How Families Can Make a Difference Globally
The world is big. As parents, how do you take a big world that God has created and find a way to make a difference globally as a family? When it comes to having a Kingdom impact globally, there are four ways your family can be involved.
1) Learn: With so much information available to us today, there is no shortage of ways to engage your kids in what is happening around the world. Check out different news outlets, books, movies, podcasts, and documentaries to stay up to date on what’s happening around the world. Share that information with your kids in an age-appropriate way and discuss it together. Take advantage of opportunities in your community that allow you to learn about and experience people of different cultures and backgrounds. For example, visit a museum or attend a cultural festival. Celebrate a holiday another country celebrates by cooking one of their well-known foods, listening to their music, or honoring a common tradition.
2) Pray: The needs around the world are great. As it is age-appropriate, begin sharing those needs with your kids and praying about them together. Your family can always be praying for those affected by poverty or other human rights violations. For example, you could say, “Tonight we are going to pray for kids in other countries who don’t have enough food or water at home. How would it make you feel if you didn’t have food for lunch or dinner each day? What if the water you drank made you feel sick because it wasn’t clean?” Find ways to personalize the discussion for your child and pray together over those needs. If you know a missionary working in a different country or are familiar with a ministry serving globally, pray regularly for them. Sign up for their newsletter updates, read them together as a family and pray.
3) Give: One way to give financially to ministry happening around the globe is through sponsoring a child living in poverty. When you sponsor a child with one of our partners, a seed of hope is planted in a child. Being chosen, encouraged through letters, and loved by a sponsor opens their heart to know that they are truly loved by God and not forgotten. Child sponsorship is a way to get your whole family involved. Your kids can help write letters to the child you sponsor or help send a gift. You can also hang the child’s picture where your whole family can see it, prompting you to pray for your sponsored child often. This is such an amazing way to make a difference in the life of a child in another country. You can learn more about child sponsorship at tpcc.org/child-sponsorship.
4) Go: One of the best ways to experience what God is doing around the world is to go on a mission trip with your child. When you go on a mission trip together, you embark on an incredible journey to watch God do some amazing things in the lives of not just the people you’re serving—but in you as well. These experiences allow you and your child to see just how big God is, learn how the part you play makes a difference around the world, build relationships that will carry the Gospel, and discover what God has individually gifted you with to make a difference outside the walls of the church. To learn more about mission trips with Traders Point, go to tpcc.org/serve-far.
Incorporating these four things into the rhythm of your family will allow your kids to understand the world God created, the people in it and how God can use them to make a difference globally.