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10 Ways to Pray with Kids
Prayer doesn’t have to be complicated. Explore simple, meaningful ways to pray with kids—through art, movement, journaling, nature, and everyday conversation—that help children express their hearts and notice God’s presence all around them.
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Low Church Attendance Over Summer & What To Do About It
BONUS CONTENT: We have a special gift for you. If you want a list of suggestions for making connections with families at church this summer, make sure you click to download the bonus content. If you click here, we’ll send you an exclusive PDF with a list that we have compiled from folks here at ICM. Summertime, it brings such effervescent joys. Days are longer. There’s more time with family and sunshine. But in ministry it often brings seasonally low church attendance, too. And, if we’ve been in ministry long enough we have been anticipating these months. The lull in…
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Engaging and Welcoming Children in Worship
DOWNLOAD YOUR FREEBIE: If you are interested in receiving a FREE PDF that includes seven suggestions for how you might easily engage children in worship, then make sure you grab this freebie. Click here to download our list of ideas – and then pick ONE to try and implement this Sunday. Summer = Party Time! During the summer months, many of our churches get a little more creative. Because of this seasonal flexibility, it can be a great time to try something new that will help welcome and engage children in worship. Maybe you’ve moved to a different worship schedule,…
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5 Questions to Ask Kids This Summer
s Summertime Brings New Opportunities for Connection Anyone else out there ever get into a conversation with your child, feeling disappointed having hoped you’d have a deeper exchange but simply received one-syllable responses? C’mon, you’re killing me, Smalls! Over the summer, parents often have the joy of more interaction with their kids when school and homework have faded into mere memory. Long road trips, lazy pool days, car rides to the movie theater, and walks to the park take residence on our calendars instead. Such fertile soil for fun chats! So, over here at ICM, we’ve put together a list…
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Community Spotlight: A Retirement Home Coloring Series
BONUS CONTENT: Do you like this post? Want to get some bonus content NOT included in this post? This week’s PDF includes our list of the 5 Takeaways from Lutheran Living’s experience of using our coloring posters with their retirement community. If you’re interested in this exclusive, bonus content, click here to get access to download the PDF Hey, all! Recently, we got to catch up with The Rev. Susan Bantz, Chaplain at Lutheran Living Senior Campus, a retirement community in Iowa. She gave us the inside scoop on the fun they had doing a retirement home coloring series this…
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Community Spotlight: St. Gregory the Great Catholic School (Oxford, England)
Today we are starting a new series of blog posts where we will highlight some members of our community and sharing with you how they used some of our resources and products. We’ve written before about how creativity breeds creativity, and we love seeing how communities use our products. While our coloring posters are typically used in church congregations, we saw many schools who found creative uses for using coloring posters at school – especially our Stations of the Cross posters during Lent. Special thanks to Fran Walsh and all of the students and staff at St. Gregory the Great…
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Spring Update and What’s Up Next?
Phew. It’s been awhile since I’ve done much blogging here, but it’s not because we’ve been lazy – we promise! This winter and spring has been quite a time of growth for Illustrated Ministry, and I just wanted to take a moment to catch you up on what’s going on and what’s up next for us. Stations of the Cross Coloring Posters I imagined that our Stations of the Cross Coloring Posters would be popular, but I don’t think I quite imagined they would take off like they did! In the end, we sold 1000 sets of our physical posters to churches,…
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Tutorial: How to Easily Create Wooden Poster Hangers to Display your Completed Coloring Posters
Are you wondering how you might hang and display your Stations of the Cross Coloring Posters? Or maybe another set of our coloring posters? Would you like to learn how to easily create these beautiful wooden poster hangers? The below tutorial will work for any of our coloring posters that are 36″ wide and 24″ tall, whether you ordered physical posters from us, or whether you got engineering prints made by Staples. Illustrated Ministry community member Suzanne Voldman, a parishioner and volunteer at St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church in Yakima, Washington, first shared one of these photos in our Illustrated Ministry Facebook Group,…
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An Interview with The Rev. Jennifer Baskerville-Burrows about our Lenten Family Resources
In a few weeks, we will be launching our second series of Lenten devotions for families called An Illustrated Lent for Families. It will include devotions, coloring activities and more, for the weeks during Lent, leading up to Easter. We are really excited about this project but unfortunately can’t share much more than that for now. However, it will be very similar in form to our last Illustrated Lent for Families project. A few months ago, I met The Rt. Rev. Jennifer Baskerville-Burrows at an Episcopal event in Chicago. Baskerville-Burrows told me about how she had been worshipping at a church that handed out…
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Help Us Support Children in Syria – We Will Match Donations
Below is a message from our founder, Adam Walker Cleaveland. Whether or not you can give financially to support the work of Project Amal ou Salam, we invite you to join us in prayer for all of those children in Syria who are suffering. If you are like me, you’ve probably been hearing the news about Aleppo, seeing the images, and grieving for all those innocent men and women and children who have lost their lives amidst the escalating violence. It’s tragic to imagine the lives of the children in Aleppo, and we’ve been trying to imagine how Illustrated Ministry might be able…
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Stations of the Cross Coloring Posters
We are excited about our Stations of the Cross Coloring Posters, and we hope this post has helpful information for you as you begin your Lenten planning. If you aren’t familiar with the Stations of the Cross, or would like to learn more, you can find out some details about the history of them at Wikipedia here. One of the earliest versions of the Stations of the Cross may have begun around 1217 by St. Francis, who started the Custody of the Holy Land, a group that guarded and promoted devotion to certain holy places. But it was around 1200-1500…
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Coloring Invites Creativity, Deepens Relationships and Much More…
Note from Adam: I’m excited to introduce you all to Alissa Ellett, who wrote the blog post below. Alissa has written for ICM (for An Illustrated Summer, our Illustrated Earth curriculum and is currently working on our Illustrated Children’s Moments) and is going to be helping us get our blog to be more consistently providing you with interesting and helpful posts, starting off with some reflecting about coloring. Alissa has worked in ministry for fifteen years, serving in churches across California. She earned her master’s in Christian education from Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary and is currently serving as the children’s and…