BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (BP) — Buying groceries for local families, helping build playgrounds or funding the construction of water wells in Peru are among activities children at Bonsack Baptist Church in Roanoke, Va., will rise early to perform on Children’s Missions Day (CMD) Sept. 21.

At Jay First Baptist Church in Jay, Fla., children will perform age-appropriate tasks at a cookout for first responders including police, firefighters and school resource officers, helping fill goody bags, making side dishes, serving as wait staff and cleaning tables.

Delayed by Hurricane Francine’s Sept. 12 landfall as a Category 2 storm, First Baptist Church of Belle Chasse, La., will immerse children in activities after worship service Sept. 29, said Julia Mendez, who leads Children in Action with her husband Anthony.

At First Belle Chasse, children will conduct a day of service at businesses near the church, posting handwritten kind words for patrons at a local restaurant, helping clean tables and refill napkin holders at a local ice cream parlor, and filling and distributing goody bags to workers at a few businesses with invitations to the church.

“You are special, you are loved, you are unique, be kind to yourself,” are among the phrases children will leave on the board at the restaurant, Mendez said, while also leaving blank notes and a pen for patrons to write and leave notes in return.

“The joy of doing something for others, especially people they don’t know,” is what Mendez hopes to instill in the small group of 6- to 11-year-old children active in the ministry. “It’s easy to do something nice for someone that you love, that you know and where it feels safe. This is taking some of these children who are very shy out of their comfort zone.

“I’m really trying to reach businesses near, where we don’t know who they are, we don’t know if they go to church,” she said, “and it’s easy for them to receive it when it’s coming from children.”

The Woman’s Missionary Union-sponsored national event has immersed children across the nation in community outreaches with evangelistic implications annually since 2008, with this year’s outreach focused on loving neighbors, as exhorted in Luke 10:27.

“Children who participate in CMD 2024 will learn who their neighbor is and what it means to love them as they study the story of the good Samaritan in the Bible,” WMU said of the event at wmu.com. “Then they will go out into their communities on September 21 (or another day of your choosing) to put into practice actually loving their neighbors!”

At Bonsack Baptist Church, Girls in Acton (GA) Director Susan Smith will spike the day with an early morning fun run on an outside track and prizes for the best crazy costumes, she said, before dispersing children among three missions projects. In addition, the fun run will serve as a fundraiser to help designated WMU Abigail Girls who are raising money to build water wells in Peru, and children will design craft sticks to be used in the construction of the WMU houseboat project to teach children about the Southern Baptist Cooperative Program.

Smith has fond memories of participating in GA missions events in her youth that still impact her life today, she said, and sees value in creating such memories for today’s children.

“On this day, thousands of children across the country are uniting together to do differing things in their communities, but we’re all working together,” she said. “And then, I have to go back to the GA pledge, because I think the GA pledge is written in an excellent manner to define who we are. And that is to learn about missions, pray for missions, give to missions, do missions and participate in the work of the church.

“And we keep those five things in front of our girls all the time,” she said. “And as we do these activities, we explain this is how we are living out our pledge.”

Trudie Blackmon, a volunteer leader of Children in Action at Jay First Baptist, hopes the church’s CMD outreach focusing on first responders will give children a better understanding of what it looks like to care for others sacrificially.

“The older ones, they know a little bit more about all of it,” she said, “but they don’t even realize especially what first responders do. They don’t understand that they put their lives on hold to go help somebody in need.

“And we’re hoping that maybe having an opportunity to sit down and just socialize,” Blackmon said, “that maybe they can understand that, that there are people out there who will leave their kid’s ballgame to go and save another kid, or something like that.”

Jay First Children in Action will participate in the cookout for first responders by bringing products for the goody bags, helping prepare simple side dishes such as macaroni and cheese, serving food and cleaning tables.

“That’s it’s not all about them,” is the main takeaway Blackmon hopes will be on the table.

(EDITOR’S NOTE — Diana Chandler is Baptist Press’ senior writer.)