Every year for the past 8 years, our girls ministry takes a weekend retreat. We always have a leadership team that is comprised of high school girls and adult leaders. I work with the adult leaders to develop a theme and direction for the weekend and then I bring our girls and leaders together for a vision casting and brainstorming planning time. In the planning meeting we come up with as many fellowship ideas, worship planning ideas, and prayer experiences that go along with our scripture focus and theme.
From there, the girls are assigned a leader to help develop and make these ideas come to reality. It’s always exciting to see what our teams come up with and I love working together with them to bring their ideas to life. I am knee deep in planning for our retreat this year and as I was putting together materials and ideas to help guide and direct our brainstorming time, I remembered that I had never shared one of our prayer experiences that was created by our Snowball lead team last year.
One of the ideas that came to life at our girls retreat was a prayer experience in a baggie that helped reinforce our theme that we are “complete in Christ”. We were studying about relationships in our small groups utilizing Hayley Dimarco’s PB&J dating book, but during our worship times we focused on how the only relationship that completes us is our relationship with Christ.
The prayer experience in a baggie contained 5 cards that guided each girl individually through an interactive and meditative scripture study to prepare her heart for worship that evening.
Each baggie also contained a pen, a stick of gum, a blank nametag, and an additional card that contained words that God could write about us on our nametag.
We had music softly playing from our worship leader, and as the prayer experience drew to a close, we moved into our time of worship without a break or a word. It was a powerful time for us sisters in Christ to read His word and then respond to Him in worship. If this prayer experience can be utilized by your girls ministry, then we are thankful for the opportunity to share. Please take the opportunity to paste the bottom creative commons use sentence onto the prayer experience so credit can be retained as this freebie is distributed. Thanks!
Special thanks to the girls who helped write it from Brentwood Baptist Church and to Liz Gregory who designed the template and compiled the written prayers. Thanks to Jean Crosby, JoEllen Taylor, Amber Echols, Kathy Alwahab, and Chris Veca for serving on the leadership team that helped make Snowball a special weekend once again.