A Weird VBS

Each year Word of Peace Lutheran Church puts on a week-long extravaganza that provides an opportunity for the children and youth of the community to experience the love of Jesus in an exciting and energy packed event.  This year was no different as we had around 530 participants and over 200 volunteers make it possible.  

One of the favorite things for me is to see the amazing creativity and decorations and ideas created by our staff and volunteers.  This year was no different.  Check out some of the pictures in the previous post here.  

Here are some helpful hints and ideas for creating amazing yet simple visuals for your vacation bible school.  

Styrofoam is your friend

It may not be the best for the environment, but you can't argue about the versatility of the light plastic material.  The best part of using styrofoam is it's ability to be painted, give off very vibrant colors and also provide amazing realism if desired.  

Styrofoam cutting tools are essential.  There are many different types and styles.  We have used a number of them and find that the creative juices begin to flow with a hot foam carving knife in our hands.  Here is one of the brands we use.   

Getting the right kind of foam is also key.  We find our at Home Depot of Lowes.  They are white and generally used for insulation.  There are different thicknesses and densities as well.  This is a good example of what we use.  

Don't be limited to one piece of foam either.  Glue them together to create three demential set pieces.  If you need more inspiration just watch your favorite movie that takes place on an alien world or something like Lord of the Rings and you will likely see set pieces make from styrofoam.  Check these out.  Amazing isn't it?  

One note about cutting styrofoam...do it outside.  It produces some bad smells and fumes.

Be Bold with Colors

I can not stress the importance of color during Vacation Bible School.  Whether you are creating your own or using a canned theme you must utilize the color theme throughout the church.  

This year we used bold primary colors that reminded us of a Dr. Seuss book.  Wherever the kids walked there was some color that signified they were still in VBS land.  Some of the simple decoration ideas came from our VBS curriculum provider and Pinterest.  Utilize these boards and ideas because there are too many good ones not to.  One of our favorites was the spiral pool noodles that we hung from the ceiling.  

Brainstorm with out fear of how you will actually make it

When we think about what VBS will look like we never worry about how we will make it happen.  Most likely we will be able to find a way to bring an idea to life if we give it a chance.  As an example, we had a staff member who is known more for her amazing spreadsheets than here creative mind, but she came up with a fantastic idea for decoration this year.  The real question was "how are we going to do that?"  She came to me with the idea and together we worked to make it happen.  Take a look at what we created

The idea was a canopy in our gathering area and the question was how do we do it?  We ended up using anchors in the block and brick, then suspended green show fence using cables between walls.  We attached balloons and tissue paper to complete the effect.  People loved it.  It was a little sad to take it down today.  

In the end the environment we we very excited with how the week looked and was received.  We are so thankful to all of our volunteers and creative minds that helped make this week possible.  I hope you are equally excited and please with any VBS decorating you do this summer and I encourage you to share your ideas with those around you.

God Bless

Vacation Bible School

It is that time of year again and Vacation Bible School is in fill swing here at Word of Peace.  We have a rather large VBS ministry and amazing staff and volunteers that help make it happen.  To give you an idea about the size of our VBS we have 530 kids and over 200 volunteers for the week.  We have a morning VBS from 9-12 and the energy here is thick.

This year's theme is Weird Animals.  We thought it was a strange idea too.  The hardest part for us was trying to visualize what the decorations would look like.  We normally take the ideas given to us and tweak them...a lot.  What we came up with was something right out of Dr. Seuss.  Take a look.

The bright colors and fun shapes have really made the week fun.  We are only through one day, but everyone seems to be having fun so far.  Next week I will go into a little more about how we created the fun things you see here.

Till then, God bless.

Spring Cleaning

One common problem in churches around the country would have to be storage, or in our case lack there of.  Churches do a great job of accumulating stuff.  There are always people that look through their house and think "I have no use for this anymore, but I'm sure the church could use it!"  This is not a bad mindset to have.  If only people had that same attitude about their money.  But that is for another time.

The visual ministry at Word of Peace has done a great job at having a wide variety of useful items that were acquired at little to no cost.  But over the past 3 years we have looked at our storage room and said the same thing: "We need to go through this and clean."  

This past week we finally did just that.  It felt so good.  

Some things we learned that could be helpful to other churches. 

Enough Storage is a Rare Commodity.

