Everything I Need To Know I Learned At VBS
We’re hosting a Vacation Bible School this week for a small group of elementary youth. I decided, based on parent input, to focus the camp week on “resilience.”
For part of the camp, I’ve been leaning on resources published Berkeley Youth Participatory Action Hub. One focus, the one I’m preparing for tomorrow, centers around youth and adult power sharing, specifically youth as leaders and resources.
The first two days of camp, I’d been using resources to help us build toward the focus on power sharing. Today I had planned a set of activities moving us toward youth empowerment. But... and I find this revelatory… instead the kids asked if we could repeat exercises from the first two days.
So I asked them if they wanted to lead them. They said yes (they actually bounced up and down while saying yes).
Perhaps because I’d been re-awakened to the idea of youth leading, during worship I’d already rolled youth in as leaders/prayers/liturgists. I assigned some of them (the volunteers) to start making notes in order to lead the exercises well we’d begin doing after worship.
So for about 45 minutes this morning we did just one exercise (the same exercise we’d done Tuesday) four times, each time with a new leader.
It was kind of incredible because if you sat and watched, you’d see how much they were learning both through the repetition, and also by gently holding space for different leaders to play their role.
We will still process things more tomorrow on the topic of youth exclusion and empowerment (because I want to learn from them about the spaces where they don’t have leadership, don't feel empowered, feel excluded), but I love how this group moved us ahead on the theme and self-moderated/directed things.
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In the exercise for tomorrow, I will ask: To what extent are young people involved in the planning, operations, and evaluation of programs and organizations that exist to promote their well being (in other words, how much influence do youth have) at the national, state, community, school, church level?
We’ll have numbers up on the wall scaling from 1-10, and they’ll be able to respond through movement on where the statement falls on the continuum of youth inclusion.
We’ll then brainstorm situations where youth feel powerless simply because they are young, and then we’ll prepare some skits to demonstrate those situations. We’ll then make use of a hand-out (I didn’t invent any of this, to be clear, it’s all on the Berkeley site) to discuss whether youth are treated as objects, recipients, or resources in the scenarios.
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Our camp this week isn’t big. We’ve got a group of 14 youth. But this has allowed a level of adaptability in the moment that I believe has opened space for considering youth more intrinsically as resources rather than objects or recipients.
Which then leaves me thinking about other contexts in the church that could be reformed to better recognize youth as resources.
This starts with communion. There was a long-standing wrong-headed notion in the church that one can only receive communion when they “understand” it. But the real entry point theologically to communion is not “understanding” (which is ableist), but rather baptism.
And the baptized, who host the table, have as part of their baptismal covenant a wide sense of welcome that invites all to the table.
But think about other small ways church treats children as objects rather than resources. They have sometimes in the past been place away in cry rooms. In some church constitutions they don’t get a vote at meetings until they are “confirmed” (even though again theologically confirmation happens at baptism, not at a magical grade level in the teen years).
And children are often only given certain roles in church, often in the background, like acolyting. It is more rare to have children lead worship (not just for a youth Sunday, but regular), or preach.
And yet again theologically the church believes that all the gifts of the Spirit are given at baptism. And Jesus taught through action that the community that follows him should place children not at the edges of their gatherings but at the center.
I’ve found another added bonus of engaging our VBS participants as resources: it’s far more relaxing as a leader. I can rely on them to lead the way. I can sit and watch and process sometimes. Certainly there are still many ways in which we rely on adult wisdom and presence to direct or redirect actions and host the camp as a whole. But it’s profoundly liberating to treat everyone as part of the team.
I’m aware many teachers and youth leaders move regularly in these ways. I’m also aware those ways of moving are quite counter-cultural, so we are all outgrowing dated assumptions that look at children as objects and recipients.