to?
Parents: Fill out the “Our Family Witness Practice” sheet below (including any relevant details) and put it up where the whole family can see it!
Whether on a car ride from church or at dinner later this month or some other time, let’s decide when we want to bring this up again. And, finally, let’s end by praying together for these 5 people by name, that God would help them to know his love and that God would send us to help them know his love.