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SinBusters is the Middle School Fellowship of the Kent Presbyterian Church. Our weekly activities each month generally include a service project, a game night, a road trip, and a movie night.

Bible Verse Game

Overview
One of our most popular games is the Bible Verse Game created by John and Penny Graves and is described here so that it can be enjoyed by other Christian groups. The game can be played by groups as small as 4 up to an unlimited size, and works well with Junior High and Middle School youth. This is a team game where each team hides verses from a Bible story or parable throughout the church, retrieves the verses hidden by another team, and acts out the story that they have retrieved. The team size can be anywhere from 2 to 6.

Preparation
The leaders locate stories or parables from the Bible of at least 10 verses, one story for each team. Print the verses on a sheet of paper leaving room between individual or grouped verses so that each story can easily be cut into 10 pieces without cutting off any of the words. Downloading the verses from the Internet and arranging them in a word processing program is one good way to accomplish this formatting feat. Write the order of the verses (1 to 10) in the left margin to eliminate any confusion as to the order of the stories after the sheets are cut. Prior to cutting, the verses should then be photocopied onto different colored sheets of paper so that each team's verses have a distinct color. Cut each sheet of colored paper with the verses into 10 pieces and retain the original.

Instructions to the teams
The instructions must be completely understood by the teams so they must be carefully explained in some detail. The game fails if these instructions are misunderstood.

1) You have been given 10 parts of a story (or parable) that are to be hidden throughout the church.
2) The team must go out and first hide the paper labeled with the number 10.
3) Write a clue as to the location of paper #10 on the back of the paper with the label #9, and then hide that paper. Write a clue as to the location of paper #9 on the back of paper #8, and hide it. Continue this process in order until the team has only paper #1 left with the clue as to the location of paper #2. Teams must remain together and work together to decide where to hide papers and how to draft clues.
4)Clues can be challenging and clever, but an impossible clue reflects poorly on the authoring team.
5) Once you have hidden all papers (except #1), return to the meeting room, and hand paper #1 to a leader. (This is a good time for a refreshment break)

The search

Once all teams have returned and turned in paper #1 to the leaders, the leaders distribute each paper to a different team and give these instructions:

1.) You have been given paper #1 that contains the clue for finding paper #2. Go through the church using the clues on the back of each paper to locate the next paper and find the entire story.
2) Teams must stay together, look at the clues, and find all 10 papers of that color.
3) If a team cannot find a specific paper, they can locate the team that wrote the clue, show them the clue, and ask for "Mercy". The authoring team must respond with an additional, helpful clue. After looking again, if they still cannot find the paper, they must locate the authoring team again, and ask for "Grace". The authoring team must then divulge the location of the paper.
4) Once all papers have been retrieved by a team, that team must return to the meeting room.

The skits

As the teams return to the meeting room, the leaders give them the original, uncut sheet that contains the verses they retrieved. Each group uses the full sheet and the cut up verses to plan the skit that acts out their Bible story or parable. Once the final group returns and are allowed 5 to 10 minutes of preparation time, each group acts out the verses that they found.

Time

Over an hour.

Rummage Sale Activities Featuring A Scavenger Hunt

At the church Rummage Sale, our Junior High youth help on the evening (Friday evening) between the two days of the rummage sale by straightening the items on the tables to be ready for the second day of the sale(Saturday).  After all the piles of clothing are straight and the other items are arranged neatly, the SinBusters perform skits with props selected from some of the items that are being sold at the Rummage Sale.  The first skit is a Bible story or parable selected by a leader, the second skit is a story developed by the kids, and for the third skit, each team select props for another team who must develop and perform a skit using those props. It's great fun. This takes about an hour for 4 groups of 5.

This year, Penny Graves created the Scavenger Hunt game.  Here is how it worked.  Penny made a list of things they might find in the items for sale – she walked around and looked for things that were hidden, not specific items.  For example, she included on the list “a musical note”.  It could have been in a book, on a t-shirt, in some sheet music, etc.

Here is the list Penny came up with this year:
  1. 1. A musical note
    2. A dog
    3. A heart
    4. A purple flower
    5. A fish
    6. The letter Z
    7. An item of clothing with words
    8. An apple
    9. A farm animal
    10. A pumpkin
    11. A rabbit
    12. The sun
    13. A bus
    14. A bird
    15. Something red, white & blue
    16. Something that’s a set
    17. Item of clothing with a number
    18. A Christmas tree
    19. A cloud
    20. Something that makes noise
    21. Something to drink from
    22. Something with stripes
    23. A piece of sports equipment
    24. Stars
    25. A butterfly
Some things could have been counted twice, but I required that there be 25 different items, so a cup with a purple flower on it could only be counted for “purple flower” or “something to drink from”, not both.  We split up into two teams, and the team who collected all 25 items first was declared the winner. This game takes about 1/2 hour.

Permissions

Everyone is given permission to copy this section and distribute it for the purpose of Christian fellowship. If you play these games, you are invited to send an email to jgraves@aol.com with your location and comments so we can map where this game is played and improve the games or activities in the off-chance that we haven't thought of everything. :-) You may reprint these games or activities in any for-sale publication as long as the Kent Presbyterian Church ownership is acknowledged and the church receives a copy of that publication. We also ask that readers be encouraged to send an email to jgraves@aol.com informing us where the game was played.

For More Information Contact:

Kent Presbyterian Church
1456 E. Summit, Kent, OH 44240
Tel: 330-673-0661
Internet: kay@kentprez.org



Kent Presbyterian Church
1456 E. Summit (click link for map)
Kent, OH 44240

Send mail to jgraves@aol.com with questions or comments about this web site.
Last modified: 07/06/08