littleton observer

VBS – a summertime tradition


Photo by John Peters	Photo by John Peters
Marie Thorpe, standing, looks over some work being done by Antonio Robinson Jr., 4, and Karen Banks, 4, during a recent Vacation Bible School at South Street Baptist Church. The church joined forces with Enon Baptist Church for its VBS this summer.	What’s Vacation Bible School without snack time? Here, Mary Margerum (right) and Geneva Shyrier prepare snack for the youth and adults attending the South Street Baptist-Enon Baptist VBS held at the end of June.

Photos by John Peters
Craft time is a big part of Vacation Bible School, and leatherwork was one of the crafts at Lake Gaston Baptist Church’s VBS held last week. In the photo above left, Julian Brady edges a belt he is making. In the photo above right, April Greissinger is stamping a bealth she is putting together. In the background is Pastor Ron Nida, who wrote the church’s VBS curriculum and leads the leatherworing craft session.

By John Peters
Editor

There are certain summer milestones that seem to be part of the collection consciousness of folks who have grown up in rural communities.
The elation that comes with the last day of school, fireworks displays bursting in a sweltering summer sky on Independence Day, and the long, hot, lazy days of summer when the novelty of free days and July 4 parades have long passed.
Another one of those shared traditions is Vacation Bible School – or VBS – and churches in the Lake Gaston and Littleton region continue to make that part of children’s lives.
“It’s always been around since I’ve been around,” said Mike Currin, pastor at Littleton Baptist Church. “Everybody was involved in Bible school when they were a kid, they want their kids involved in it.”
Pastor Ron Nida, of Lake Gaston Baptist Church, said the origins of VBS are quite simple.
“School’s out, the kids need something to do. There is baseball, swim leagues, other activities. The church, historically speaking, felt it important to provide a few weeks where kids could study the Bible.”
Four local churches – Littleton Baptist, Littleton United Methodist, Littleton Presbyterian, and Lakeside Lutheran – last week finished a week-long session of VBS.
“The tradition of a community VBS stated some time back in the 60s and it’s expanded as it’s gone along,” said Mick Currin, pastor at Littleton Baptist. He said the Baptist and Methodist church first joined together, and over time the program grew to include the four churches.
“There are advantages to doing a joint program” Currin said. “It’s hard to do a VBS in the daytime, but that is when the kids are available. They are more alert, fresh, and you have more available time with them. In an evening VBS, you have to condense everything down.”
But, with a lot of adults working during the day, he said it’s hard to get enough adult volunteers from any one church to effectively run a daytime VBS. With four churches, there are generally plenty of volunteers.
“With everybody working together, many of the things we are able to do, we just couldn’t do it as one church,” he said.
This year, with youth from the John 3:16 day camp joining the community Bible School, Currin said they had more than 80 children each day.
Like many VBS programs around the nation, the folks from the four churches gather during the winter months, choose a curriculum from one of dozens available, and then start recruiting volunteers and gathering material for the various crafts and other parts of the program.
At Lake Gaston Baptist Church, Nida and the church organizers do things a bit differently.
First, they have large enough numbers to split the week-long event into a morning session aimed at kids age 3 through sixth grade and a night-time session built around teen-agers.
With between 70 and 80 children in the morning session he said splitting the two sessions allows the church to recruit some of the teenagers to be among the 30 volunteers helping with the younger children. Then, the teens get their own, customized program at night.
A second difference is the fact that Lake Gaston Baptist uses curriculum written by Nida for the younger children, and by associate pastor Todd Stout in the teen meetings.
Nida, the founding pastor of the 21-year-old church, said there were a couple of reasons behind opting for his own material.
“First, the material we were using, the wonderful musician who wrote much of the music retired,” he said, and he and other folks in the church weren’t keen on the material being published by that company, or others, after that retirement.
“We wanted the kids to have songs that were easy to learn and had a deeper message,” he said.
Second, he said the companies publishing VBS curriculum make such programs “generic for all churches.”
While not looking for controversy, he said there are some elements in the Bible he believes should be included in the VBS curriculum that were being excluded from those more generic programs.
He’s written six years worth of curriculum, which allows for a rotation for every child passing through the first through sixth grade segments of the VBS to sit in on the entire program, without repeating any of it.
At its heart, though, VBS is, for the adult, an opportunity to spend time with community children, and to give them some Biblical teaching. For the kids, it’s a break in the monotony of summer, a time for crafts and games, a bit of classroom structure and a chance to get some snacks and punch while socializing with their friends.
“I think most kids love all of it,” Currin said. “They love the crafts, of course. One of the things we do, the youth actually do a drama at the end, a drama they create, it’s hilarious. They do it, everyone enjoys watching it.”

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Jul 18, 2007