Instant Vacation Bible School: Just Add Kids

By RICHARD MULLINS The Tampa Tribune

Published: Jul 24, 2007

Amid a gym full of 300 bubbly children, Astrid Hilson, 8, settles into her row of a dozen second-graders and gets ready to scream out one of her favorite Bible school songs, "Great Adventure."

"I like the songs the best," says Astrid, who has met "lots of friends" so far at the "Avalanche Ranch"-themed vacation Bible school at First Baptist Church of Temple Terrace.

Astrid has plenty of company learning that particular song. More than 5,000 U.S. churches have also purchased the Avalanche Ranch Bible school kit from a professional Bible school production company in Colorado, Group Publishing.

Although each church can put its own particular spin on Avalanche Ranch, that program lays out every step for a successful VBS week - from how to organize each day with particular Bible messages to dances, songs and even what snacks to eat. To make the program more interactive and fun, there are dozens of add-on options: Avalanche Ranch T-shirts, DVDs, cowboy hats, craft kits and Bible verse action figures for children to take home each day.

"I'll admit I was slightly cynical at first when I saw all that," said Astrid's mother, Lucretia, a Unitarian by upbringing who picked the Temple Terrace program partly after seeing an online video advertisement for Avalanche Ranch. "It's not like the VBS I did when I was growing up, when everything was homemade. But she just loves it all. She whines every night about wanting to come back to Bible school."

Off-The-Shelf Lessons

Such is the new face of Vacation Bible School, or VBS, as most churches call it.

In perhaps another example of America's time-starved families, a growing number of churches are leaving behind the yearly tradition of recruiting volunteers to hand-make VBS decorations, programs and lessons from scratch. Instead, more churches are turning to national publishers that produce ever-more elaborate VBS kits with components designed to appeal to busy working parents and media-savvy children who are accustomed to the multimedia impact of movies, the Internet and video games.

About half a dozen major publishers now dominate the VBS kit market, and use development methods similar to any consumer product company introducing shampoo or cell phones: extensive market research, hefty technology investment, and field testing with children to see what works and what doesn't.

This summer, there are VBS kits with all the decorations and music for a water park theme, stock car race and an outer space adventure.

Each year the kits become more high-tech and elaborate, and the costs can add up to several thousand dollars for a church - leading to a division between churches, with some deciding to absorb the cost as part of a mission-driven outreach, and other churches deciding to charge admission, which in the Tampa Bay area can top $35 per child this year.

Every Detail Already Planned

For churches, one main appeal of these kits is that they orchestrate every detail for managing hundreds of children and volunteers for a week, organized around a master schedule of rotating sessions each day, such as:

•"Chadder's Wild West Theater" classroom session with videos of the chipmunk character "Chadder" drawing on Bible lessons to overcome calamity.

•"Chuck Wagon Chow" snack break with a rotating menu for the five days, such as "Stick With Us S'Mores," and "Tumbling Jericho Walls" cheese and crackers.

•"Cowpoke Crafts & Missions," with journal writing time (Western-themed journals available, $13.99 for pack of 10).

For each activity, the kit includes custom instruction sheets, complete with talking points.For each day, there is a Bible action figure (with the day's lesson stamped on the back) for the child to take home and remember the day.

"No one has to prepare everything," said Mary Shelnut, director of preschool ministries at Temple Terrace Baptist Church. "In Bible schools of old, you'd get volunteers who had to spend weeks in preparation. This curriculum lets workers come for a week, and everything is prepared for them."

Kits Appeal To Multimedia Kids

The productions may seem somewhat commercial from an outside perspective, but youth directors say it works with modern children.

"Our goal is to have anyone, child or volunteer, grow in their faith that week," said Sylvia May, an education director at Hyde Park United Methodist Church, which had 350 children in VBS this summer, up from 200 last year.

Children now are immersed in multimedia experiences all day, May said, and it takes something more to engage them to think about God, faith, right and wrong.

"Parents and children now compare church to other venues, to children's museums, to high-tech elementary schools, Disney, even their pediatricians' offices are multimedia now," May said. "That's where children and parents are now, and church should probably not have the same homemade feel as when I was a child."

Although no one group seems to track sales of the VBS industry, individual companies say their business is growing dramatically. Since last year, sales of VBS kits have doubled at ChristianEdWarehouse.com, a national reseller of Christian education supplies based in San Diego.

"We've sold well over 1,000 kits, and we're just one company selling," said marketing coordinator Jayma Malme. "The dollar volume is probably up 75 percent over last year," meaning more churches are buying supplies beyond the basic VBS starter kits.

One main reason for that growth could be that Americans (and church staff) are busier than ever - prompting churches to pick programs that are less time consuming to produce.

The Ventura Calif.-based Barna Group research company recently found the number of churches offering VBS has declined 15 percent since 1997, from 81 percent to 69 percent, meaning 38,000 fewer churches. The main reason cited by pastors was a lack of teacher volunteers.

Companies Test-Market Kits

With so many buying the same VBS programs, churches need to be cautious of homogenizing the religious experience, said Nadine Anderson, director of Christian Education at Grace Lutheran Church in Carrollwood.

This year, her church chose the underwater-themed "Great Bible Reef" program from Augsburg Fortress, the publisher of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, based in Minneapolis, Minn.

"I enjoy it, they're easy to use, and it does have a high impact with kids," Anderson said. "But you can go from one church to another, both doing the exact same program and still see two different things because people do put their own spin on it."

Successful kits don't come by accident or divine inspiration alone.

Each year, Group Publishing develops two new VBS programs: one generally more upbeat and the other more serious, usually with an ancient-world experience theme, said Dan Tancik, the company's VBS team leader. Both programs are tested during a full-week run at a church near its Loveland, Colo., headquarters. This year, Group added online registration as a feature for parents.

Cost Schism Divides Churches

With churches adding more elaborate and more expensive VBS kits, churches appear divided on how to handle the costs.

A "starter kit" can cost a few hundred dollars. But if churches decide to add extras - such as CDs for each child, shirts, journals, hats and plush toys - the costs add up quickly. A VBS with 300 or more children can quickly mean thousands of dollars in expenses.

Some churches, such as Temple Terrace Baptist, absorb the entire cost of VBS. "We don't charge people to come on Sunday morning. Why would we charge for summer programs like VBS?" Shelnut said.

The Name of Jesus World Outreach Center in Tarpon Springs charges $30 per child, plus $4 for lunch. Hyde Park Methodist pays for most of its VBS program but also charges about $25 per child to offset some costs, though children who are referred through social service agencies pay no admission.

Despite the cost, many churches believe they could not do without VBS. With more parents working full time, VBS has emerged as a relatively inexpensive summer day care option for some families who rotate their children from church to church to fill up the summer school break.

And if churches can provide a good experience for the children, there's more of a chance parents dropping them off would consider coming back.

Upward of 40 percent of the children at Temple Terrace Baptist's Bible school came from nonmember families, Shelnut said. "Our purpose is to plant the word of God in people's hearts and lives, even in families who ship their kids around from week to week," she said. "We don't go out and actively campaign them for membership, but we do offer opportunities for them to come back and see the kids present their songs on Sunday."

Reporter Richard Mullins can be reached at (813) 259-7919 or rmullins@tampatrib.com.