Posts Tagged ‘lifeway vbs’

Preparing for VBS Means Preparing for Follow-up Contacts

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wooley1 2013With the two biggest weeks of the VBS 2013 season just days away (more Bible schools are conducted during the first two weeks of June than any other week), we need to realize we are being given a rich gift – the gift of connecting with hundreds of thousands of unchurched families.

For many families the week of VBS is the first and possibly only connection they will have with your church or any Christian church. It is a new beginning for both the families and the church. Growing these relationships is not the responsibility of the unchurched families. It is our responsibility! It is the responsibility of the church!

Recently I wrote about the importance of replacing our way of thinking about follow-up – as a simple postcard or one-time phone call – with the goal of making continued connections.  This goes way beyond a simple “thanks for coming to VBS” into a series of actions resulting in ongoing life-impacting relationships.

While building a relationship is an ongoing process of connections built on top of connections, there must be a beginning. For most of us the beginning step is the age-old idea of follow-up – making that initial contact with guests and anyone making a salvation decision during VBS. The problem for most of us is that the initial contact is also the last or only contact.

As you start preparing for these contacts, consider the following four levels or types of contacts that need to be made. Each requires a unique message and response time.

Level 1: Individual making a salvation decision or asking questions

Response time for this contact needs to be given top priority and made within 24 hours aof the decision if at all possible. If it is a child making a decision or asking questions, the contact needs to be made with parents as well. The person making this contact needs to be able to review the decision or questions, help the individual confirm his or her decision, and then share information about next steps such as baptism and church membership.

Level 2: Individual with no church affiliation

Response time for this contact needs to be made within 48 hours of the last session of VBS or the last session the individual attends VBS. This contact needs to be made in person if possible, but in a relaxed and non-threatening way (i.e. a quick front porch visit instead of entering the home). The person making this contacts needs to be able to share about other ministry opportunities the church has available for each member of the family. The purpose of this contact is to deepen the relationship by connecting family members to on-going ministries such as other special events and weekly Bible study.

Level 3: Individual from another church

Response time for this contact needs to be made within the next week unless the individual also requires a Level 1 contact. The goal of this contact is not to entice the family away from their church, but to let them know their participation was welcomed and appreciated, and that they are always welcome to participate in other ministry events in the future. If the individual has made a decision or is asking questions her church should be contacted and made aware of the situation.

Level 4: Individual regularly attending your church

Response time for this contact should also be made within the next week. This contact can be a postcard, phone call, or home visit. The goal of this contact is to make sure those kids who attend every Sunday are not overlooked. They may not have been the primary focus of VBS, but they need to know they were noticed, loved, and appreciated.

As I wrote earlier, these contacts are first steps within the process of continued connections. This is a critical beginning, but just a beginning.

 

VBS Workers Needed! Where Are They?

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wooley1 2013Recently we asked our VBS Facebook friends to share their prayer needs. Overwhelmingly the requests were for additional workers. Although I wish it were not the case, this response did not come as a surprise. Time and again we hear from VBS leaders that one of their greatest needs is willing workers.

Here are six steps to consider during the final days of enlistment for VBS 2013.

Step 1: Put your strongest and most experienced workers in speaking or lead roles. This will take the pressure off apprehensive volunteers and well as scale back the pressure on you to find workers who already know how to teach or lead the different areas of VBS.

Step 2: Look beyond the usual list of workers. It may be that the very best VBX leader is someone you have not even considered. I write from personal experience here. We were desperate for workers willing to spend a week with sixth graders. We had a lead teacher but no one else had stepped forward.

One afternoon Dava (our VBS director) said, “I think we should ask Tim if he would help us with the sixth grade.” Obviously my response was, “I can’t see Tim saying yes. I really can not see him relating to sixth graders.”

Thankfully Dava won the day and asked Tim, who obviously said yes – otherwise there wouldn’t be a story here.

To put it simply, Tim was awesome! After VBS he came to me and said he would really like to continue the experience by working with sixth graders in Sunday School. How often does that happen?

Within a few months Tim became the director of the department, and within the year he had expanded his ministry to include an extremely successful community outreach basketball program for inner city kids.

Thankfully Dava looked beyond the usual!

Step 3: Realize that quiet often the problem with recruiting volunteers might just be you and your attitude about enlisting. It is not unusual to find a director who is uncomfortable personally asking people to help. As a result, the director depends on bulletin announcements – the lest effective way to enlist workers – and then is bewildered when few if any respond.

