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Fun Games for Adults in Church Bulletins

Add games to church bulletins to help adults bring Scripture into focus and spur interest outside the worship service. Use word games, number games and puzzles to give adults a reason to dig deeper into the Bible and the tenets of their faith. Use puzzle construction websites or create your own from a particular theme. Basic Bible knowledge and a concordance provide a sound basis for creating such games. Choose a unifying theme and get started.

Crossword Puzzles
- A crossword puzzle can be simple or complex, depending on space available.
  
  Start with a sheet of graph paper or a narrow-column spreadsheet. The object is to place words relating to the theme of the puzzle in an interlocking grid. Sample themes might include descendants of Noah, tribes of Israel, biblical geography, Christ's miracles, parables, and early Christian missionaries. Number the letters used in the puzzle. Provide clues, including a scriptural reference, for each word.
Acrostics
- An acrostic puzzle uses the first letter of each answer to spell out the main answer to the puzzle. Create a series of questions with that in mind. Provide scriptural references for each question.
Common Theme Puzzles
- Build a puzzle with questions that share something in common in the answers. Look at various foods listed in the Bible, modes of travel, animals, plants or some other recurrent theme. Invite the puzzle worker to match historic place names with modern equivalents, or before-and-after names of characters in the Bible. Provide a scriptural reference for each item.
Word Find Puzzles
- Scatter words from Scripture throughout a grid of letters for a word find puzzle. Provide a list of words hidden in the letter grid, which can be solved by forming words vertically, horizontally or diagonally.
Arithmetic Puzzles
- Select verses that give numerical references and frame questions that are answered with the numbers. Create an arithmetical formula to use the numbers to arrive at the final answer.
Multiple-Choice Puzzles
- Provide several possible answers to a Bible-based question. Make the answers plausible and provide a scriptural reference that will enable the puzzle worker to guess the correct answer.
Tips
- Place the answers on the back page of the bulletin to avoid accidental viewing, or wait until next week to provide answers to this week's puzzle. Take advantage of Bible websites for research. Some have free puzzles available. Facilitate creation of multiple puzzles of a type by saving a template for that type, such as a formatted spreadsheet for crossword and word find puzzles. Make the questions challenging but not tricky to avoid discouraging puzzle workers.

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