Children’s Guide

With specially-written prayers from the same Bible verses, the Children’s Guide to Seek God for the City 2022 helps families pray together and empowers kids to learn how to pray for their community. It’s a no-cost, downloadable PDF file.

• Children’s Companion Guide (368 KB PDF)

The children’s guide is available as a single PDF file. Each week has two pages, except for the last week, which has just one page. Each week is designed to be photocopied (double-sided) and distributed to children or parents week-by-week during the forty day season of prayer (March 2 to April 10, 2022). You may also prefer to distribute the children’s guide as a complete set. The scriptures and themes are the same as the standard version providing another way for families to involve children ages five through eleven in united prayer for Christ’s glory.

Letter to Parents

Dear Parents of Preschoolers and Elementary Age Children,

Use the Children’s Guide to make Seek God For The City 2022 an exciting prayer experience for your entire family. Although developed to help elementary age children be more involved, it can be adapted for even younger children. Here are some ideas to make it useful for your family:

1. Meet regularly. The booklet can give you a focus point to meet regularly as a family. Make it your intention to meet on a daily basis. Don’t hesitate to start again if the daily habit is disrupted. Continue to pray daily even when some family members cannot participate.
2. Read and pray, read and pray. Each day, Seek God For The City presents an Old Testament passage and prayer with a Gospel passage and prayer that follows the same general theme. The Children’s Guide presents only the Gospel portion. Read aloud the Old Testament scripture and the prayer that follows as it is presented in the adult book. Then invite your children to look up and read aloud the Gospel passage from a Bible and the prayer in the guide. If you need a suggestion for a translation, try the NIrV. It is very easy for children to read and understand. You can look up each day’s passage online by going to: biblica.com/bible-search
3. Talk about it. Answer questions your children might have about what is read, or discuss what it means in ways your children can understand. You might ask, “What does God want our family to do?” or, “What can we expect God to do?”
4. Make it specific. Each prayer from the Gospels, in both the adult and the children’s guide, offers some bullet point ideas to make the prayers more specific for particular people, friends, family members and neighbors.
5. More ways to pray. The sidebars on every page of the adult version give you even more prayer opportunities.
   1. Pray for particular kinds or groups of people. Each day presents another subgroup for whom you can pray, with creative, biblical ideas. For example, Day 8 shows ways to pray for sick people. Important: The subgroup does not necessarily correspond to the prayer theme of the day as expressed by the Old Testament and Gospel passages.
   2. Prayerwalk. Explore how you may be able to apply the prayerwalking suggestion as a family. For example, on Day 8 you may walk as a family through a few blocks of your neighborhood, praying quietly as you walk for people who may be sick, whether their illness is known to you or not. The sidebars are packed with creative ideas to pray for each of the subgroups.
   3. Pray for the countries or continents of the world. The adult version presents the names of the countries of a different continental area of the world each week. All the countries of the world are listed. Choose one or more of the countries on each page. Find that nation (or nations) on the map. Combine the ideas so that praying for the nations doesn’t become tedious. For example, on Day 8, pray for the sick people of that nation (or nations), making it simple to extend prayer for sick people in Paraguay or Peru. You might wish to have a map of the world available to use each day, but keep it simple. Mentioning the names of one or two countries each day is enough to instill the idea that God is working globally as well as locally. Prayer for the nations stirs up healthy curiosity about the world. Don’t try to make this a detailed geography lesson. You want to keep them interested in how God is at work all around the world.

It is our prayer that this Children’s Guide will help your family grow in hope and prayer for your city and God’s world!

In Hope,

The WayMakers team