This past week our church held its summer Vacation Bible School. Let’s all stand and give a standing ovation (or moment of silence?) for those precious VBS Directors in churches everywhere!
It’s Just Better with Others
My favorite hockey team is the Colorado Avalanche. I’ve been rooting for them for well over twenty years, dating back to the 1990s. At the time of writing this, they’re preparing for Game 6 of the Stanley Cup Finals versus the Tampa Bay Lightning. If they win tonight, they’ll claim their third Cup Championship in franchise history. If they lose, they’ll wait until Tuesday to attempt victory once more.
I’m certainly not a hardcore hockey fan. Football is the only sport I watch with any regularity, and that is mainly a fall and winter sport. But when you have a favorite team or player, you’re always capable of being pulled into watching random games at random times. Watching hockey in June fits the bill!
While I know some committed hockey fans (St. Louis has a strong hockey culture given their own professional team, the Blues), most people I mingle with weekly couldn’t care less about it. Still fewer care and know the rules intimately, something I still struggle to grasp myself.
Yet I’ve noticed something through watching the Avalanche during this playoff run: it’s just more fun when you can enjoy it with others.
No amount of ice time or reminiscence about the good ole days of Sakic, Roy, and Forsberg could pique my wife’s interests. I’m not a drinker, so hanging out at the local sports bar isn’t a suitable option. And since my “Avs” defeated the Blues on their road to the finals, most St. Louis fans have lost interest. Also, it doesn’t help that Stan Kroenke owns the Avalanche, Kroenke being Public Enemy #1 after he yanked the St. Louis Rams from town in 2016.
Until two weeks ago, about the most meaningful conversation that I’d had about the Avalanche’s playoff performance was with a random guy in the Charlotte Airport. He’d noticed my Colorado ballcap and commented on how well they were playing. As readers will recall, the circumstances that landed me in that airport at that time weren’t especially congenial to nerding out over sports.
But recently I visited with Joe. Joe and his wife have been part of our church family for well over 40 years. Recently Joe has experienced some health issues, keeping him out of service frequently. But Joe is a huge sports fan. Ironically enough, I learned during our recent visit that he’s a Tampa Bay Lightning fan. I promised Joe that if they ended up squaring off with the Avalanche in the Finals, I’d come over and we’d watch a game. This past Friday I was able to deliver on that promise. It was a lot of fun.
As far as I know, Joe is closer to 80 than 70. He grew up in Iowa, was raised Catholic, and worked for the airline industry for decades. I was raised in South Carolina, in a Baptist family, and I’m a pastor half his age.
Isn’t it interesting how sports have a way of bringing people together? They cut across so many socio-cultural barriers. Even though they don’t unite people in the most important way—the way Jesus does—they have the capacity to foster community where citizens in a diverse society can momentarily set aside politics and share cultural experiences. Moreover, they can create opportunities for Gospel conversation.
I still remember Chris from when I lived in North Carolina. Chris and his girlfriend attended our church’s services regularly, though he openly acknowledged that he wasn’t a believer. Chris was from the Bronx, a heavy drinker, and worked in construction. But he loved baseball. At the time, I still did, too. We got together to watch baseball a few times. The conversation would often gravitate to other personal topics. Sports fandom provided that avenue.
We should be clear-eyed about sports. They can be downright idolatrous. Indeed, professional sports leagues have been complicit in the rise of alcohol consumption and amateur gambling. It’s no stretch to claim that sports are too important for too many Christians—to the detriment of advancing the Gospel and weekly worship. Simultaneously, I have found that measured enjoyment of sports can not only be legitimate, but it can open doors to other relational and spiritual opportunities.
If Joe and I are truly one, it will only be because of Jesus. But for a moment in history, the providential meeting of two of our favorite teams gave us an evening of fellowship. And the reason we even knew of our mutual interests was a connection through a church family that began in 1961. And that church was only possible because of the one that Jesus founded in Acts 2. Praise be to God.
UPDATED (10:05PM CST): Congratulations to the Colorado Avalanche on their third Stanley Cup!
VBS: Past, Present, and Future
Vacation Bible School has always been a mixed bag for me.
I remember the days when VBS was a huge ministry for most churches. It was the one, non-Sunday ministry that you could count on every church having. I still see a packed sanctuary in my mind’s eye when I remember the programs of my youth. I especially remember the corny songs, the colorful themes, and the challenging crafts. Of course, some of this hasn’t changed!
