And now for something different... VBS: A Retrospective

I haven't been keeping up with this thing like I should, but that's because I'm lazy. Anyways, my life has been pretty full to the brim between work, playing videogames, and reading the occasional book. Although I'm going to finish the Deadpool for fall's TV lineup, I wanted to take this moment to talk about something I had the opportunity to participate in recently: Vacation Bible School.

I volunteered a few weeks ago to run recreation for a hundred+ children. I've done this for several years, and it's actually rather rewarding, although that's not the reason you're supposed to do it (hint, you do it for the children). Our church picked Pandamania this year as their curriculum, which obviously has an animal theme.

What I wanted to focus on, of course, was the recreation, which involved me running the provided games for three hours over the course of a week. How do I put this...

The games were terrible. They were boring, contrived, and in some cases, were hardly games at all. On the one hand, I can understand what they were trying to do. The creators of Pandamania were trying to weave in the lesson of the day with everything that happens, whether that be the skit, the snacks or the games. This is not an uncommon idea for a VBS curriculum, but it can easily be taken to inane levels.

For example, one game (which we didn't use) called for children to catch stuffed pandas while I fired them from a leafblower. Oh, and they were to stand still for the duration of the game. The curriculum stated that the frustration that the children would inevitably have would be a great tie in for the day's lesson concerning the frustration of man trying to reach the expectation of God.

Seriously? Frustrating the children was actually a goal for this recreational acivity? And that's not even mentioning the impossibility of trying to get twenty+ kids to Stand Still. It seemed that the other games also tried as hard as they could to avoid being games, as a few of them seemed to lack any central objective.

The nature of Pandamania's recreation brings to mind issues of Postmodernity that surprised me, especially seeing as that the Church often balks at those kinds of ideas. It seemed to me that Pandamania was trying to avoid regular games for the reason that games are, by nature, competitive. That is, they have a potential winner and loser, and I think that the Postmodern idea of not having competitions because, "We're all winners!" has, to some degree, begun to affect the church. The simple truth of the matter is, that life does have competiton, and if handled correctly, children are more than capable of handling a minor loss and letting it slide right off, jumping into the next game with little memory of what happened before. In fact, I believe that children are often better at handling some of these kinds of losses than adults, who put far more stake in things, do. Games need an objective, or they are needless expenditures of energy. I could easily have children run laps around the gym and have them shout out Bible verses, but I don't think that would make for a fondly remembered experience.

There's also a kind of capitalistic issue to explore in the creation of VBS curriculum. I can imagine that it would be an interesting position to be in, to have one's job be to create an entire week long experience, to invent a theme and incorporate it so that one can sell it. Make it too simple and there's no reason to buy it. I believe that there's a pressure to make a curriculum fresh, and that includes making new games. But just like it can be more fun to play with a cardboard box than a shiny, boring toy, so are simple games like tag far superior than anything that can be contrived.

Ultimately, I think it's better to let evangelism be evangelism, and games be games. Try to make a Frankenstein of both, and you get something that fails in either category.

I'll wrap this up with a bit of an anecdote. A VBS I attended at a very conservative church (more conservative than I cared for) played army dodgeball for recreation. We all loved it, and though I'm not necessarily a fan of the church in question, I still fondly remember, years later, the fun I had. It is those positive memories that we want tied to experiences like VBS, not boredom or weakly constructed object lessons.

Pandamania