For several consecutive years now, our church has purchased the Answers in Genesis (AIG) material for VBS. This year’s version, International Spy Academy, boasts an impressive array of decoration ideas that are easy to implement and surprisingly cost-effective, promotional pieces that are attractively designed, and a giving program whose videos are so professionally produced that they almost seem askew in our small church. Furthermore, our volunteers hit a homerun in the planning and execution of AIG’s International Spy Academy. Any church, big or small, can benefit from AIG’s variety of well-produced VBS materials.
And as you read through these compliments, I’m sure you’ve been waiting for the “but.”
My primary responsibility this year was the teaching. And like most teachers, I prefer to make lessons my own, which means they sometimes take a different emphasis. AIG’s program —and this is to their credit — limits that flexibility with strong thematic coherence. The day’s theme weaves its way through the memory verse, the games, the craft, and even the snack. If, for example, I want to depart from Tuesday’s Trinitarian talk for four-year-olds, the rest of the evening loses its punch.
Let’s start with an example of AIG’s lesson plan. For Day #3’s lesson, after a brief discussion of Exodus 3:14, the curriculum instructs the teacher to guide students through evidence stations where they discover pre-selected divine attributes. At the first station, the children decipher a message that reads, “God is all-powerful.” The second, with a clue-card and mirror, the students decode the phrase “God doesn’t change.” At station three, the students remove Bs and Zs from a sentence to discover, “God is everywhere.” Two more stations lead the students to a poster that lists God’s attributes with “I AM” being most prominent. For application, the kids are instructed to draw posters about the great “I AM.” For the three reasons listed below, lessons like this caused me to re-think the methodology.
First, although I appreciate the theological emphases, I prefer to teach through Bible passages that work toward theological conclusions. Also, I like to bridge between days with more thematic carry-over, that is, Monday leads to Tuesday from a Bible-timeline perspective. Simply put, I prefer a more inductive approach that guides through entire Bible passages with cross-reference supplements, rather than AIG’s more deductive/proof-text approach. My intent with this post is not, of course, to argue the merits of my preferred Bible-study method, but to show how the two can be married to create a thematic whole while using as much existing AIG visual–aid as possible. Please don’t misunderstand – AIG’s method is absolutely legitimate (I use it, in fact, in the paragraph below). I’m talking about preferences while teaching children through a week of lessons.
Second, several lessons encourage children to search for biblical clues with a magnifying glass or to crack codes leading to Biblical truth. I realize, of course, that the good folks at AIG are trying to stay true to the espionage theme, but perhaps this one goes a touch too far. God’s existence is the most obvious fact in human history — the heavens declare the glory of God (Psalm 19:1); man willingly suppresses God’s obviousness (Romans 1:18). I don’t want children to get the impression that God is hard to find. Likewise, with all the modern talk of Bible codes, I prefer to avoid that verbiage altogether.
Third, from a practical standpoint, these craft-type preparations were overly intensive when combined with the other responsibilities of the week. Also, with our limited space, stations were impractical.
If you plan to use International Spy Academy in the coming weeks, I’m happy to offer my personal adaptations. I’m by no means putting them forward as a better method. It’s simply the way I prefer to teach. I’ll keep the descriptions bare-bones and in adult language. If you’d like a larger description or even my power-point presentations, email us here at Rooted Thinking and we’ll pass them along.
