Whatever your church’s stance on tithing, there’s no doubt that giving is biblical. It’s important to help children understand that even a small offering can be useful to God. (Remember the small lunch the boy presented Jesus? It fed 5000 men!) Begin this teaching by reading this verse or asking a volunteer to read it aloud.
“Bring you all the tithes into the storehouse, that there may be meat in my house, and prove me now herewith, said the LORD of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it.” (Malachi 3:10)
For the teaching, you’ll need 10 bananas. If you plan to serve them as snacks, you’ll need one banana for each child for after the lesson. Place the 10 bananas on a table in your teaching area.
Say, “Look everyone! This is one of my favorite snacks. Who loves bananas?” (Wait for children to respond.) “Well today, we are going to do some pretending. Let’s pretend that in a world where bananas are used as money, we just get paid. We got paid a lot–we got ten bananas! Before we can gobble them up, we need to pay for a few things. For instance, we need to pay the rent; we have to have a home to live in. That’s 3 bananas! Now we need to buy more food, we can’t eat just bananas. That will cost us 2 bananas.” (Put the bananas in a bag or somewhere they can’t be found.)
“We need to pay for a few more things in ‘Banana Land’ like our car, that’s 2 bananas, clothing, that’s 3 bananas… Oh no! We have no more bananas! We didn’t even give bananas to the church. Why would the church need our bananas? Because the church feeds the poor and gives clothing to those that need it. They also help families in need during the holidays or whenever a tragedy happens. However, if we don’t give any bananas, they won’t have any to meet all these needs.”
Take all the bananas out of the bag. “Let’s start over. The bible says we should give something to the church called the tithe before you give to anyone else. So let’s count the bananas. We have ten–first let us give one to the church! Now we can do all the other things we want to do.”
Who want’s a banana?
Read more from Mimi by following her blog at Tools for Kids Church.
For more help to teach kids about giving, try these related ideas from our website:
- Giving Object Lesson for Children
- Matthew 6:24 coloring page
- giving to others printable
- Bible lesson on the love of money
Thank you for the lessons. I have been doing this for along time but was running out of ideals for the children that would be fun but also learning more about Jesus.