A Coordinator's Playbook for VBS Sharing

A modern VBS program usually runs as a week-long program of religious education for elementary school children, with Bible stories, religious songs, arts and crafts, skits or puppet shows. One congregation must staff each part every morning, set up rooms, tidy crafts and welcome families at the door. For a small congregation with four or five steady volunteers, that load leaves little room for absence or rest. Sharing the load across sites lets you keep the week open to children without asking the same people to do every task.

The origins are traced to Hopedale, Illinois, in 1894, when Sunday school teacher D. T. Miles, who also taught at a public school, felt limited by time constraints in teaching the Bible to children. She started a daily Bible school in the summer that enrolled 40 students and lasted four weeks. A local school held the classes while an adjoining park served for recess. The lesson for you is practical. She used what the town already had: a classroom and open space, rather than building something new. A shared VBS can work the same way when you borrow rooms, tables and shade from each other.

Many churches run their own VBS programs without being under the umbrella of a national organization, so you are free to set dates together. One workable pattern is to run the week in one building, then move it to the second building the next week or the next summer. Another pattern is to split the days, with opening songs and Bible stories in one place and crafts and games in the other. When you look at choosing VBS kits that fit small teams, check how many leaders each station needs and assign those stations to the people who already know them.

Robert Boville of the Baptist Mission Society saw the value of passing teachers around. After learning about the summer program led by Virginia Sinclair Hawes in New York City, he recommended it to other Baptist churches and set up a handful of summer schools taught by students at the Union Theological Seminary. During one summer, 1,000 students were enrolled in five different schools. You can use a smaller version of that idea. Ask a singer to lead songs at both sites, ask a craft leader to prepare twice as many of one craft, and let storytellers rotate by day instead of staffing every room every day.

Virginia Sinclair Hawes, director of the children's department at Epiphany Baptist Church in New York City, started an Everyday Bible School for neighborhood children in the summer of 1898 in a rented beer parlor on the East Side of New York. A bronze plaque in the foyer of First Baptist Church in Charlottesville, Virginia, honors her efforts. Her choice shows that the room itself can be plain if the teaching is clear. You can read the history of Vacation Bible School with your planning team and then walk through both fellowship halls with a tape measure. Backdrops on frames, folding tables, bins of costumes for skits and puppet stages travel well, while taped paper scenes and sand or water games do not.

Yes, if you sort them before you store them. Modern programs often use arts and crafts geared to elementary children, and many pieces use paper, glue, yarn and paint that fade or dry out. Keep scissors, markers with caps, fabric, beads, uncut paper packs and reusable trays, and throw away half-finished pieces that will not keep. The Wikipedia page does not publish a model schedule for shared volunteers. Write names, counts and dates on each bin so the next team knows what will fill one classroom. Notes on how congregations lend ministry kits can help you set a simple rule for return dates and missing pieces.

In 1922, Boville founded the World Association of Daily Vacation Bible School, and a year later Standard Publishing produced the very first printed VBS curriculum, with enough lessons for a five-week course for three age levels: kindergarten, primary, and junior. Some churches now use themed curriculum programs from their denominations or independent publishing houses, which provide easy preparation and include marketing tools. If you share one purchase, buy one leader set and agree on who copies student sheets, who keeps the song files and who stores the posters. Guidance on how resource center lending works shows how to log that kind of shared set so it comes back complete.

Most churches provide VBS programs at no cost to those attending, though some may charge a fee for the program. Cost sharing helps you stay in the first group. When two treasuries split one curriculum, one pack of T-shirt blanks for volunteers and one run of craft supplies, the per-child cost falls and fewer families face a fee. Studies point to a decline, with Barna Research finding that 81 percent of United States churches offered VBS in 1997, while only 68 percent did so in 2012. A free week that is well staffed through sharing gives parents a clear reason to return.

Dr. Abraham L. Latham of the Third Presbyterian Church in Chester, Pennsylvania, while not using the title Vacation Bible School, started a five-week, four-hour-per-day summer Bible school in 1912, which at its peak had 650 to 700 students. That claim as the first summer Bible school of its kind rests on scale, but scale came from daily order and many helpers. You do not need that size to share well. Put leftover paper goods, song sheets and puppet scripts in one box, label decorations by Bible story, and set a date to hand the boxes to the next coordinator. Call one nearby church this week and walk through your storage room together.