How to Add Amazing Missionary Stories To Your Homeschool
Scroll down to enter this fantastic giveaway to celebrate Sonlight’s 30th Anniversary!

Missionary stories have a huge place in our home. They have an inspiring way to grow our faith, give us new perspectives in difficult situations, and keep Christ as the center of our lives.

After serving as missionaries in the Middle East and South America for many years, we wanted to continue to instill in our children the love for missions just as my husband and I do.

Our prayer is that they will NOT just tag along with mom and dad but genuinely love the lost and intentionally work to see lives won for the Kingdom of Heaven.

For that reason, we have made reading missionary stories a big part of our family life.

I want to share with you how you can add missionary stories to grow your children’s faith, godly character, and love for missions in your homeschool.

Why is it important to read missionary stories to our kids?

Adding the study of Missionaries to your homeschool school injects us with daily doses of faith and encouragement.

Our goal as Christian parents is to teach our children to love the Lord our God with all their hearts, soul and strength and to love their neighbors as themselves. Stories from the mission fields help us do just that.

We want to raise mission-minded children who know what Christianity really is, a life of pure devotion to follow and serve our Lord Jesus and there is nothing like missionary biographies to teach just that.

It excites my heart to read stories from great heroes of our faith like Mary Slessor, David Livingstone, Gladys Aylward, George Muller, and many others. They were ordinary people who did extraordinary things in God’s name. They’ve lived a life of unshakable faith and immense love for the lost.

Gladys Aylward is my children’s favorite missionary. She heard God calling her to China and against all odds and through many trials, she held fast to her faith, fulfilled her calling, and ended up saving over 100 Chinese children.

George Muller is my favorite missionary. He had a heart for the endless amount of orphans of his time and even though he barely had enough to sustain his own family, by faith, he took in up to 30 orphans to care for. Facing many trials of bare cupboards with nothing to feed the children, trusted the Lord for the provision. With simple faith-filled prayers, he saw many miracles of provision with people showing up with food right there when they needed it. George Muller cared for over 10,000 orphans in his life.

Mission Stories: Faith Lessons from George Muller

3 Easy Ways to Fit Missionary Stories Into Your Homeschool

1 – Include Missionary Storybooks in Your Morning Basket

Keep a morning basket with your Bibles, journals, and a few of your favorite missionary storybooks to start the day with a devotional, an inspiring story, and prayer time.

Ask your children to share their favorite parts of the story with each other and what new revelation or understanding they drew from it.

Allow them a few minutes to journal on their own and write down their thoughts and prayers in a quiet and intimate way.

Once they have finished journaling, pray together as a group for all the missionaries around the world.

You can use a guide such as Window on The World to help you pray for the missionary work and the salvation of many countries.

Use these enjoyable missionary stories as family read-aloud for maximum spiritual benefit!

2 – Use Missionary Biographies to Develop Godly Character

There is nothing more powerful to capture the heart of a child as storytelling!

We can learn many great lessons by reading missionary biographies and how they trusted God and persevered during trials and tribulations in their lives.

As you read stories, highlight their context and point out to your children godly character traits in it and how those character traits play a role in helping us face different situations in our lives.

Ask them what they learn and what character trait they need to work more on developing. Help them to come up with a plan for it.

Look for what the Bible says about that character trait. You can work on daily memorizing that verse and even add it to your children daily copywork practice.

In The Homeschool Sisterhood, we use the Bible and missionary stories to focus on specific character traits and habits training such as obedience, attention, truthfulness, thankfulness, and others.

3 – Use Missionary Stories to Enhance Learning

A fun way to use missionary stories to enhance learning in your homeschool is to map the life of a missionary, create maps, and a timeline.

I want to give you a practical example of how we use missionary stories to enhance learning in our homeschool. Let’s pick one of my favorite heroine of faith: Corri Ten Boom.

Enhance Geography Learning

While reading a missionary biography, ask your children to point out the country where the missionary is from and together, research about it. This is a wonderful way to learn about different countries, cities, continents, landmarks, bodies of waters, etc. As we read about Corri Ten Boom’s life, we can study about the Netherlands.

Enhance History Learning

Look at your missionary timeline and try to identify important historical events happened during that time. For example, if you are reading about Corri Ten Boom, take advantage to learn as much as you can about the Holocaust.

Create a timeline, identify important historical figures such as political leaders and those used by God to help to protect the Jewish people or help to liberate Jews from concentration camps. What can you learn about the Jewish people? Opportunities to enhance learning are immense.

Enhance Cultural Learning

There are so many wonderful ways you can enhance your homeschool learning from a missionary story. You can learn about their culture, basic vocabulary in their native language, and even cook some special dishes or desserts from the country you’re learning about.

Above all, have fun learning together!

Connecting with Missionaries: A Missionary Stories Bundle Giveaway

Win A Sonlight Missionary Bundle!

This week, I am partnering with Sonlight Curriculum to celebrate their 30th Anniversary and give away a Sonlight’s Missionary Bundle containing some of my favorite missionary stories.

