Summer means lots of things to lots of people. For thousands of kids across the United States (and around the world), one of those things is VBS.

If you had the “priviledge” of attending Vacation Bible School (or, VBS for short) as a child, you know what I’m talking about. If not, you might not be familiar with the whole VBS thing. Allow me to explain.

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the conspiracy

I don’t remember how old I was when I first went to Vacation Bible School, but I do remember that it didn’t take me long to figure out what was really going on: a conspiracy against kids having fun in the summertime . . . For 51 weeks every year, kids like me were only subjected to Sunday School once a week. By virtue of its very name, Sunday School was limited to just one day a week. Since we had to go to church anyway—and the only alternative was sitting with the grown-ups in the boring big service—Sunday School wasn’t so bad. But for 1 week a year, things were very different. For one week a year, we had to go to Sunday School every day.

The grown-ups were clever enough to rename the whole thing “Vacation Bible School.” I was sure this was just a semantic smokescreen; a way for them to avoid having to answer for the inherent injustice in making kids go to Sunday School even when it wasn’t Sunday. What’s more, the name “Vacation Bible School” just underscored the unfairness of the whole thing. We were on Summer Vacation, which meant we didn’t have to go to school. That was, after all, what the word “vacation” meant: no school. I knew it could also be when someone goes on a trip, but in my Elementary-school lexicon, that was undoubtedly a second definition. By including the word “vacation” in the name of the thing, the grown-ups killed two birds with a single stone: (1) they reminded us that regular school wasn’t a valid excuse for not going to VBS (Summer Vacation = no school) and (2) they made it sound like VBS was something that was supposed to happen while we were on vacation. The stonewalling played out something like this:

(frustrated kid:) “But Mom! It’s summer vacation!”

(unwavering mother:) “That’s why it’s called ‘Vacation Bible School.'”

I remember protesting this reply by trying to explain the fundamental paradox of any kind of school that takes place during a vacation. Kids all seemed to understand that such a thing was an impossibility, but grown-ups remained blissfully (and conveniently) ignorant. It was propaganda, and we couldn’t do anything about it.

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from hopedale to pandamania

We thought losing a week of summer vacation was bad. As it turns out, it could have been a lot worse.

The idea of Vacation Bible School can be traced back to 1894 and a place called Hopedale, Illinois. That year, forty children spent four weeks (!) of their summer vacation attending the summer Bible school. Yikes.

It took a while for the thing to really catch on, but by the early 1920s, VBS was an established and accepted practice. In 1922, Dr. Robert Boville of the Baptist Mission Society founded the World Association of Daily Vacation Bible School. In 1923, Standard Publishing cranked out the first official VBS curriculum: enough to fill five weeks (!) of daily VBS. Wow.

My own experience was more congruent with wikipedia’s description of modern VBS programs:

Today, many churches run their own Vacation Bible School programs without being under the umbrella of a national organization. Some churches opt to use themed curriculum programs from their respective denominations or independent publishing houses which provide easy preparation and include marketing tools.

Modern programs usually consist of a week-long program of religious education which may employ Bible stories, religious song, arts and crafts, skits, or puppet shows which cater toward elementary school-aged children.

Standard Publishing is still in the game, but there are LOTS of other publishers producing VBS packages these days. Christianbook.com sells a variety of these VBS kits, all of them geared towards making VBS seem like a fun, exotic, vacation-appropriate activity. You can visit their VBS page to see the full array of VBS kits they sell . . . but you really don’t have to. I already did. And then I went to each publisher’s site to collect logo graphics, which I then put into a vibrant, brightly-coloured collage. In retrospect, I probably spent way too much time on it. But then again, that seems to be my M.O. for this blog . . .

Anyway, here’s my collage of 2011 VBS packages, including 13 different kits from 11 different publishers. Click the image for a larger view.

I’m sure there’s a lot of variation in terms of options and cost, but just to get an idea of what some of these kits contain, I looked at three VBS kits: Pandamania and Hometown Nazareth, both from Group publishing; and Inside Out and Upside Down on Main Street, from Standard Publishing.

If you ask me, the term “kit” is somewhat misleading. I think of a “kit” as some sort of bundle that contains the various items I might need to run my VBS. Instead, on the purchase page for each VBS kit, I found dozens of pages of items: a publisher’s website subscription thingee, the bare-bones “starter kit,” a bunch of theme “essentials” (whatever that means), arts & crafts supplies, music & media, theme decorations, publicity materials, gear (your basic swag and threads), “gifts & other fun stuff,” leader manuals, other miscellaneous [materials], . . . etc. There are so many little options and accessories, I couldn’t get a quick estimate put together. I guess this makes the product more flexible for different sizes and bugets. For what it’s worth, here’s a tabulation of all the items offered as part of each kit, how much it would cost if you bought just one of each item, and the average cost per item.

In a word: overwhelming. I have a new respect for the folks who head up these vbs programs at their churches. They have to wade through all this stuff and figure out which of these hundreds of items they actually “need” and how many they can afford with their given budgets.

It is also worth mentioning that the 2012 VBS programs are already in the works. Almost all of the publisher sites I visited had previews of their 2012 programs: cute graphics, theme details, and more. I can only guess on the timeline, but these things don’t just create themselves. A lot of hours goes into putting together this kind of product. It looks like the 2011 Pandamania went on sale in December 2010. It wouldn’t surprise me if the creative people turned around in January 2011 and started working on Group Publishing’s 2012 program so the preview would be ready come summer.

And all of this is just for a one-week program! I know that VBS when I was a kid wasn’t nearly as exciting; just imagine what those poor children from the 1920s would think if they saw this. Even though one of the same publishing houses produced their program (Standard Publishing), I’m pretty sure that their five-week programs weren’t even one-fifth as much fun.

Anyway, although there are lots of alternatives available in 2011, Pandamania seems to be the powerhouse of the bunch—at least in my neck of the woods. I saw at least three different local churches advertising this VBS program, each a different denomination (Presbyterian, Lutheran, and Methodist), and that was just on my daily drive to and from the office!

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Σ: vbs

Vacation Bible School is a big business these days: lots of themes from lots of publishers. A lot of work goes into these themes, a long time in advance; 2012 previews are already available! Pandamania, from Group Publishing, is one of the big swanky themes for 2011, and the one that inspired this post.

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let’s make our theme: vbs from hell!

With all that work and time to consider (and reconsider) the naming of their 2011 VBS theme, it strikes me as incredibly ironic that Group Publishing chose “Pandamania.”

But you’ll have to wait until next time to read why Pandamania is, essentially, vbs from hell.