Chattanooga: Christian education leaders say crafts have changed over the years

If retail outlets ran short on glue in the summertime, area residents who attended vacation Bible schools in years past wouldn’t be surprised.

There was a lot of gluing going on.

Vacation Bible school crafts often were “everything you can create with popsicle sticks and glue,” said Carolyn Miller, director of children’s ministry at Signal Presbyterian Church on Signal Mountain.

Nate Johnson, director of Christian education at First Lutheran Church, recalled designs including “paper plates and sand and glue” and “paper and beads.”

Today, when churches have much more competition for children’s attention, vacation Bible school materials often are “plastics and more high-tech stuff,” he said.

More than 3 million people attend VBS sessions each year, according to the Barna Research Group. But that number is dropping. The percentage of churches that offered the summer classes dropped from 81 percent to 69 percent between 1997 and 2005, the research group reported.

Professionals and volunteers who handle the craft portion of the programs are trying to do their part to make the hours when children are present interesting.

Today’s vacation Bible school is “more user friendly to the age of the child,” said Ms. Miller. “You’ve got to use materials relative to the day. We want (what they learn) to be in their hearts forever. We want it to be a place where they meet God and happiness abounds.”

That was no less the case when she attended VBS at Woodland Heights Baptist Church, she said, but the tools of the leader then were things like a milk carton or a Clorox jug.

Ms. Miller said she and her friends probably made a bird feeder out of each of the two items in sessions that likely had the theme of God’s creation.

In this year’s VBS at Signal Presbyterian, which began today and continues through Thursday, the theme is “Galilee by the Sea.”

Ms. Miller said participants make different items at each of about a dozen first-century marketplace booths. Among the things they’ll make are sandals, soap, mosaics, wooden dreidels, measuring devices (not rulers) and hair braids or wristlets, depending on the sex of the child, she said.

Popsicle sticks and “the proverbial pipe cleaners are not on our supply list,” she said.

Eddie Boggess, pulpit minister at LaFayette Church of Christ, said he didn’t recall making a lot of crafts at vacation Bible school when he was growing up.

“I think there were worksheets and things like that,” he said.

Mr. Boggess, who directed the church’s VBS last week, said his volunteers supervised the creation of “more artistic crafts” with inexpensive materials, recycled materials and “things we already had.”

Among the items produced by participants were a collage rainbow mosaic that was laminated and hung in the church, a foam craft frame with the VBS theme of Joshua 24:15 (“But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”) and a collage flower, he said.

Younger children used magazines to find pictures of birds and flowers and things that displayed the beauty of the earth, Mr. Boggess said.

“They enjoyed it,” he said. “It worked out real well.”

Mr. Johnson, whose vacation Bible school is June 22-26, said the church will use Group Publishing’s “Power Lab” theme.

The publishing company’s new material, with more elaborate tie-ins to the annual theme, is a good “fit for the new generation,” he said.

“(Even) paper is still good,” Mr. Johnson said, “but they try to jazz it up a little bit.”