Christmas Sunday School Projects: Prayer Tree

Here's an idea that will help your Sunday School class to turn the focus away from receiving gifts and back onto God and what the season is really about. Turn your regular Christmas tree into a Prayer Tree instead where your class can hang their prayer requests and pray for them during the Christmas season.

A Prayer Tree is simply a regular Christmas tree but instead of piling gifts under the tree, you decorate the tree with prayer requests instead. You'll need to start with a small Christmas tree. It can be real or plastic. If it is a really small Christmas tree, you may want to just set it up on a table in the corner of your Sunday School room.

Instead of placing store-bought Christmas ornaments, you're going to make your own by cutting out a bunch of Christmas ornament shapes from construction paper. I like to use a variety of Christmas colors like red, green, blue and yellow, but feel free to use whatever is available to you. You'll want to cut out enough Christmas tree ornaments to cover the entire tree.

Once you have your Christmas tree ornament cutouts, you want to punch a hole at the top of each ornament cutout and run a ribbon, string or ornament hook through the hole so that your ornament will hang nicely from the Christmas tree. Have your Sunday School class write their prayer requests on the Christmas tree and pray specifically for those prayer requests every Sunday in class.

Obviously there are several variations that you can use when you're putting up a Prayer Tree in your Sunday School class. You can just take normal prayer requests or you can choose to pray for something specific. Here are are few ideas:

Have your Sunday School class list the names of their unsaved friends and family on each Christmas tree ornament cutout and pray for them all through the month of December and on into the next year as well.

List the names of missionaries that your church supports or has sent out. You can also get in touch with various missionary organizations to request names and specific needs that each missionary and their family may have.

Pray for all the members of your congregation during Sunday School. Grab an up-to-date church directory and write out each name onto an ornament. If you have a large church you may want to list them by families instead.