This past weekend we had a 7th grade confirmation retreat. As part of this event, we spent some talking about the marks of discipleship, including service. To get students thinking creatively about ways they might use their gifts to serve the church, I created a game called Gifts to Serve. You may recognize the format follows a popular fruit to fruit game.
Here's how it works. I created green cards with service opportunities using the pdf you will find below. I tried to keep them fairly generic so they can be used by a variety of contexts. If any don't fit your context, feel free to toss them out.
I then made a big stack of red cards, enough for each student to have 5 each. As a group, brainstorm a list of adjectives to describe people and gifts they might have. Things like loud, tall, young, funny, musical, coordinated, organized, smart, etc. I encouraged them to not go negative, but honestly a couple on the slightly negative side did make for comical pairings.
In groups of 5-10, have one person be designated at the judge for that round and select a green service card. Each student chooses a red "gifts" card of theirs to pair with the green "service" card and tosses it into a pile face down. After all red cards are laid, the judge flips the red cards over and picks the pairing they like best. They might pick a funny one, a serious one, or the one that is the most unlikely. It us up to the judge! The person who laid the selected red card, keeps the green card. The laid red cards are mixed up and redistributed at random to the players. The round 1 winner becomes the round 2 judge and play continues!
I hope you have as much fun with the game as we did. We are already looking forward to playing it again.