I remember Mrs. Bernice Robinson so eager to put food on our plates during snack time. She was always glad to give us seconds if we wanted them. I remember Mr. Sammie Driggers showing us how to build a birdhouse, a stool, and other useful crafts. I remember it being hot as blazes during gametime outdoors. I remember feeling so uncomfortable singing the cheesy songs. Again, some things never change.
Yet over the last 25-30 years, VBS programs have lost a lot of cache. To be sure, you can still find plenty of churches offering them, even if they aren’t quite as uniform in format as they used to be. But the one big difference seems to be the number of kids turning out. Even churches much larger than mine report significant declines in participation. Why?
I suspect that most of this decline can be attributed to the rise of camps—every and any kind of camp. The public school system especially got in on the camp game in recent years. There has almost always been some type of summer camp for football players. But now every sport and extracurricular has its own camp. Speaking of the school system, summer school is now for more than just kids needing to catch up; it’s for kids trying to get ahead.
There are other factors that have created a new ministry environment for VBS. Our churches should study them, understand them, but then they must respond.
My general concern is not whether VBS belongs in an approved sacred cow category. My concern pertains to how many churches have responded to two factors: (1) the desire to move away from being event-driven; and (2) the overall effort involved in doing ministry in a competitive environment.
On the first count, many pastors, church leaders, and layman have seen the futility of hosting lots and lots of events. They’ve invested years of efforts, time, and money, and seen little results. More positively, they’ve tried to reframe the outreach strategy of their ministry so as to emphasize the church going to the world, not the world coming to our church buildings. This is admirable, but incomplete.
Outreach and evangelism are inherently costly. They always exact a price when it comes to time, talent, and treasures. These resources need not be what they have been in the past, and they certainly need not look the same. But for too many churches, no intentional community ministry has replaced VBS and other ministries which have been nixed altogether. We’re explaining our outreach philosophy better, but our actual practices reveal a hollow philosophy.
On the other hand, some of us are tired of competing. We’re frustrated with the school system. We’re frustrated with the community social calendar. We’re frustrated with the lack of volunteers for larger-scale events and programs. Fine. What will we do with our frustrations? How will we let Jesus transform this into a positive and prudent outlook on what we do need to do to meet and minister to people where they are?
This isn’t easy. I saw my wife direct a VBS for two or three years, and it was incredibly stressful. Maybe we need to rethink how such ministries are executed. Maybe we need to find new wineskins to put the same timeless message into.
An additional error that churches kept making through the years when it came to VBS was that there wasn’t a concrete enough sense of who the ministry was for. Was VBS primarily for church kids or unchurched kids? Too often churches didn’t answer this clearly. Even when they did, they tried to say “yes” to both, which misses the point of a question that asks who something is primarily for!
Even once churches established the who of VBS, they didn’t always sufficiently discern how the program needed to be formatted to minister to that type of audience. Again, this is easier said than done.
Ultimately I don’t know what the future of VBS will be for evangelical churches. We’ve had years when we didn’t do it in our ministry, so I can’t even say what its future will be for our church. I do know that I still come across middle-aged adults who fondly remember attending VBS. Some of them were converted through it and are serving God today. Others made decisions that were will-intentioned, but ignorant. These people and others are prevalent in many of our communities. The seed was sown. We need to trust that some measure of harvest lies ahead, even if we cannot know its yield.
Thank God for the Mrs. Bernices and Mr. Sammies of the world.
Currently Reading:
John McWhorter, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.
Quote of the Week:
The pro-life movement should greet the reversal of Roe v. Wade with a spirit of gratitude. The people of this country have, for the first time in almost 50 years, an opportunity to enact laws that truly protect the lives of unborn children. But the movement should also show a profound humility and absence of malice toward their political opponents . . . After all, the simple truth is that if the pro-life movement wants to end abortion, it has to do much more work than merely banning abortion . . . No set of policies relieves pro-life Americans of personal responsibilities. That means fostering and adopting children. That means loving mothers in distress. That means sustaining and creating private institutions that provide shelter and assistance to women in need . . . Earlier this month, we learned that the abortion rate increased during Trump’s presidency. He was the first American president since Jimmy Carter to end his term with a higher abortion rate than when he began. This suggests that for the first time in three decades, the cultural moment is not on the pro-life side, that women are facing an increased sense of instability and uncertainty, and that the best way for pro-life Americans to view the reversal of Roe is not as the beginning of the end of abortion in the United States, but rather as the end of the beginning of a long struggle to remake our nation into a culture that is far more hospitable to mother and child. (David French)