Youth directors across New Castle County report losing VBS registrations to travel baseball and swim teams that now run seven days a week. Is adapting the schedule wise contextualization, or a slow surrender of the Lord's Day?
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Add your commentBorn and raised in Wilmington, attended VBS at Aldersgate UMC every single summer from age 5 to 12. The idea that we now have to compete with a travel baseball schedule to get kids into the Word of God is honestly heartbreaking to me. Not angry at the parents — I get it, I really do — but something has shifted in our priorities as a community and I think we need to be honest about that before we start rearranging the calendar to chase it.
I'll say something unpopular: some of these VBS programs need to look in the mirror before blaming the sports schedule. I volunteered at one in Pike Creek last summer and honestly… it was not good. Dated curriculum, disorganized volunteers, no clear gospel presentation. If we want families to choose VBS over baseball it needs to be worth choosing. Excellence is also a matter of principle.
Fun fact: Vacation Bible School was actually invented in the 1890s specifically to reach urban children whose parents were working all day. It was always about MEETING kids where they are. The whole origin of VBS is contextualization. Someone do some church history before they claim the format is sacred.
My daughter quit VBS two years ago because half her friends from the neighborhood weren't there — they were at swim team. She just didn't want to go without them. We're members at a church off Kirkwood Highway and I talked to our youth director about it and she said they'd lost almost 30% of their typical enrollment. 30 percent. That's not a blip, that's a crisis. Do weeknight sessions and let's get those kids back in the room where they can hear the gospel. The alternative is they hear nothing.
Hard disagree. You start bending VBS around travel ball, next thing you know you're bending Sunday worship around pickleball tournaments. There's a principle here.
Counterpoint to the person above: yes and no. Some of these travel league schedules are genuinely coercive — kids get dropped from rosters if they miss practices, coaches schedule mandatory weekend tournaments with like two weeks notice. I coach rec ball myself here in Newark and I see it constantly with the travel teams. It's not purely a values choice for every family. Sometimes parents are trapped. A little more grace please.
Nobody is forcing these families to choose sports over church. Lets be clear about that. This is a discipleship problem disguised as a scheduling problem.
I moved here from Charleston, SC about two years ago and I'll be honest — the youth sports culture up here is on a completely different level than what I was used to. Down south VBS was basically a community institution and nobody scheduled around it, they scheduled BECAUSE of it. I'm not saying one region is more godly than the other but the infrastructure of shared Christian calendar just doesn't exist here the way it did there, and churches need to reckon with that reality.
Weeknight VBS already exists and works great?? Our church, Brandywine Valley Baptist, switched to Tuesday-Thursday evenings three summers ago and registrations went UP. Like, significantly up. Sometimes faithful contextualization just looks like reading the room and loving your neighbors enough to meet them where they are. Jesus ate where the people ate.
can we also talk about how expensive these travel leagues are?? a family shelling out $2,000 for a summer baseball season is not the same demographic as the family who needs VBS most. the kids whose parents CANT afford travel ball are often still available and still need programming. maybe our real opportunity is leaning INTO that instead of chasing the travel league crowd
That last comment is actually not quite right — VBS as we know it was largely formalized through the early 20th century Baptist and Methodist movements, not really the 1890s urban mission model you're thinking of, which was a different program called Daily Vacation Bible School started by Everyday Bible School advocates in cities like New York. The theology is similar but the lineage matters if you're making a tradition argument. Either way though I agree with your overall point, the format has always evolved.
To any Wilmington-area youth directors reading this thread — genuinely asking, not being combative — have you surveyed your own congregation families about what schedule would actually work? Not assuming, actually asking them? Because I feel like a lot of this debate is happening above the heads of the exact families everyone says they want to reach. Start there. The answer might surprise you.
ok so genuine question for the folks insisting on keeping the Sunday anchor — which Sunday specifically? because every church i've visited in New Castle County does VBS on a completely different week anyway. the "tradition" argument kinda falls apart when theres no consistency to begin with lol
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