5 Reasons Why You Might Want to Kill VBS in Your Church

4. VBS doesn’t usually mirror regular children’s programming. Most churches pull out all the stops for VBS, and understandably so. Children are a gift from God and deserve our very best. We do children a disservice if VBS becomes the high water mark for children’s programming in your church. Too many times I’ve seen a church pull together for a solid VBS but then allow their regular Sunday morning children’s experience to languish by comparison. If you want your children’s ministry to thrive, then you need to pull off a VBS level experience every single Sunday. The reason many kids don’t follow up from VBS is because Sunday morning experiences (from children’s Sunday School to morning worship) is lame compared to VBS. So they’ll just wait until next summer to come back. If you want to effectively reach children, VBS level programming needs to happen every week.

5. VBS delays churches from having hard conversations about why they aren’t reaching the younger generation. The statistics are overwhelming. We are losing the Millennials in droves, these same Millennials many of whom have probably been to a VBS at least once. VBS isn’t effectively reaching the next generation, and in fact can be harmful because it inoculates churches from having hard conversations. A church who doesn’t effectively reach the younger generation will be able to say “at least we’re reaching some during VBS” and declare that their next generation strategy, when the majority of those non-church kids are dumped off my uninterested parents who are simply using VBS as a babysitting service. If the only time your church reaches more than a few dozen kids is during VBS, that’s not a success. That’s a sign that your church needs to have a tough conversation about what it’s going to take to effectively reach kids on a weekly basis.

Those are five reasons why you might want to kill VBS. I’m not saying VBS doesn’t work anymore. In many contexts, it still might. But in our church’s environment, we transitioned to something else. We discovered that more than half of our kids coming were children of the volunteers who were working, and the rest were drop offs from uninterested parents. We tried hard to reach those parents, even offering groups for parents to meet while their children were at VBS. In our little corner of Mississippi, however, unchurched families have been conditioned to treat VBS as a babysitting service and nothing more. So we transitioned to a twice yearly interactive children’s worship service for parents and kids to experience together that flows from and into our normal Sunday morning experience. It’s been a huge success for us and we’re glad we made the switch.