Creekside Covenant Kids: Week Three: Peter is the Rock

This week's bottom line was:

What is important to God should also be important to me.

During the story we learned about Jesus giving Simon his new name (Peter), and why Jesus chose that name. The name Peter is from the Greek work petros which means "rock". God chose this name for Simon because he was to be the foundation for the church. In Matthew 16:18, it says "And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church". We talked about how when Jesus told Peter this, there weren't a bunch of churches and Christians, and that telling Peter that he would be the start of all of these things was a huge deal! Because Peter realized that the growing of the Church was important to God, he made sure it was important to him as well.

During our application time, we talked about things that are important to God. The kids came up with some awesome responses such as showing kindness, being healthy, obedience, and showing love, they are all so smart! Each student got to write something that is important to God on a river rock, and their challenge was to keep the rock with them during the week as a reminder of what should be important to us.

The next activity had to do with how Jesus gave Peter a name with a very special meaning. We researched what all of the children's names meant, and they got to make tiles with their name and meaning on them. We had meanings ranging everywhere from "Red Head" to "Gift from God" and the kids loved discovering what their names meant. We also spent some time talking and thinking about how we could live out our name-meanings in real life. It was incredible to hear their insightful answers and their overwhelming creativity.

We finished off this fun-filled week with ice cream sundaes (sorry parents)!! We topped our sundaes with things that looked like rocks to remember the Peter was the rock that Jesus chose to build the church on. What a great week!

Here are some pictures: