For 2025, I challenged my Sunday School to memorize 52 Bible verses for the 52 weeks of 2025, a verse for every week. To evaluate whether my students indeed memorized the verse, instead of calling the student out in front of the class (lest I embarrass somebody), the class plays a game, which can only be played if the pupils memorized. Most of these games I learned from using them when working in children's ministry with Child Evangelism Fellowship (CEF). Thus, I have gained insight on which games work best for adults, which ones work best for kids, and how to modify each game for each age group. In no particular order, here are 10 games I have found to work effectively.
ERASE A WORD: Write the Bible verse on a chalkboard or white board. Have the class read the whole verse in its entirety. Have a student come up an erase a word. Have the class read the Bible verse again, including the erased. Continue this process until the whole board is erased, and the class has to recite the verse by pure memory. To speed things up for longer verses, increase the number of words erased each turn. If the class has problems remembering how many words erased between words still up on the board, put a placeholder, like a dot or a line. Remember that the Bible book, chapter number and verse number are free game!
JUST 1 WORD: Have the class sit in a circle. Starting at 12 o'clock and going clockwise, the first student says the Bible book title, the second student says just the chapter number, the third student says just the verse number, the fourth student says just the first word of the verse, fifth student says just the second word of the verse, etc., etc., until the verse is done. Time the class, and encourage them to beat their time. Continue the game until the class has created a personal best record, which they seem unable to beat. For an added layer, eliminate students who say the wrong word or hesitate for 3-5 seconds to say their word. For teaching children, however, be aware and respectful of kids sensitive to losing games. When teaching grown ups, though, adults may like the elimination part because those who don't want to play can "pass" (i.e. eliminate themselves) by just remaining silent. If playing with elimination rules, last man standing wins, as long as (s)he can recite the verse in full. If the last man standing cannot recite the verse solo, then the game ends on a tie with whoever could recite the verse together. Under the elimination rules, use your own discretion to call a tie when no one can get eliminated because they all say the verse with no hesitation or error.
THE MAGNET GAME: Print out the Bible verse on magnet paper (Staples sell this magnet paper at 4 sheets for $16) as big of a font as possible. Cut up the verse into individual words. Put all the words in a bag, and shake well to mix. Pass the bag around the class, having each student pick out a word. If words remain after the bag has gone around once, pass the bag around twice. One by one, have the students put the words on a magnetic board. When working with children, have the youngest go first, for all the youngest child has to do is place the word on the board. Then, having the second youngest go second, for that kid just needs to know if their word goes before or after the second word. If somebody goes to put up his or her word on the board, but he or she cannot accurately because of an error, have that person fix the error. Repeat into all the words end up on the board. Then have the class read the verse together what they have put up on the board. To add some variation to this game, instead of putting the words in a bag for the students to pick, hide the words in the room, or if playing outside, scatter them in the grass. Now The Magnet Game has also become a hide and seek game!
THE CLAPPING GAME: Pick 2 students: a guesser and a picker. Have the guesser face the wall opposite of where the Bible verse is displayed, with their eyes closed. Have the picker point to a random word in the verse. Cover up that word. Have the rest of the class, with the picker, read the verse, but instead of saying the covered word, the class should clap. The guesser then has to guess which word was clapped instead of spoken. Repeat until all volunteers are exhausted. When working with children, older children make better guessers, and younger children make better pickers. Again, Bible book title, chapter number and verse numbers are free game!
THE PICTURE GAME: You will need PowerPoint, Keynote or something similar for this game. For the first slide, have the Bible verse in its entirety. Have the class read the whole Bible verse. For the next slide, eliminate a word, but in its place, put a picture that depicts the word. Have the class read the Bible verse again, still saying the word depicted by the picture. Repeat this process, with every subsequent slide replacing a new word with a picture. Do this until no more words that can be depicted with a picture remain. If memorizing larger Bible passages, like whole chapters, try to have a single picture replace a whole verse.
