It’s the time of year when many churches bring the three J’s together—Jesus, joy, and juice boxes. Although in the case of our church, juice boxes come in the form of sweet tea and lemonade. But that would make for an awkward (and non-alliterative) title.
Like most moms, I am sometimes riddled with regrets about how I parented my kids. The biggest was that I never enrolled them in Vacation Bible School. I didn’t even know it existed when they were young. I could use that as an excuse, but I wasn’t seeking out opportunities for my children to be spiritually fed.
Here’s an interesting fun fact: Vacation Bible School has been around in some form or another since 1894. It began as a seven-week program led by a Sunday school teacher in Hopedale, Illinois, who was frustrated that she didn’t have enough time to share more of Jesus with the students in the classroom. So, she created a program to be taught throughout the summer to make up for the lack.
I hadn’t given much thought to when and how Vacation Bible School started until one of the men in our church (who is old enough to be my dad) said VBS ran for two weeks when he was a kid.
However, I grew up in the Catholic church in Northern California. There wasn’t a Southern Baptist church to be seen. And raising my children in the same denomination came with more regrets than not signing them up for VBS. But that’s best left for a different post.
Even so, my personal experience with Vacation Bible School started as an adult in a Calvary church where my husband and I first attended after leaving the Catholic faith. We were still in Northern California at the time, so VBS had expanded into various denominations since Robert Boville of the Baptist Mission Society ran with it in 1922.
A year later, Standard Publishing produced the first printed curriculum for a five-week program covering three age levels—kindergarten, primary, and junior. Today, it’s rare to see any VBS run for more than a week, and most likely only three to five days. Ours was five evenings, with the last being a family fun night.
In past years, I’ve helped out in various roles for VBS, but this is the first time I’ve been asked to teach the Bible stories. Although we didn’t have three age levels, we had five. Fortunately, our pastor took pity on me and offered to take two of them. Bless his heart.
As a former schoolteacher and now Sunday school teacher to children from four years old through kindergarten, I figured this wouldn’t be a stretch for me. I had that age group as well as the 1st and 2nd grade level, and the two- and three-year-olds.
However, I had some doubts about how to make story time as exciting as music, crafts, or recreation. Kids hyped up on lemonade and sugary snacks have the attention span of a swarm of gnats. It just so happened that my two- and three-year-olds were scheduled in the last rotation when they would’ve been fast asleep if they were home.
But Jesus has the power to raise the dead, so He can certainly fill these little bleary-eyed and cranky souls with enough energy to take in a word or two from the Bible. We can never underestimate the effectiveness of the Holy Spirit when we’re faithful to show up.
I loved the theme this year—Magnified: Discovering the Bigness of God in the Smallest of Things. After this past week, I will forever have that song stuck in my head. We had sixty kids from two through sixth grade, and fifty church volunteers from high school students to seniors in their eighties. It was an amazing event because so many were willing to do their part.
If you’re volunteering for VBS this summer, let me offer some humble advice.
- Pray before every session. Ask the Lord to show you open hearts that are hungry for the love of Jesus.
- When you’re moved to pour into a child, don’t wait. With everything else competing for time at VBS, you never know if a child will show up for the next session.
- Be on alert. Some lonely little souls need special attention. One such girl didn’t want to attend VBS because she was anxious, even though she’s been coming to church her whole life. I connected her with a sweet girl her age, and it made all the difference.
- Follow up with parents/guardians of children who may have more questions than you have time to answer. The same little one above asked a great question at the end of the story about Jesus and the woman at the well. “Why didn’t the Jewish people and Samaritans like each other?”
With the next group of kids coming in for Bible time, and her group leaving for music, there wasn’t enough time to give her question adequate attention. I texted her grandmother, who is a friend of mine, and asked her to follow up and explain as much as a first grader can understand about prejudice and intermarriage of that period.
- When the Lord presses a specific child or two on your heart, keep them in prayer even after VBS is over. It’s those Holy Spirit moments that are often critical in a child’s faith life.
If your child is attending VBS, check in with him/her every day after the session. I had our pastor’s two-year-old son in my “baby” class. I mentioned to his wife that I felt very ineffective getting through to these little ones. That evening, she sent me a video of our pastor talking to their child about what he’d learned that night. Even at two, Jack was able to tell his daddy that “Jesus woke up from his nap and said, ‘Go away, scary storm.’”
I can’t tell you how that short one-minute video encouraged me in the following VBS sessions.
Which comes to my last piece of advice. If your child is positively impacted by someone volunteering for VBS, take the time to thank him or her. I was so impressed with the elderly in our church putting these children ahead of their challenges. I saw exhaustion on their faces, but it didn’t dim their joy.
If you have the opportunity to enroll your children or grandchildren in VBS, I highly encourage you to do so. I truly believe my kids would’ve benefited from this Jesus-filled event when they were young, and maybe I’d now have one less regret hanging over me. It takes a village, and we have a built-in one right around the corner.