To put it lightly, we were starting to be a fire hazard.  The decorations, worship elements and seasonal items were beginning to encroach on the fuse boxes and that's a big No-No!  We have shelves but they were overflowing.  We also have two offsite storage units that we have been too lazy to get bring stuff to.  If you have little to no space on site I highly recommend looking into off site storage lockers for your seasonal items.  For Word of Peace we keep our Christmas decorations, Vacation Bible School supplies, kids choir play sets and once a year festival games in the lockers.  This is a huge weight off the small storage rooms we have here on site.



Organization, Organization, Organization!

Investing in shelving, strong clear plastic tubs and labeling can save the day.  One of the hardest things we dealt with this year was a departure of 3 of our long time visual ministry team members and they new where and what everything was.  Rather than calling them every time we needed to find something we decided to go through everything relabel everything.  The end result was fantastic and anyone can walk into our room and know where something is.  

Inventory  

I like to work in a way that is very similar to one of my favorite TV show growing up: MacGyver.  He would take the materials around him and get out of a jam and save the world.  Now, I am not saving the world, but saving money and using what you have rather than buying new every time is key in a church.  The problem was I had no idea what materials we had to use.  This may take some time but:

1.  Go through everything
2.  Label and group together like seasons or materials
3.  Create a spreadsheet with all of the supplies and keep it updated



This way you can reference the work you have done and pick and choose from the supplies you already own to create something new.  

Involve Others

As a staff member it is good that I know and hold the inventory of the Visual Ministry supplies, but our church is packed with volunteers and other ministries that could use the supplies we have.  Share your knowledge with others and invite them to respectfully use them.  You as a church are in the business of ministry and helping each other out.  Other churches are also in the same boat.  We welcome people and churches that want to use what we have.  Anything to spread the good news of Jesus Christ.

In the end it feels so good to step back and look at a room that was packed and feel like we have "extra" room now.  Just remember to keep tabs on the clutter, it will sneak up on you.  

Here are some more pictures of what we did.  

 Exploding into the sanctuary!

Our awesome Volunteers

During 

After!

Easter 2014 Tweaking Tradition

Celebrating Easter is something I look forward to more than most things in my life.  Having the anticipatory Lent and Holy Week prior to Easter Sunday, not to mention the tiredness and long hours, all make me ready for a day packed with praise and worship fueled by adrenaline.  

There are a few decoration traditions here at Word of Peace that have been observed the entire 10 years I have worked at the church.  They weren't bad, but this year we had a few additions that made us rethink the traditional decoration scheme.

For starters we needed to incorporate the very large tomb from the Holy Week Walk.  The point was for those who attended to be invited back for Sunday worship to hear the rest of the story.  Check out the Holy Week Walk post here.

The other issues on Easter Sunday consist of figuring where to put all the people who come to worship, brass, choir and pastors in and amongst the decorations.

This year we had a wonderful theme of butterflies.  We hung them from the center of the sanctuary and made a large banner for behind the altar.  We also had around 75 fresh spring plants that are scattered around the chancel (stage) area.  

The other large object is the Good Friday cross.  This is the tradition that needed to be tweaked.  We pounded nails into it on Friday and normally on Sunday we flip it over and place the flowers in and around the cross.  But that would take up too much space with new large tomb.  What to do?

In the end we still used the cross at the foot of the tomb.  We rolled the stone away and placed flowers around all of it.  It was truly beautiful.  We received many great comments on the decorations and I was glad to continue to use the traditional cross in a new way.

Tomb and Cross

Altar and Butterfly Banner

Flowers around musicians

Dealing with Tradition

First of all, tradition is not a bad thing.  We would never be where we are as a church without our traditions.  But, we would also NOT be where we are today if we would have not broken tradition.  There is a fine balance and it is not easy to walk that line.  

In the area of creative worship it is implied that there will be new ideas.  Being creative is not just about sticking to the rules and doing the same thing year after year.  To me that actually sounds like there might be a lack of creativity.  

For me, my creative juices flow when I see something inspiring or moving.  Many times they come from looking at traditional things and wondering how we can use them in a more modern / contemporary way.  

In the case of the tomb and the cross we had two major center pieces, both with significant meaning on Easter.  Without the cross there is no need for the tomb and without the empty tomb there is no point to Easter, no forgiveness...death wins.  But Jesus did not stay dead and that is the reason we need to be reminded of both his death and resurrection.

In the same way we as a church need to remember where we came from and those traditions that got us this far.  As a church we should strive to hold those traditions dear and continue to create new traditions that will sustain the church for years to come.

Blessings,

Dain