Is VBS A Waste of Time and Money?
I was recently with friends my age. We were all children in the 50s and 60s. We began remembering summer Bible schools. We came from different denominational traditions, but we had one thing in common. Vacation Bible School was a pivotal start in our faith journeys. It wasn’t our youngest years that we remembered—the years when we pasted cotton puffs on construction paper to make sheep. It was our older years, when we put together skits and did service projects and just had a great time.
One friend commented that her family moved one summer and the Bible School she attended eased the disruption in her life. She had friends when she started school the next fall.
Bible School used to be two weeks long—long enough to build community, change faith habits and make an impact on a congregation.
The concept of VBS began to fade when mothers began working.
Soon the energy waned. A two-week school, staffed by volunteers, was too much like work.
With parents out of the house, older children had their summers scheduled. No longer able to volunteer, parents looked to enrich their children’s life with paid camps which would advance their child’s academic progress — sports camps and academic enrichment camps. Cost, when it’s not the church, is no object. These paid camps tend to challenge the youth and make it worth the parental sacrifice.
Instead of emulating the trend, beefing up their summer programs, and adjusting the economic model, churches slowly began to cut back or eliminate VBS.
Two weeks became five days, with instructional time limited to less than two hours. The impact of the school became negligible. Nothing replaced it.
Volunteers to work with older children are the hardest to recruit, so only the youngest children are now served.
The Church couldn’t do things they way they used to. We pretty much stopped doing anything but going through the motions. They made it easy for kids to stop coming at just the age when they need incentive to stay engaged.
Working together to solve problems has never been a strong point of the Church. The most common attempt was to go together to hold a community VBS and that benefited the host congregation more than the others. That sort of thinking soon died.
The value of VBS to a congregation is in the immersion, in building new faith awareness and engaging families. They are of real value when they are part of other programming.
When VBS is a short, stand-alone event aimed at only the youngest children, who are perhaps too young to even carry the memory into their adult lives, they are of little value.
There is barely enough time and energy to hold classes. Engaging in follow-up, the real value of a VBS, is next to impossible.
The failure of VBS is a failure of the Church to adapt. We can’t do VBS the old way, so we won’t do it all or just create a minimal experience to say we are still doing it.
The core problems of VBS were never addressed.
Problem 1: Lack of volunteers
If VBS is your best and most promising outreach to the community, it might be worth paying people and making sure they are trained to do a great job. In the church we tend to keep spending money on the same things (that aren’t working).
Problem 2: Busy kids
Instead of developing a more challenging summer program which would keep children challenged and engaged, we made it easy for them to drift away. Reversing this will be tough. Families find time for things that are worth their while.
Problem 3: Cost
Parents pay for all those other camps that they are sure will benefit their children. They just might be willing to pay for a summer faith program that offers the same opportunities for growth.
We believe that a faith-based summer program can still be a major asset to a congregation. It must be more professional in approach. Activities must be challenging. Families must be engaged and VBS must be part of larger church experience.
VBS has been neglected for several decades—decades of decline all around. It still has possibilities but reviving it will require some funding, at least initially. This will require church entities to work together—always a challenge, but so very needed.
VBS-aid
What if instead of congregations joining together to host a school, they joined together to train a team of leaders which would travel from congregation to congregation?
We put together a concept three summers ago which attracted interest from congregations. None of them wanted to pay even a modest sum to attempt it. Instead, they all did nothing that summer (and every summer since).
The hierarchy partners we approached would very much benefit from a cooperative program with congregations. It would build good will, which will eventually benefit them in their mission. They had other priorities, we were told. At the same time, they cried about few people entering vocations. They just couldn’t see that the program we were trying to develop would introduce church careers to youth. As it is, youth are absent from church life during the years they ponder their future.
We think the program is still worth trying. An experimental year could be funded for $100,000 and benefit eight to sixteen congregations that couldn’t run a program like this on their own.
The concept calls for teams of trained teachers (college students) to provide the leadership to a congregation. Four to eight congregations in the same 20-mile radius would share the expenses but have the benefits of the school being in their church. The traveling VBS-team will spend two weeks in each congregation.
Pooling the resources of several churches will make it affordable for all.
2×2 would still like to pioneer this concept. If your small church is worried about your future and want to take a new approach to revival, try to find a few other congregations in your general geographic area to see if VBS-aid might restore a summer ministry to your congregations and contact us.
It’s too late for this year. But if enough congregations commit by Christmas 2013, we’d love to put a first team together to test the concept. (The program is interdenominational.)
By the way, Redeemer had a six-week summer program for neighborhood children, so we have some experience.
