Disciple: VBS? Not Exactly
Experiments in children’s and youth ministry
By Summerlee Walter
Christian churches across denominations have long engaged in the same familiar summer ritual: VBS. Vacation Bible School. Beloved by some, dreaded by others, it has for decades been a trusted means of drawing families – the under-12 members, at least - back through the doors of the church for one week amidst a schedule busy with beach vacations, soccer tournaments and pig pickings.
In many churches, youth and children’s formation volunteers have already started to pick out this summer’s VBS theme, and this article started out as an exploration of “doing VBS differently.” Along the way, though, it became apparent that the “different VBS’s” about which we were learning were, in many ways, something entirely new that we don’t yet have a common vocabulary to describe.
Part Galilee journey, part experiment, part formation and service and fellowship (the part we recognized as being held in common with traditional VBS), the youth and children’s gatherings featured here address the needs of young people in new places, at new times and in new ways.
WINTER VBS
As part of her work with Puerta Abierta, the intercultural house church she leads in Greensboro, the Rev. Audra Abt had learned something important about the youth whose families form her congregation: they get really, really bored during breaks from school. Two (or four) weeks of being stuck at home with siblings can begin to drag for any young person, but add to that the additional limitations of living in low-income areas – no transportation to friends’ houses, no extra money for track out activities, limited opportunities to travel to visit family – and breaks from school become a lonely, isolating prospect.
So last summer Abt decided to try something new. A youth group she’d started wasn’t taking hold and so was on hiatus, but during the summer she gathered the youth she’d met through Puerta Abierta to take walks through the neighborhood, watch videos and enjoy fellowship together. During the fall, the gatherings took the form of weekly homework help, which youth from St. Andrew’s, Greensboro, where Abt serves part-time, also attended. Later Abt, along with St. Andrew’s EYC Coordinator Olivia Wilson-Smith, took the bold move of cancelling two Sunday youth meetings a month in favor of Tuesday evening offerings; the weekday gatherings drew from the young people who had connected to the homework help group.
And, throughout it all, Abt continued to hear from youth in the neighborhood that school breaks are depressing. So she decided to pull together a three-day program during the 2015 winter break. The plan was to spend one day each walking through Advent, Christmas and Epiphany, but the ultimate goal was fellowship.
“What if we were to do something that would give us all a chance to get together and have something to look forward to?” Abt asked. “It was clear the ministry would be having the chance to spend time together in a time that can be depressing or lonely or isolating.”
Abt did the best thing anyone can do when building something from scratch in response to a need emerging from the community: she asked for help. A request to the Convocation dean to forward a message to the Greensboro clericus yielded volunteers from St. Christopher’s, High Point. A Methodist church that donated space for homework help again offered its space. People volunteered their gifts: musicians agreed to sing, kinetic-oriented people offered to put together games, artists brought projects. Regional canon the Rev. Canon Earnest Graham offered to teach the youth to draw Bible comics, and diocesan youth missioners Amy Campbell and Beth Crow offered supplies and logistical support for bilingual registration. (Those resources are now available for other churches to use.)
Adult volunteers brought their children and their children’s friends to hang out with the youth from Puerta Abierta. The 14 children and youth who attended ranged in age from 3-year-olds through high school seniors. The high school youth were able to hang out together or help with the younger children.
“They were not just recipients of ministry but active participants in it,” Abt explains. “It also worked because it wasn’t necessary that everybody knew each other right off the bat, and they could come when they could.”
The gathering, pulled together in response to a need in the youth community, has also pointed to future ministry opportunities. After decorating wooden crosses, one girl declared that she could carry her own cross during Greensboro’s annual downtown stations of the cross on Good Friday. The stage is now set for a Lenten activity.
“I can tell you Holy Week in Greensboro is going to be different,” Abt says. “They’re already invested in their crosses and how they’re going to carry them. It’s exciting to see who we’ll invite next.”
[Cross-making during Puerta Abierta's winter VBS. Photo courtesy of the Rev. Audra Abt.]
CAMP IN THE CAMPS
In 2013, a 12-year-old confirmand at Trinity, Fuquay-Varina, decided he wanted to visit the Episcopal Farmworker Ministry as an outreach project for the church. Twelve members of the congregation accompanied their vicar, the Rev. Roxane Gwyn, to the ministry. They were moved by what they saw in the migrant worker camp they visited, but they were frustrated because they didn’t have an opportunity to connect with the workers.
“We weren’t interacting, so that was one of our challenges,” Gwyn explains. “They were standing in line and we were passing out shirts and blankets and that was it. There was a longing to get connected, but we didn’t know what to do.”
An opportunity presented itself when Patti Trainor, at the time the Development Director for the Episcopal Farmworker Ministry, called Gwyn with a possible solution to the problem: a Mission Endowment Grant could help provide the funding for whatever project Trinity envisioned. Trainor helped to draft a grant that focused on children and youth programming around two topics: healthy eating and creative classic play, broad ideas Trinity could refine into specific programming later.
With funding from the grant, the program, called Camp in the Camps, came to life in July 2015 when children, youth and adult volunteers from Trinity and the two churches with which they partnered, Grace, Clayton, and El Buen Pastor, Durham, arrived at the Episcopal Farmworker Ministry with classic water toys for a day of fun they called “FIESTA.”
With the help of hundreds of water balloons and whatever other water toys congregants could loan, donate or invent, the children of migrant workers and the children from the Episcopal congregations played. The language barrier wasn’t much of a problem, in part because, as Gwyn points out, kids mostly just giggle and shout when they’re playing anyway. Friendships were also helped along by the fact that the children from Trinity, unprompted by Gwyn or their parents, had decided to bring some of their books and stuffed animals to share.
In total, 60 children and adults attended FIESTA. The event turned out to be more family-oriented than Gwyn originally anticipated, as parents from the camps were not comfortable sending their children to FIESTA alone. She’s already incorporated this learning into future plans for Camp in the Camps. The next FIESTA, planned for May or June, will focus on encouraging families to cook healthy food together.
The project has also started to evolve a formation component.
“People keep saying, ‘Maybe you can do a little teaching,’” Gwyn explains. “Formation wasn’t the original goal, but when we get together at the ministry to decorate Easter baskets on Holy Saturday [for the ministry’s big egg hunt on Easter], we’re going to talk about why we’re doing it.”
What Puerta Abierta’s winter gathering and Trinity’s Camp in the Camps share in common is a willingness to go where the Spirit leads, to adjust mid-course and to invite the gifts people have to offer. They take the best of traditional parish programming for youth and children and reimagine it for new populations with different needs. Regardless of what we decide to call them, these ministries are undoubtedly the work of the Spirit moving among God’s people.
Summerlee Walter is the communications coordinator for the Diocese of North Carolina.
Tags: North Carolina Disciple