SIGN LANGUAGE: If the picture game is good for non-verbal visual learners, then sign language is great for kinesthetic learner! Take the time to learn the Bible verse in both your favorite/preferred Bible translation and in sign language. You don't have to learn the sign language for every word; just focus on the main words. Teach both the words and the sign language to your students. Evaluate your students on both. Do just the sign language in silence, and have the students recite the verse. Recite the verse, and have all the students do the sign language motions. You can even pick 1 student to be the sign language leader and another student to be the spoken word leader. If choosing student leader, repeat until exhausting all volunteers for both sign language and spoken word. Technically, since sign language is another language, you have made your students bilingual in this Bible verse!
BIBLE VERSE(S), ABBREV.: Kids these days love their abbreviations. "JJ" means "just joking," "JK" means "just kidding," and "JP" means "just playing." "BRB" stands for "be right back," "BBS" stands for "be back soon," and "BBL" stands for "be back later." Well, use this to your advantage in memorizing Bible verses! Display just the 1st letter of every word in the verse(s) to see if the students can recite the verse with this hint system. There's an easy, medium and hard "mode" to play this game. Easy mode puts a number of underscores after the letter, an underscore for each missing letter. This helps the students realize the size of the word, whether big or small. Medium mode spaces the letters apart and adds the appropriate punctuation, which is more of a help than you think. Hard mode removes all spaces and punctuations. It's just a straight list of all the letters with space or punctuation. For example, Deuteronomy 7:9 CSB would look like this: KTYYGIGTFGWKHGCLFATGWTWLHAKHC
LETTER JUMBLE: This game is pretty self-explanatory. Keep the words in order, but jumble up the letters in each word. Students will have to unscramble the words to recite the Bible memory verse. If not creative enough to find a way to scramble the letters within the word yourself, plenty of websites can be found with an internet search that can aid you in scrambling letters within a word. Use all capitalized letter to prevent hints of the first letter with proper nouns Here's an example from Micah 6:8 CSB: NDNIAMK EH SHA ODLT OUY THWA SI ODGO NAD THWA TI SI HTE OLDR EUQRRIES FO OUY OT TCA YUJLST OT OVLE FLAUNEFTSISH NAD OT KWAL YHMUBL THIW OURU GDO.
WORD SCRAMBLE: This game is also self-explanatory, for in a way, it's kind of the opposite of the letter jumble. This time, keep the letters of each word in order, but instead, mix up the order of the words. The students' goal is to put the words in the correct order. To make things easier, delete/erase used words, but to make things order, always keep the mixed up words up. To make things even easier, sort the scrambled words in a logical way, like sorting them by alphabetical order. Again, if you have trouble scrambling up the word order yourself, a simple website search will yield plenty of webpages that can do the scrambling for you.
SYNONYMS ARE INCOMPLETE: The name of this game comes from a rule in Bible quizzing. In Bible quizzing, if a quizzer says the a synonym of the correct answer, they are marked incomplete, meaning they are neither right nor wrong, and they have the rest of their time to say the correct word. In this game, cover up the main words of the verse with synonyms of that word to have the students try to guess the right word. There are two ways to play this game. You either list the correct word alongside all its synonyms, making it multiple choice, or you can leave out the right word, thus making the students guess the missing synonym. For example, let's say the class is memorizing Isaiah 53:5 CSB, which reads, "But he was pierced for our rebellion, crushed because of our iniquities, punishment for our peace was upon him, and we are healed by his wounds." In this example, I would cover up "pierced" with "mortally wounded," "transgressions" with "broken covenant/relationship/trust," "crushed" with "bruised," "iniquities" with "warpedness," "punishment" with "chastisement" and "peace" with "wholeness." There are many way to cover up the words of the verse with this game. If writing the verse on chalkboard, whiteboard or poster board, cover up the terms with post-it notes. If using PowerPoint, cover up the words with interactive click-on buttons. If struggling to think of synonyms, the Amplified Bible is a big help with synonyms. Speaking of other version, beware that this game may throw off people who have the verse memorized in a different English translation.
Leave a comment letting me know if missed or forgot any Bible memory games!