Free Printable Missionary Stories for Children

True stories, retold for children

The Missionary Stories are written for children, in a Sunday School Edition. Every story is based on documented people and events: the preachers who carried the message of baptism in the name of Jesus across America in the 1910s, the missionaries who took it to Africa, South America and Asia, and believers in China and elsewhere whose testimonies are still told in churches today.

The language is plain and warm, written for a child, but the names, places and dates are real. A child can find Indianapolis, Ethiopia or the Amazon on a map and know that the story happened there, to real people who trusted God.

What is inside every story

Each story is four pages, and all fifty share the same layout, so a class or a family quickly learns the rhythm. The first page names the theme in one line, states a Big Idea in a sentence or two, and begins the story beside a full-color picture. The story continues on the second page with three more pictures, so four scenes carry it from beginning to end. After the story, Did You Know? facts tie it to real history, such as the 1913 camp meeting at Arroyo Seco taking its name from the Spanish for dry stream, and a memory verse follows.

Then come five discussion questions, each with a line for a written answer, a short prayer written in a child’s voice, and a Try This! activity with a blank box beside it to draw in; in the first story, a child is asked to find Acts 2:38 in a real Bible and read it aloud three times.

The people and places

The first stories begin at the Arroyo Seco camp meeting, where R.E. McAlister pointed the crowd to how the apostles baptized, and follow Frank Ewart, Glenn Cook, Juan Navarro and G.T. Haywood, whose whole Indianapolis congregation was baptized together. From there the collection travels with Nona and Bug Freeman through southern Africa and into the mountains of Ethiopia, flies with missionary pilot Bennie DeMerchant over the Amazon, and visits believers in China, among them Paul Wei and the orphanage and village churches of the True Jesus Church.

Later stories meet Andrew Urshan, who came from Persia; Frank Small in snowy Canada; Robert Lawson; D.C.O. Opperman’s hungry Bible school students; Vesta Mangun at The Pentecostals of Alexandria; and missionaries serving more recently in Guatemala, Pakistan, the Caribbean and the Middle East. Story 15 and story 50 look back over the whole journey, so they work well as review lessons.

What the stories teach, and where they come from

Every story carries one theme a child can hold on to. God provides: a basket of food on the doorstep, a check for the exact amount. God protects: a runway hidden in the jungle, a house the officers walk past. God heals: a blind woman in a Chinese village, a sudden healing in a church service. And God keeps His Word.

The collection is also plain about where it comes from. These are stories from Apostolic history, the tradition also called Oneness Pentecostal, and several of them are about baptism in the name of Jesus and the gift of the Holy Ghost, told the way those churches tell them. If that is your family’s conviction, the stories will sound like home. If it is not, you will know before you print. Our statement of faith sets out the position plainly.

Using them at home, in Sunday school and in co-ops

Fifty stories is close to a year of Sunday school at one a week, with the two review stories as natural breaks. At home they fit a morning basket or a bedtime read-aloud: read the story, talk through the questions over breakfast the next day, and let your child retell it to a grandparent from the four pictures.

Read aloud to young children and let them answer out loud; confident readers can read a story on their own and write short answers. A few stories deal with sickness, death, persecution, a witch doctor and spiritual darkness. They are told gently and always end in God’s power and care, but read those first and choose the right time for your child.

A simple plan for one week

One story can carry a whole week without taking much of any day. Read it aloud on the first day and look at the four pictures together. On the second, talk through two of the discussion questions; on the third, the other three. Do the Try This! activity midweek, say the memory verse and pray the prayer at bedtime, and at the end of the week let your child retell the story from the pictures, to you, a sibling or a grandparent on the phone.

By the time a family has worked through a dozen stories this way, children start connecting them on their own: the same Freeman family in Africa, the same pilot over the Amazon, the same God answering prayer in very different places.

Printing

Every story is a four-page, letter-size PDF with full-color illustrations; printed on both sides it takes two sheets of paper. The last two pages have lines to write on and a box to draw in. The download at the top of this page holds all fifty stories in one ZIP file; the table above lets you print one story at a time. For older students and adults who want the fuller history behind these accounts, By Many Witnesses is free to read in the Apostolic Academy.