Is VBS Still Good Ministry?

One of the greatest dangers of vocational ministry, where sharing the Gospel is not only your life’s work (as is the case for all Christians) but also your paying job, is cynicism. Ministers are privileged to see a lot of miracles, but a lot of disappointments too. People let you down, blessings become curses, and dreams become nightmares. And when you see that every day, it’s easy to become disheartened and disillusioned.

Never is that truer for me than in the runup to our church’s annual Vacation Bible School. Like hundreds of churches around the country, for one week per summer we invite kids from the community to come spend a couple of hours each night learning about Jesus through Bible study, music, crafts, and recreation. I can’t definitively tell you how long VBS has been around—Wikipedia says 1894—but I can tell you it is a firmly entrenched part of evangelical culture, as unquestioned by most congregants as the time of invitation after each week’s sermon.

But as the person in charge of planning VBS the past two years—in a small, aging church I don’t always have the luxury of a paid children’s minister or volunteer VBS coordinator—I’ve found myself cynically questioning its validity as ministry. Are the kids getting anything out of their 10 hours with us that week? Are those flimsy crafts they make actually teaching them anything about the Bible? Are the games, which so easily devolve into cries of “he’s cheating!” or “she’s not being fair!”, really anything more than ways to keep the kids occupied for twenty minutes? Are the Bible lessons, rushed through for the benefit of short attention spans, sticking with the kids five minutes after they’re taught? And the music—those infectious, peppy earworms that take over parents’ car stereos for a week every summer—is the music anything more than annoying?

To sum it all up, is Vacation Bible School really ministry, or just an outdated, irrelevant tradition that we endure out of obligation instead of purpose?

Thankfully, last year I got my answer from the best source possible. At the end of every VBS, our church always hosts a “Family Night” in which the kids put on a brief performance of the songs they’ve learned, Scriptures they’ve memorized, and stories they’ve heard, to the smiles of their beaming parents (and their camera phones). Partly due to my own concerns about the legitimacy of VBS as ministry, last year I stressed to the kids every night that this time around, Family Night would not be a performance or a school assembly, but a kid-led worship service. Their job was not to put on a show, but to lead worship the same way that the pastor, music minister, and other musicians do every Sunday.

That Thursday night, we ran through our order of service, practiced our songs, recited our Bible verse, and I gave the kids one final reminder about their responsibility for the next night—not to perform, but to lead worship. Then we dismissed and parents started picking up their kids. During that flurry of goodbyes, I overheard one little girl’s excited greeting to her Dad, as joyful and pure as anything I’ve ever heard: “Daddy, Daddy guess what we get to do? Tomorrow we get to lead worship!!!” From the look on her face, you’d have thought she’d been given a puppy.

The kids are listening—maybe not to everything said, maybe not every minute, but they’re listening. The kids are learning—maybe they won’t be able to tell you how many loaves and fish Jesus turned into food for 5,000 after Friday night, but they’ll remember he loves them. And the kids, with their childlike faith, are growing.

To every children’s minister, teacher, volunteer, and parent: VBS matters. It still works. For all its flaws and headaches, it is ministry. Jesus says we are to let the little children come to him—with crafts, games, teaching, and music, thank you for bringing them to him.