Typically there are more people then we realize who will say yes if personally asked, but will never respond to mass appeal. If you have a difficult time recruiting personally, enlist a team of people who are good at it. In this way you are recruiting only a few people who in turn will recruit the masses. Beside, getting more recruiters on the team will help take care of the issue of looking beyond the usual list of workers.

Step 4: You also need to realize that there are potential volunteers who are willing to help, but might never volunteer because they feel inadequate,or are afraid to volunteer only to be rejected because the position has been filled by someone else. Often a hesitancy to volunteer has more to do with fear of rejection then fear of the job.

Step 5: When you do ask someone to help, make sure you know what you are asking him to do. Give him a list of specific responsibilities using terminology that is self explanatory. For example, don’t ask me to be the lead teacher for the first grade class without telling me exactly what a lead teacher is expected to do. When people know exactly what they are being asked to do they are much more willing to agree.

Another aspect of Step 5 is don’t ask someone to just be a warm body to fulfill worker/student ratio in the classroom. No one – even if they say they do – wants to just be there with no responsibility or purpose. Believe me, I have been recruited as a warm body and it was the most boring and uncomfortable thing I have ever been asked to do. When you ask someone to be a helper, make sure you have at least a short list of expectations. People willingly serve when they recognize and identify with a purpose. Give every worker a purpose and show him how his job fits into the big VBS picture.

Step 6: Realize that no matter the size of your church, finding enough workers is not easy. It is all proportional.

While in seminary I served at a church of about 75 regular attenders. A friend served at a church of about 5,000. I desperately needed two additional workers for our preschool Sunday School. One day I whined that if I were at a church the size of her church I wouldn’t have a problem finding enough workers. She quickly informed me that while I desperately needed two preschool workers, she needed a new group of 250 preschool extended teaching time workers every Sunday.

Lesson learned! No matter the size of the church there is always a need for workers. AND no matter the size of the church God has placed just the right number of volunteers.

As we approach the Day of Prayer for VBS this Sunday (May 19), know that LifeWay’s VBS team is praying for you and the workers needed for the harvest in your community.

May 19, 2013 – National Day of Prayer for VBS

 

Rhonda small Have you ever flipped the switch on a lamp several times and nothing happened? Do you remember the frustration of, “Why isn’t this thing coming on?” during your fruitless flips up and down. What about that sheepish, “oh,” realization when you see the disconnected plug?

This is a pretty good picture of our efforts to spread the gospel without prayer. Prayer is the power source that enlightens and charges our efforts. We are less than a month away from what are typically the two biggest weeks of VBS. Even if your VBS is later in the summer, the time to begin praying is NOW!

The VBS 2013 Administrative Guide has great prayer resources from prayer calendars to prayer walk brochures. And, this Sunday, May 19, 2013, is the National Day of Prayer for VBS.

I started thinking about praying for VBS and it occurred to me that V. B. S. is a great acronym for praying for VBS everywhere.

V – Volunteers! Recently on our Facebook we asked people to share their prayer requests. (Our team prays for you!) One of the most requested prayer concerns was for volunteers to help. Jesus told His disciples to pray for workers (Matthew 9:36-38). It is still an urgent prayer. The harvest is ready!

B – Bible! God’s Word changes lives. God promised that His Spirit would be our Teacher (John 14:25-26). We need His power and guidance as we teach Bible truths to others.

S – Salvations! VBS is still one of the strongest evangelistic efforts made by many churches. Prayer, concentrated Bible teaching, and the forging of relationships set the stage to share the gospel in a powerful way. Pray that hearts are prepared to respond to the gospel of Jesus.

I hope you’ll join me this Sunday, as we pray together for VBS!

 

 

VBS New Testaments

thomasLooking for a special gift for new Christians, a meaningful “souvenir” from VBS for kids, or something to take into the home of an unchurched family who visited your VBS? The VBS New Testaments with Psalms and Proverbs fit the bill perfectly! There are lots of things to love about these New Testaments, but my personal favorite feature is that the very first pages of these Bibles feature 30 days worth of kid-friendly, kid-centered devotions. So not only are you putting the Word of God in a child’s hands, you’re also helping him learn how to read the Bible and apply it to every day life.

devotions

 

Another nice feature is that the plan of salvation is clearly outlined throughout these Bible’s pages. Key verses are highlighted to make them easy for kids to spot and directions to “turn to page # and read ____ verse” make it easy for a child to use his own Bible to share the Gospel with a friend. There’s even a section that deals with questions kids have about what being a Christian means and what happens next.

