Leads to over reliance on VBS for evangelism
For Southern Baptists, the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S., VBS is the most effective tool of evangelism, the impetus for 26% of baptisms in 2006. Nearly three million children and adults attended VBS at Southern Baptist churches last year, resulting in 94,980 "decisions to receive Christ as Savior" and 280,693 "Sunday School prospects discovered," according to Southern Baptist Convention statisticians. "Vacation Bible School is today's revival," said Jerry Wooley, the VBS specialist for LifeWay, the SBC's publishing agency.
That sounds great, but our number one tool of evangelism should be the Word of God, and it seems to me that in the SBC churches that we have been members/attenders at, the VBS is exactly what the author of this article says it is for many people: The large signs beckon from every suburban church. Free baby-sitting, they whisper. All week! It is a seductive pitch, directed at frazzled parents desperate to entertain their bored offspring as the summer drags on.
That is exactly what U have experienced. Parents drop off young children at the church, pick them up at the end of the week and never come back. Maybe we reached the kids with the Gospel message, IF we are giving them a solid message, but it never gets reinforced at home and they may never hear the Gospel again until VBS next year, and eventually they get too old for VBS and never go to a church again, except for weddings and funerals (where the Gospel is also typically absent). And that brings us to the second part...
Is the message the right one?
Glynis Jaszewski, a Roman Catholic who lives in the suburbs of Richmond, Va., sent her two children to Vacation Bible Schools at Protestant churches without qualms. "When I was working, they would always go to two or three of them in the summer; it was day care," Mrs. Jaszewski said. She believes their generic Christian message doesn't vary much, even across denominational lines.
Indeed, the big publishing houses that provide VBS material--the SBC's LifeWay, the United Methodists' Cokesbury and the nondenominational Standard Publishing (which produced the first printed VBS curriculum, in 1923)--peddle their wares to any church, regardless of denomination. And the simple themes based on Bible verses, with an accompanying VBS cheer ("Run the race, keep the pace, keep your eyes on Jesus!"), rarely stray into Wittenberg-like territory.
That statement should strike us as problematic. I am not suggesting that we make unchurched kids memorize the Institutes of the Christian Religion by Calvin, but they ought to be getting a solid enough message that a ten year old who goes to a Roman Catholic church should at least realize that something doesn't jive. If what they are hearing is so watered down that the basic justification by faith alone is lost, then are we really doing the Gospel justice?
Having said that, there is plenty of good that comes from VBS. Kids that never hear the Gospel, never see a Christian example, get exposure. That is great and there is no price that can be put on one soul saved, but the question is whether or not we should count on VBS for our main, and perhaps only, evangelistic effort...
3 comments:
That is very true... Unfortunately most children curriculum for anything in the church is moralistic at best and does not show man's sinfulness nor his utter need for God's living Word, Christ...
That is very interesting that the article said it was the new revival of our era...
Although I agree that one soul saved is always a good thing, but can we really compromise Biblical evangelism if VBS is not promoting it, even if some people get saved?
Although God can use the compromises, should we settle for the compromise? I am just thinking out loud here, but if this is what mainstream evangelicalism is doing, do we want a hand in it? Evangelicalism is not what it used to be or what it should be becuase they have no doctrinal spinal cord...
That is my concern as well. Do we water stuff down to get people in the door, and then teach them? I would say no, because it has been my experience that once watered down, it is awfully hard to proclaim the true Gospel again. If we truly believe in a God who is sovereign, which we both do, then our role in evangelism is to declare the Gospel to lost sinners and let God do the work. Any attempts to "nudge" things along by our own cleverness ultimately degrade the Gospel.
If I am still serving in my current church next year, we are probably NOT going to use Lifeway stuff. Great Commission Publications, the publishing arm of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church as some good stuff, I just need to "baptize" certain parts of it :-)
Yeah, I definitley agree. We are not holding to the sufficiency of Scripture and God's ordained means when we dim down the Gospel to make it more appealing...
Hopefully, that curriculum will be better... lol
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