This summer, I signed my children up for three back-to-back vacation Bible schools—one in Brooklyn, where we live; one in Manhattan; and one in the suburbs of Philadelphia near extended family. Our vacation Bible school (VBS) boot camp spanned three consecutive weeks and three different denominations.
I wasn’t sure how my kids would respond. Would three weeks of Jesus camp turn my nine-year-old son off to church or draw him closer to God? How would my three-year-old daughter fare in a trio of new environments without me? Was this a little too much VBS for one month?
I’ll admit my VBS immersion plan was as much logistical as it was spiritual. Earlier this year, I had scrolled through the family calendar and counted nine weeks of blank squares in July and August. I told my husband I was starting to panic. After years of working limited hours as a freelancer to maximize time with my children, accepting a new job opened my eyes to the stress millions of parents face every year. Piecing together the summertime childcare puzzle requires time, money, and first-rate organizational skills.
The cost of local summer camps involving sports, art, nature, and all kinds of niche activities was staggering ($800 a week to play chess?!). Our newly planted church didn’t have the resources to hold its own vacation Bible school—or kids’ week, kids’ camp, or my favorite: kidz camp (VBS’s edgy cousin).
Feeling discouraged and a little cross-eyed after several hours of research, I prayed for help and started looking up VBS programs at churches where our family had a connection. My anxiety lifted as the blank calendar squares filled up with day camps that were both Christ centered and blessedly affordable.
The one in Manhattan, at a large Presbyterian church, cost the most, but it was also the only full-day program, running from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., Monday to Friday. The church intentionally chose those hours to meet the needs of working parents. To wrangle enough volunteers, church leadership asked parents of campers to spend one of the five days serving.
The Brooklyn camp took place at a small, nondenominational community church and was free to attend. It ran from 9 a.m. to noon, Monday to Friday.
The third camp was held at my mom’s midsize Lutheran church in southeastern Pennsylvania. It cost $50 per child, with a promise to help families who couldn’t afford the fee. It also ran from 9 a.m. to noon during the workweek.
I was curious to see how the three VBS experiences compared to one another. Each church invited parents to watch a portion of the programming, so I was able to make some first-person observations in addition to interviewing my own children.
Both kids enjoyed all three camps but liked the Pennsylvania one best. I expected this from my daughter, given that her grandmother was one of her VBS teachers that week. But my son surprised me by picking the most traditional of the three.
The church still called its program vacation Bible school, not some cool new pseudonym. Each day began and ended in the sanctuary, with its stained-glass windows, long red carpet, and golden chandeliers. And many of the teachers were retirees.
The kids didn’t care about any of that. They were wowed from the moment they stepped out of the parking lot and into the Alaskan wilderness. The theme was True North: Trusting Jesus in a Wild World, and the church went all in. White, fluorescent ceiling bulbs were replaced by green, blue, and purple hues to invoke the Northern Lights. Someone had dragged undecorated Christmas trees out of the attic to create a coniferous forest. My daughter squealed with delight when she spotted a little stuffed otter swimming in the make-believe mountain stream.
A quick search shows that this ready-made VBS program from Group Publishing was a popular choice this year. A Pentecostal church in Tennessee, a Presbyterian church in Canada, and a Roman Catholic church in Trinadad and Tobago are among the long list of congregations that deployed the curriculum this summer.
For about $300, churches could order the True North starter kit, including a program guide, leader manuals, music, and basic student resources. The church my kids visited purchased add-ons like colorful wristbands, T-shirts, and scenery backdrops.
Ready-made programs like this one are the most accessible for many congregations. They can also tip VBS toward social media homogeneity, the same “tyranny of the algorithm” that makes “every coffee shop [look] the same.”
But the globalization of VBS programming isn’t necessarily problematic if church leaders carefully vet their curricula. It’s beautiful to think that my kids were studying the Book of Matthew, learning lessons like “When we need hope, we can trust Jesus,” as children from Ontario to Trinidad were hearing the same message (delivered perfectly by Bruce the Moose).
The Manhattan church chose Lifeway’s Magnified! curriculum, which focused on Psalm 34:3 and encouraged kids to discover “the bigness of God in the smallest of things.” The church decked out its space with colorful backdrops, giant daffodils, and jumbo ants made from black balloons.
This congregation did an outstanding job of keeping the key point front and center, judging by the frequency with which my toddler continues to randomly shout, “Made to magnify God!”
She also still talks about “that silly frog.” Some brave soul donned a neon-green, inflatable costume in the July heat. His antics kept the kids laughing all week.
recommended
The final stop on our Tour de VBS, on our home turf in Brooklyn, was another win. The church used a ministry called Orange for its program, Live It Out: Discover How to Love like Jesus.
Compared to Lifeway and Group Publishing, Orange is the new kid on the block and seems to emphasize digital content over VBS’s physical spaces. For my kids, that cut down a bit on the wow factor, but they still had plenty of hands-on fun. They could also rattle off the five key lessons by heart—“love one another,” “be kind to one another,” “forgive one another,” “pray for one another,” and “serve one another.”
VBS falls somewhere between weekly Sunday school classes and overnight Christian camps. For preschool and elementary-age kids like mine, it can be a spiritually significant, immersive experience without the time constraints of Sunday mornings or the higher stakes of sleepaway camp. As NPR reported last year, VBS is also an easy entry point for non-Christians facing significant childcare needs.
And yet the number of churches that offer VBS is dwindling. CT covered the trend in 2013 after Barna published “The State of Vacation Bible School.” At that time, Barna reported that 68 percent of Protestant churches in the US offered VBS in 2012, down from 81 percent in 1997.
It’s hard to find comparable recent numbers, but it appears VBS programs were already declining when the pandemic hit. A 2022 study by Hartford International, which surveyed more than 600 churches representing 31 denominations (both Catholic and Protestant), found that only 36 percent of churches held VBS the year before the pandemic. After a sharp drop-off in 2020 and a rebound in 2021, just 31 percent of churches said they were planning to hold VBS in 2022.
There are many reasons churches may skip vacation Bible school. It’s time-consuming and logistically challenging. It requires a significant time commitment from volunteers. It’s messy, loud, and can be costly. Plus, results are difficult to measure. But couldn’t we say the same about most worthwhile evangelism and discipleship efforts?
I may never know whether three weeks of VBS boot camp in the summer of 2025 had a long-term impact on my children’s faith, but I’m seeing evidence that the experience captivated the little hearts in my household.
It’s been more than a month since the first week of VBS came to a close in Manhattan. I asked my son if he could recall any important lessons he learned there. He answered almost instantly: “God loves me. God cares about me. God sees me. God forgives me.”
Not to be left out, my daughter piped up to share her most important takeaway: “I know! Trusting in Jesus!” Then they both broke into one of their favorite new VBS songs as I soaked in the sounds of their high-pitched little voices. These lyrics say it best: “The greatness of God is magnified in the smallest of things.”
Related
