Faith Quest is one of the discipleship tools, used within our Kids Church (K-5th) programming, to help kids establish their faith on the lasting foundation of Jesus Christ! There are many things we want to teach kids through their Sunday morning experience, but we recognize that a child’s discipleship has to be bigger and more intentional than a weekly 45-minute program. We believe a child’s discipleship is more effective at helping them establish a firm faith foundation when the church and the home partner together. Therefore, Faith Quest is designed to be a discipleship tool that helps bridge the gap between a child’s church experience and home life. It utilizes the resources of the church community while providing a pathway for kids to have faith-based interactions at home with parents/guardians. 

• A SERIES OF QUESTS - Faith Quest is designed around a series of quests that can last one month, two months, or possibly longer. Each quest is meant to nurture different aspects of the Christian life within a child. For example, one quest might focus on growing their Biblical knowledge through scripture memorization, or Theological understanding. Another might help deepen their daily walk with Jesus by encouraging them to do Spiritual Disciplines. The next quest’s goal might be to develop Christ-like character through acts of service. Having a variety of quests each year can help keep kids engaged but also allows for a more holistic faith development, where we can help nurture a child’s head, heart, and hands for Jesus!

• STARTING A NEW QUEST - At the start of a new quest, parents/guardians will receive information laying out the details of that specific quest. It will indicate the length of the quest, its end goal, and the weekly challenges that your child is meant to do.

• WEEKLY CHALLENGES - Each quest has weekly challenges for your child to complete, but what does this look like? Let’s say the current quest is focused on Bible memorization, then the weekly challenge will be memorizing a verse or part of a larger passage. If the quest is aimed at developing the spiritual discipline of prayer, then each week there will be a prayer challenge. The weekly challenges will be clearly laid out at the start of each quest.

• COMPLETING THE WEEKLY CHALLENGE - If a child completes the challenge for the week, then the following Sunday, they will need to indicate to our volunteers that they finished it. This will look different depending on the current quest. It may mean they are required to recite their memory verse to a Kids Church volunteer, they may be asked to bring back a completed worksheet, or it could simply be sharing how they fulfilled the challenge that week. 

• INDIVIDUAL & GROUP PRIZES - Every Sunday that a child shows they have completed the challenge for that week they earn a small prize. But every time they complete a weekly challenge; they also help their peers work toward bigger group prizes. To help keep things fun and to create a need for teamwork, each quest will have a huge game board hung up in the Kids Church area. Along the path of the game board, different group prizes will be listed, with one grand prize at the very end. Every time a kid completes the weekly challenge they get to move the group one space along the game board. This system helps reward kids each week for the effort they put in, but it also helps encourage them to work together so that they can reach the big prize at the end.

At GFC we recognize that life is busy and that at times it can be easy to let the discipleship of your kids fall through the cracks. But we firmly believe that kids need more than just a Sunday morning experience. They need to have the adults in their lives normalize conversations about the Bible, Jesus, and the journey of faith. But again, life is busy, and it can sometimes be difficult to start meaningful spiritual conversations with them. That’s where Faith Quest can help. The weekly challenges are not meant to be overly burdensome, but they will give opportunities for you to interact with your child about spiritual things. Kids don’t need a 100-minute long conversation about Jesus, they need one-hundred 1 minute long conversations about Jesus. Read that again and let it sink in! Imagine if you helped your child complete the weekly challenges. Throughout their grade-school career, the conversations about Jesus would add up, potentially giving you dozens if not hundreds of faith-based interactions with them. It is within this repetition and the normalizing of “Jesus talk” that we believe a lasting foundation of faith can begin to grow within your child.