It’s Vacation Bible School time again!
I love teaching the Pre-K class. Did you know before I met Dale on main street that fateful summer night, I was going to college for a degree in Early Elementary Education?
Well, that’s only partly true. I went ONLY because my parents made me go and paid for my first year. I picked being a teacher because I LOVE kids, but truly just wanted to get married and have babies and stay home! 🙂
Anyhow, our theme this year was Custom Car Garage: loving God and serving others.
The curriculum we used referenced the Jesus Film, so our church invited some Jesus Film Missionaries to come and work with us all week. It was amazing!
Have you heard about the great work the Jesus Film is doing? It has been translated into 1,140 languages!!
From their website:
“Every eight seconds, somewhere in the world, another person indicates a decision to follow Christ after watching the “JESUS” film.
Every eight seconds… that’s 10,800 people per day, 324,000 per month and more than 3.8 million per year! That’s like the population of the entire city of Pittsburgh, PA coming to Christ every 28 ¼ days. And yet, if you are like many people, you may have never even heard of it.
Called by some “one of the best-kept secrets in Christian missions,” a number of mission experts have acclaimed the film as one of the greatest evangelistic tools of all time. Since 1979 more than 200 million men, women and children worldwide have indicated decisions to follow Jesus after viewing the film. In addition, through hundreds of partners an estimated 10+ million decisions have been made as the film “JESUS” is used extensively by the Body of Christ worldwide.
“But how can any single film reach so many people and touch so many lives?”
It is the power of the Word of God in their heart language.”
Watch this video, it is SO SO moving to watch these people experience Jesus Christ for the very first time. I’ve watched it twice, first at church, then at home as I tried to find it to share with you all….both times it had me in tears. Guys, they LIVED the stories of the Bible, they experienced it like they were right there with Him…laughing, gasping, cheering and sobbing as Jesus was crucified.
This will be the BEST 4 minutes you will spend today:
We were excited to help out such a great ministry with our VBS program. Each day we had an average of about 150 kids! 40 of those 150 accepted Jesus as their Savior! WOW!
Ty and Avery’s class
Destiny’s class
Pax was in the nursery.
Anyhow, the missionaries taught the kids how to witness using different ministry tools like, Evangecubes, salvation soccer balls, and they even worked on knitting hats to take into the Mission Field along with the Jesus Film.
After finding out the knitting project was hard, even for grown ups, our church came up with Salvation T-shirt scarves. The missionaries LOVED them and said they thought it’d be a big hit in the mission field!
Out of the 4 day VBS, $504.78 was brought for missions in the form of nickel, dime, quarter and dollar days! WOW! Then on Sunday, the congregation matched that for a grand total of over $1,000 to give to Jesus Film Ministries.
I worked with the little ones, who couldn’t do the evangecubes or knitting or even t-shirt scarves, with ease. Instead, we made salvation bracelets, and it was my job to teach them the colors and what they meant. The night before VBS, inspiration hit from above, I could teach them a:
Colors of Salvation Rhyme!
We worked with our kiddos on the rhyme every day. We did one to two beads a day on our bracelets too, so when we weren’t using them we hung them on this “clothes line” along the marker board.
Preschoolers are SMART! By day 2, several of them had the rhyme memorized already, and we only went over it a few times each morning! WOW.
Dale and I worked on some construction paper visual aids to go along with the rhyme, which we used each day as well as during Sunday morning VBS service.
The kids did a great job!
I am going to teach the rhyme before we close….
Dark is like the night, it represents our sin:
Red is for the Blood Jesus shed, won’t you let Him in?
White is white, like new fallen snow, because Jesus makes you clean:
New growth in Christ, as He works in you, is represented by green:
Gold is for Heaven, like streets of Gold, where we spend eternity with Him:
All these colors are the Rainbow of Salvation, so we can be Fishers of Men!
The purpose of this rhyme, is so they can tell their friends about Jesus when they ask about the bracelet they are wearing!
The Blue bead is for baptism and purple is for royalty, because Jesus is the King of Kings.
(This is not part of the Jesus Film Salvation colors, so we didn’t include them in the rhyme.)
Fun, right?! I love Vacation Bible School!!! 🙂
~T
A big thank you to my friend, Heather for sharing her CD of awesome photos with all the VBS Volunteers! The 1st 10 VBS pictures in this post are hers!
4 little Fergusons 