Ideas for using postcards

Each month give everyone in a congregation a postcard to take away with them. Encourage them to use it as a journal throughout that month: to write on the back anything that they think about or feel about that station, any new practices they start, any they realise they already do, and any ways they encounter God through that practice. At the end of the month ask people to bring back their postcards and share their experiences.

I started a small discipleship group in my church’s social enterprise, a charity shop, called ‘Cake & Chat’. We meet for just an hour on a Friday lunchtime around a Go-Pak table and there are usually 7-9 volunteers present. We’re a diverse group: some of us speak English as a second language, some are native speakers. Some would describe ourselves as Christians, others wouldn’t. Some are comfortable with lots of reading, others not so much. I wanted a resource to use that conveyed the basics of what Christians believe and do, that was active and not just about talking.

Using the MWOL postcards and badges, I planned a simple activity each week based around an MWOL practice and wrote some discussion questions and Bible verses on the back of the MWOL cards. I lay the cards out face up and had people take it in turns to turn a card over and read out the question or Bible verse. One week we wrote down everything that was wrong in the world on slips of paper, stuck them together into a paper chain, then broke the chain – ‘challenge’. Another week we used gift bags and small gifts found in the charity shop to put together care packages for a friend – ‘care.’

The best activity was very simple, however. For ‘tell’, I wrote instructions on each postcard such as ‘Share a song that means a lot to you’, ‘Tell us about someone who has helped you’, ‘Tell us about a time you prayed.’ It was beautiful to watch the group evangelise one another in ways that were totally natural.