Saturday, July 3, 2010

VBS Offering

In our VBS this year, we decided to include an offering from the children. We've never done that before. We've always offered our VBS for free and never asked for any contributions. But this year, since part of what we were learning included how the early Christians in Rome followed Jesus and how they were persecuted, our offering was designated to help Christians around the world today who are being persecuted.

We decided to do it this way: after introducing the idea on Monday, we collected pennies on Tuesday, nickels on Wednesdays, dimes on Thursday, and quarters on Friday. I really didn't know what to expect or how much we would receive - but to help us raise the amount, I said I would kick-in double of whatever the children gave. So if they gave $1, I would put in $2 more. I was thinking that maybe that would get our offering up to the $100 range.

Boy was I wrong! The children went bonkers and brought in almost $200! So now we'll be sending almost $600 to help persecuted Christians. I am astounded, and also grateful and thankful. We had a great VBS this year. This was just the icing on the cake.

2 comments:

Rev. James Leistico said...

that's a great idea about pennies, nickels, etc.
another thing that my pastor always did was a "thermometer" charting our vbs offerings. I've adapted that to the themes for our vbs each year. So one year, when we donated to LHF to publish books, we stacked a book per dollar. another year we had a palm tree that grew and gained leaves. Another year we had a toolbox filling with pictures of tools. This year (Kremer's Noah's Ark) we had a rain gauge.

Pastor Peasant said...

I like your "book stacking" idea. What I did was had a clear glass vase and challenged the kids to fill it with coins. None of us (me or the kids) thought we could do it, but we did! It's good to have such visuals.