 

The back of each Bible contains fun games and activities that encourage children to use their Bibles and reconnect with the things learned at VBS. These activities can even be used during VBS for those times when you need a little something extra to fill the time.

activities

 

The VBS New Testaments are available in HCSB and KJV to match the VBS curriculum. Take a look at them for yourself at your local LifeWay store or on the Web at www.lifeway.com. Got a great idea for using the VBS New Testaments? Feel free to share it with others by posting a comment here.

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Three Simple Statements

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carol-2Three simple statements, yet they are key to helping you be successful in leading VBS. Have you noticed them? Take a look in your Bible Study Leader Guide, they are right there on the first page of each session. Right along with the Bible story information and the life application. See them now? Good.

Allow me to explain, these three simple statements will help you know if the kids you are leading have made the connection during your lesson. Think of them as objectives, if you will. These statements let you know exactly what you want kids to know when they walk out the door each day. As you are teaching, you can use these statements as a check point to be sure you are reinforcing the main ideas of the day with the kids.

Generally the first statement will be a recall or reminder of information found in the Bible story. The second statement will move kids into applying what they have learned to their own lives. And the third statement generally involves the daily challenge. Each age-group Bible Study Leader Guide includes these statements in leader guides for grades 1-6 they are called “Connection Points” and in the preschool guides they are titled, “What Kids Need to Know.”

All the activities and discussion have been written with these three objectives in mind. By staying focused on the objectives throughout each session, you can maximize the limited time you have to reach kids for Christ!

Beginning Well…Ending Strong Part 2

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wooley1 2013Last Tuesday I listed three steps Pastors and VBS Directors need to consider to insure VBS begins well and ends strong. To briefly review, Step 1: determine the purpose of VBS, Step 2: establish dates and a budget that reflects the purpose, and Step 3: enlist a team to dream and implement the strategy.

Step 3 is actually two steps in one. The first, as I wrote about last week, is to enlist a dream team that will also become your core leadership team. This team will not only help you dream possibilities, but will help you turn the possibilities into realities.

Once you have enlisted your core leadership team it is time to enlist and train workers. I’ll share more about this topic in a future post.

Now that we have taken a second look at the three steps to beginning well, we’ll move on to three steps for ending strong.

Step 4: Put promotion/publicity strategies in motion. The key here is knowing your target audience. Who are you really trying to reach for VBS? Which segments of your community are you not only best able to reach, but best able to minister to once you have reached them? Once you know your target audience you can direct all of your energies and resources to reaching the people most likely to attend your VBS and your church. To learn more about creating a promotion strategy check out Six Steps to Reaching Your Target Audience.

Step 5: Stay focused throughout the planning stage and week of VBS. This might just be the hardest step of all. Back in Step 1 you determined the purpose (reason for conducting and desired goals) of your VBS. As you gained support from the congregation and enlisted and trained a team, you helped them understand and own the purpose. But now that VBS is in full swing it is easy to get caught up in the crunch of making IT happen and forget the very reason why IT is suppose to happen.

If IT (purpose) is building bridges to the unchurched, then everything – from registration to the final Amen – must remain focused on building bridges. Each Bible story, craft, and rec game should be used to build bridges to the unchurched kids, students, and adults who may be experiencing church for the first time. If the purpose of VBS is building bridges then sharing the Gospel message and nurturing relationships becomes the focus of every lesson, activity, and every minute. Ending strong means never letting anything get in the way of staying focused on the purpose.

Step 6: Put continued connection (follow-up) strategies in motion. To end strong we need go back to the purpose (Step 1) and change the way we think about VBS. Instead of VBS being “the event” in itself, it must become the catalyst to the event which I hope you will agree is continued connections. For many churches, more unchurched families are identified during VBS then any other outreach all year. When a child from an unchurched home attends VBS, a church hasn’t just discovered one unchurched person. The church has typically discovered – when parents and siblings are included – four unchurched people.

On average, ten percent of everyone enrolled in VBS claims to be unchurched. For a typical VBS of 100 people (both students and workers) this means 10 are unchurched. But in reality a church has just discovered 40 people who claim no church home or affiliation – yet were willing to allow their child attend your VBS!

A simple postcard saying, “Thanks for attending our VBS” is not enough. The postcard may allow you to check off the follow-up box on your to-do list, but it is not adequate if the purpose of VBS is building bridges with the unchurched. Building bridges requires continued connections far beyond the week of VBS, and continued connections requires a strategy. In the next few weeks I’ll share more about creating a strategy for continued connections. Until then, start working on the first three steps. It’s not too late to begin well and end strong!