Fun Trivia Games for Church Picnics

Church picnics provide a fun opportunity to play trivia games.a cowboy cookout image by Stormy Ward from Fotolia.com

Many church congregations hold summer picnics as a time for attendees to get together after church for food, fellowship and games. Trivia games are a fun way for people at these picnics to test their knowledge of the Bible and compete for prizes. Whatever form the trivia game takes, the questions can come from books, websites or be created by the picnic organizers to match what the church has been teaching.

Bible Jeopardy

The church picnic can be the venue for a Bible Jeopardy competition. To select the three competitors, the Sunday school program at the church can have some trivia contests in weeks preceding the picnic, and multiple games of Bible Jeopardy can be played at the picnic for different age levels. The Bible Jeopardy host should have a set of five questions of increasing difficulty in each of six categories. Contestants play as in Jeopardy, but instead of using buzzers they are seated and then have to stand up as soon as they think they know the answer. Contestants should have scorekeepers to tally their scores on chalkboards.

A great trivia game for churches that have a lot of families with children is a family trivia challenge. This game will have families compete against each other, while offering each member of the family an important role on their team. Each family should get a set of large cards labeled A, B, C and D. The trivia game facilitator can then use a list of multiple-choice Bible trivia questions of different difficulties. For the easiest questions, the youngest family member should be given the set of cards to pick the answer. The most challenging questions can go to the oldest family member. Questions can also be posed to one of the children in the family, one of the women, one of the men, or the person who thinks they know the Psalms best, for example. After the questions are completed, the family that has answered the most correctly wins.

This game should be personalized for the individual church to see who knows their church best. The facilitator of the game should create a set of questions about the church itself. Questions can touch on topics such as what year the church opened, who the first pastor was, how many parking spaces are in the parking lot, who all the current elders are, how many different Sunday school classes there are and some topics addressed in recent sermons. Adults can compete against each other, writing their answers on small chalkboards.

A spin-off of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" makes a fun trivia game for a church picnic. Ten potential competitors can begin with a question that requires placing items in order quickly, such as people from oldest to youngest, or cities in Israel from north to south. Then the contestant who wins the challenge gets to play Bible Millionaire. Multiple-choice questions should increase in difficulty, as on the television game show, and contestants get the use of three lifelines. They can choose 50/50 to eliminate two wrong answers, ask the audience to get a show of hands for each answer option (the contestant should not be able to see who chooses which answer during this process), and phone a friend to talk to anybody of their choosing for 30 seconds.