Maybe your church does VBS better than any other church, but I wonder: does your community need another one? I would be willing to bet that there are a dozen such programs in your town. What might be created if your church took the time, energy, creativity and money you spend putting on VBS and tried to create a place where kids could learn about Jesus all year long? Or what if all the churches in town banded together to create something really extraordinary during the summertime?

As for the Barna stat — there’s some truth to that. The odds of a person making a commitment of faith decrease as they get older — with a sharp drop-off after age 18. That’s no reason to give up, of course, but we must take stewardship into consideration.

There’s another stat from Barna that concerns me, though. He says that somewhere between 65-80% of all those kids will drop out of church and be uninvolved in any kind of spiritually formative activity by the time they hit their early 20s.

So, let’s define “effective” and then let’s measure how “effective” VBS really is — long term. And let’s begin to think about what we might be able to do to not only get them in but to keep them in.

And thanks for the compliment on the book. I can only hope you grow half as much by reading it as I did by writing it!

With all due respect to the above blogger, VBS was (is) like disco music. Awesome while it lasted. Very happy the above friend was saved while at VBS. My personal experience was VBS was a religious program that mimicked a glorified babysitting. Don’t drink the kool-aid. Welcome to 2009.

Beyond that, our church does VBS and does it very well. It is highly attended and is a great outreach to the community. It is a safe, fun place for working parents to drop their kids for one week during the summer. Many children accept Christ and are baptized after that week every year. I can’t imagine why churches wouldn’t do something that is relatively cheap, highly effective (far more than much of the preaching I hear) and a community wide draw.

Also, I remember at some point seeing a statistic that far more people become followers of Christ before age 18 than after. (I think it was a Barna statistic.) The Church needs to do a far better job reaching children and youth, having dynamic programs for them, and teaching them God’s word and a Biblical world-view so that at age 18 when they leave for college they remain active participants in the faith.

It seems like a better question might be why churches spend so much time and money on adult evangelism that is fairly ineffective. In all honesty I know of very few adults who had no background in Christianity (ie grew up completely separate from the faith) and have as adults become followers of Jesus.

By the way, as an aside I wanted to tell you that the devotional ‘The 52 Greatest Stories of the Bible’ has been a great blessing to me throughout this year. It starts my hour long morning bus commute everyday. Thanks.