It’s Vacation Bible School season!  VBS was started in 1894 when an elementary school teacher saw an opportunity to use the the long summer days to teach the bible to kids.  As scripture-education became more and more separated from public education, and as parents spend less and less time teaching scripture to their kids, Vacation Bible School seems like a great annual opportunity to help kids hide God’s word in their heart.

Pardon a grumpy old youth pastor for sharing my beefs with modern VBS, but seems like some of the best marketed VBS curriculum 1) tends to have Calvinist or Baptist emphases, 2) or conversely is so entertainment focused to pump kids up that there’s just no meaningful content.  My friend recently felt obligated to change his final lesson for VBS because it read the bible story of Jesus on the cross, and then instead of teaching the story as it is written, the curriculum writers used the opportunity to teach that when we do bad things it makes Jesus on the cross “disappointed.”  The lesson then quickly moved to try and force a sense of guilt upon these elementary schoolers for their terrible sins that caused Jesus to die in their place.  This is called Penal Substitution, and it never seemed more arbitrary than when thrown into an otherwise whimsical, entertainment-laden VBS.

I do think there are more Wesleyan ways to teach the bible to kids, and that we can talk about sin with kids in meaningful ways.  But for now, I don’t want to finish the story here, because we’ll get to Part 2 of John Wesley’s adventure with a Calvinist Bible School curriculum next week…