Many churches really get excited as they start inviting the community to their Vacation Bible School. One idea is to have a parade down a main street with all your teachers dressed up as cowboys, passing out invitations, or giving away candy. Some churches even make up different floats (decorated vehicles) to drive in the parade!
The most obvious way to invite is to put up posters around the community at local grocery stores or in the metro, inviting people to your VBS. We’ve designed promotional materials to help you promote your VBS.
Don’t forget to include an invitation campaign for your own church body, letting everyone know that a special program is coming soon. You could also hand out five flyers to each family in your church and ask them to invite their neighbors to the VBS.
Be sure to download the flyer.
Make other invitation tools like postcards, invitation banners, printed T-shirts, or door hangers using clip art and images available for download here.
Go all out! Kids need to hear the good news, and your VBS is a perfect place for that to happen.
We recommend you recruit volunteers specifically for each job you will need for your VBS. For example, you will be needing three actors who are willing to not only act silly on stage every week, but are also willing to wander around your VBS and hug children all day long. This requires a different set of skills than the person you will recruit to run your Hacienda Restaurant.
Start running promotion for your VBS months in advance, making the whole church excited about the upcoming program. However, when it comes to actually recruiting each person, we recommend you list out the jobs you need and think of people you know that would be good for each job. Then approach each person with a specific job opportunity.
Some people may not be used to helping in children’s ministry, but when you approach them about a specific job, they are willing to sign up. Participating in a VBS is a great way to show people in your church how much fun it can be to work in children’s ministry! Not all children’s ministry workers are teachers. We need the whole Body of Christ to get involved in raising up the next generation!
We recommend you recruit a whole bunch of helpers for your VBS to travel with the children to the different areas. They do not have to prepare a class or teach anything. Their main job will be to learn the names of the children and to help them move around to the different activities. You can even assign small groups of the children of the same age and give each small group a leader. We recommend groups of five to ten children. For these teachers, we have created a small pocket guide with the lesson, the memory verse, and the overall idea for each day. Download the pocket guide here.
The rest of your recruiting is specific to each job: the person who will give the main teaching, the person who will run each station, the actors, the dance team, and each color-team captain.
Of course, you can also find and copy the same information out of the main manual.
This VBS is written to be used with a rotation schedule with three stations. This means that you break your group up into three groups, and those groups rotate through the three provided stations. Each station lasts thirty minutes, and each station is repeated three times so that each group goes to each station once each day.
Competition can be a really fun part of your VBS, but it is totally optional. In order to keep the groups even, divide each age group into four groups. Bandanas are an easy way to show which team each child belongs to. For example, you could have the blue team, red team, yellow team, and green team. Give each team a fun, creative name. Each age group would then have children who were a part of each of the four color teams. Likewise, each of the four teams would have some children from all ages included.
Assign a captain for each team to help create a cheer during team time.
Teams can earn points by winning in the “Old West Games” and by performing a creative team cheer. Individuals can earn more points for their teams by behaving well, helping to clean, and being kind to others.
Prepare some sort of reward for the team that wins at the end of the week!
Children are Important
Sunday School curriculum
Vacation Bible School curriculum
Training
Contact