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Growing Gardens and Children’s Souls
Children have always been important to us in our biblical Garden, both the young children of our church and community and the child within us all whose heart leaps when we taste the first sweet shlurp of our garden-grown watermelon!
Sam Macomber's "Watermelon"
How have we integrated children into the garden at our church, and how can you?
Study the material on biblical plants and start planting a few plants, trees, or shrubs around your church and or home. Many already grow there! Learn and tell their Bible stories. Our plant list will give you a start. We have an exhaustive listing of virtually every reference in the bible to each plant we have been trying to grow (more than 100).
Involve the children in some of the planting with a good number of adults. It takes about for every child or two so that your garden doesn't turn into chaos. It takes a lot of advanced planing to order seeds from the various locations, and to plan and mark what will be planted where, and to get each adult to become familiar with how they will plant their send, plants, etc. However, this makes a great multi-generational project. Benches can be built near the gardens for observers as well as workers.
Involve children in watering, weeding and caring for their plants and keep telling them stories... Bible stories, life stories, and listen to their life stories! They learn about caring and receiving care!
Each Sunday during the growing season tell a story with the children and bring in plants, blooms, and God-willing, fruit to explore! The brief reflections in the plant guide, the Bible references, and the articles about water gardens and vegetable gardens provide a good starting point.
Decorate the communion table and worship areas in church school rooms with plants and their products and use them as starters for exploring Biblical stories.
Nathaniel Bauman's "Children's Garden"
Draw and paint the plants and fruits of the gardens. Cindy has taken the children outside to draw and brought in plants on yucky days. A few snacks of Biblical foods (grapes, dates, cucumbers, melon, nuts, etc.) can make the creating more fun and give a break to tell more stories.
We are working on a calendar or booklet featuring the children’s drawings which we may publish here when we are done. The children have done marvelous work and they feel proud and come to believe in themselves as they create and are affirmed by adults.
Robert Ellis' "Lady Bug on a Leaf"
Do an art sale for missions with the children’s artwork. A few years ago our children did watercolors of Bible stories, displayed them during fellowship time and adults bought them, making contributions to Heifer Project.
| Church World Service has Tools of Hope cards for Fathers’ Day. Instead of purchasing a greeting card, children and families purchase a card that will buy a tool to allow a family without food to start growing their own. Our gifts buy hoes, shovels, and seeds. http://www.churchworldservice.org/giftcatalog.htm |
We bring in food to share from our gardens during the summer and insist that people without gardens take home fresh vegetables. We hand out goodies on the way out of worship. Children can help make the deliveries.
Shannon Ellis' "Cucumber"
We teach adults and children to love the earth and to care for her as stewards. On one Sunday a year I put a bag of garbage on the communion table and children help me sort out all of the recycling, compost, and reusable materials, leaving very little to dump back into our earth! We each do an environmental survey to evaluate how well we are doing in caring for our earth. Gardening and earth stewardship go hand in hand.
Every January or February we do something exciting involving the church school and the adults to restore our energy in mid-winter. This year we carried out a modified Marketplace 29AD with the whole church set up like a biblical village. http://www.marketplace29ad.com/ The children became apprentices. The adults learned about food making, carpentry, sandal making, weaving, and taught the younger folks during the two Sundays.
We also borrowed a display of genuine biblical artifacts from the Badé Institute of Pacific School of Religion, one as much as 4,000 years old, that show with the real objects, how people lived in Bible times! Again children and adults learned came into a real physical relationship with the stuff of the Bible to make it all come alive! To see the slide show on the web http://www.psr.edu/bade/index.html To borrow the exhibit e-mail rohm@psr.edu
Another January a neighboring Rabbi, Sol Goldberg, taught our whole church how to celebrate the Sabbath, and through the month we made items to use on our "family tables." The children from each "family" (made up of all kinds of grouping of people) hosted their table.
Shannon & Robert Ellis at their Sabbath table
Next year we are hoping to engage the rabbi in teaching us to celebrate the Passover Seder meal with its biblical herbs and foods. Another year we hope to make prayer shawls from wool or flax ( another biblical plant) for all of us in the congregation and learn to prayer with them under the rabbi's instruction.
We also draw from our biblical gardens for our monthly church dinners. Flowers and greenery grace the tables. Mint adds flavor to the tea.
These are just a few ideas for integrating creative, edible, active, earthy learning.
Of course the gardens, and especially the water garden, has brought another blessing. People of all ages stop days after day at the gardens to watch things grow, to hunt out the frogs, to listen to the waterfall gurgle, to feed the fish and hunt for the one they have named... Young and old and teens end up listening to and talking with each other. The water garden especially seems to be draw people to gather as a community as they do around the fountain in an Italian village.
Corey Chambers' "Watermelon"
