The end of the school year found us scrambling for ideas on how our churches’ children’s ministry would continue to function. Almost overnight, our Release Time (religious education) classes were canceled, Sunday School was no more, and it looked like VBS most likely wouldn’t be happening in 2020. Then, we prayed. We began to brainstorm, bouncing ideas off of each other. Soon, some solutions to our predicament started to form. And so, we would like to share with you what we have done, and are doing, in hopes of reaching our community’s children with the Gospel during this Co-vid Pandemic.

A year ago we had invested in a Betty Lukens Flannelgraph Set. The best investment we’ve made for church! We continued to teach our Release Time lessons by videoing our Bible stories taught with brightly colored flannel figures and sharing them online. We also included a Scripture memory verse each week. Sunday school found us also using the flannelgraph at times, and at others, using the wonderful children’s videos that Marian Christopherson shared (https://www.ambassadorpublications.org/). We also dusted off our puppet skills and did a few skits for some Sundays.

As I write this, we are in the process of taping and editing VBS lessons for our students.  We have added "Daring Dave" and “Seaside Sarah” to our Mystery Island VBS personas. Thanks to a Thrivent grant, we ordered enough materials for our 30 students— workbooks, trail guides, songbooks, a music CD (one per family), crafts and snacks for each day, and some fun goodies as well. Even though it’s getting harder on the body to do puppets, and our minds sometimes lag behind our words, this grandpa and grandma are having a blast dressing up in island attire and doing our best to create interest while teaching the important truths from God’s Word. We will deliver each students VBS Bag and present them with  a Hawaiian lei this coming Sunday to kick off virtual VBS. Our past Release Time videos are on our church website, and our upcoming VBS videos will be posted there too at https://badgercreek-oilandparish.org

Note: the Betty Lukens Flannelgraph can be ordered from https://www.ambassadorpublications.org/store/product/betty-lukens-flannelgraph-sets/