Sonlight Missionary Bundle allows us to connect with missions through 11 powerful stories to grow your children’s faith.

To celebrate their 30th Anniversary, Sonligh is hosting 30 weekly giveaways from now through 9/30/20 with a new giveaway item each Wednesday and the GRAND PRIZE of an All-Subject Package of your choice from Sonlight. Enter the contest weekly for eligibility.

11 Missionary Story Books Included in The Bundle

1 – God’s Adventurer

Mission Stories - Hudson Taylor, God's Adventurer

From Sonlight:

Hudson Taylor was only 21 when he sailed from England. He had already learned he could trust God with the last coin in his pocket; he would need that faith as he set out to evangelize the Chinese. A thrilling true story of daring, danger and dependence on God.

2 – The Good News Must Go Out

Missionary Stories - The Good News Must Go Out

From Sonlight:

Mama Laird served as a missionary in the Central African Republic for decades and saw great moves to God. One dear follower was beaten by drunks until he almost died, but 300 or so people came to his house of death and followed Jesus, until a day no one came. Then he said, “God, let me get up or die.” Incredible, beautiful, challenging. Marvelous.

3 – Return of the White Book

Missionary Stories - Return of the White Book

From Sonlight:

God prepared the way for the Karen people of Burma to come to know him. When George Boardman and Adoniram Judson arrived, the Burmese were not terribly interested, but the Karen were desperately ready. An incredible story of God at work.

4 – Catching Their Talk in a Box

Missionary Stories - Catching Their Talk in a Box

From Sonlight:

The amazing, “out-of-the-box” story of Joy Ridderhof. An illness kept her from missionary service, but that merely opened a greater opportunity! Joy began Gospel Recordings, an organization that has used low-tech means to send recorded Gospel messages to people in thousands of language groups around the world. An amazing story . . . and challenging!

5 – George Muller

Missionary Stories - George Muller

From Sonlight:

With scarcely enough money for his own family, George Muller sponsored a “Breakfast Club” for orphans that eventually filled five large houses and cared for 10,000 children. Muller’s faith and generosity have set a standard for Christians of all generations. A gripping true story. Biographies of people like George Muller will help increase your faith and challenge you and your children to rest in God’s provision.

6 – Gladys Aylward

Missionary Stories: Gladys Aylward

From Sonlight:

A story built around the work of Gladys Aylward, an uneducated British housemaid who went to China via Russia in the midst of the Soviet-Chinese war in the early 20th century.

Glads Aylward story is inspiring and captivating. Wonderfully told by Janet Benge and sure to encourage anyone called to the mission field.

7 – With Two Hands

Missionary Stories: With Two Hands

Eighteen glorious chapters of God at work in Ethiopia. Witch doctors transformed; the single person who could translate ends up in just the right place; two girls who pray daily for transformation for many years … and transformation happens. Marvelous.

8 – In Search of the Source

Missionary Stories - In Search of The Source

From Sonlight:

A translator struggles to help a tribal people understand what the Bible says. Fascinating, thought-provoking, and often funny, these are the stories of a culture’s first encounter with God’s Word.

9 – Lights in a Dark Place

Missionary Stories: Lights in a Dark Place

From Sonlight:

Davis. Fourteen stories of how God has been at work in Colombia, South America. People escape a burning house, see dreams and visions, try to convert kidnappers. Dramatic and exciting. He is worthy of praise!

10 – Mary Slessor: Forward into Calabar

Missionary Stories: Mary Slessor Forward into Calabar

From Sonlight:

A millworker, Mary Slessor became a pioneer missionary in Africa, not only teaching people about Christ, but helping to put an end to twin-killings and other brutal practices.

11 – Ida Scudder: Healing Bodies, Touching Hearts

Missionary Stories: Ida Scudder: Healing Bodies, Touching Hearts

From Sonlight:

An amazing story of a woman who grew up in India and couldn’t wait to leave. In one night, three men came to ask her to help their laboring wives. All three refused her father’s help (he was a doctor), preferring to let their wives die than break religious taboos. And all three did die. Ida realized she could make a difference, and so she went to med school, then served in India for decades, helping the lepers, founding a teaching hospital, serving the people. Powerful.

I use Sonlight Curriculum

With God, all things are possible! This is the main theme I find in missionary stories. These stories keep my heart on fire to serve the Lord, to teach my children diligently in God’s way, and to reach to others with the love of Jesus.

Adding missionaries biographies or compilations of missionary stories to your homeschool will fill your family with faith, help you to understand the needs of other peoples and cultures, and daily remind you that our God loves to use ordinary people like us to do extraordinary things!

Above all, stories of God’s faithfulness on the mission field and the sacrifice of His missionaries will do more to grow your children’s faith in God than a dozen lectures!

Missionary stories give us all the inspiration and confidence we need to step out in faith and do things that in our own eyes seem impossible!

Reading about David Livingstone, inspired Mary Slessor to become a missionary. These stories give our children a heart for missions and confirm their lives’ calling as well.

More Missionary Stories I Recommend for Homeschoolers