I often think about this.
"When you reach a child, you change a life. When you reach a parent, you change an entire family." -Dale Hudson
We know stats show that when you reach a father and he starts attending church, the percentage of his kids going to church and following Jesus skyrockets.
Parents have the most influence in the lives of their children. This means a huge part of our strategy should be to reach and influence parents.
Going into VBS this year, I set up a strategy that would help us connect with unchurched parents.
Here are the steps we took.
We thought about parents in our planning.
How can we involve parents?
How can we share the Gospel with parents?
How can we get parents to buy in and be a part of their child's VBS experience?
We decided to host a family night on our final night of VBS.
It was a night for the entire family to participate in. No drop offs. Parents must attend with their child.
Each night of VBS we promoted the upcoming family night. (FYI - we do VBS in the evenings)
Each night we handed out a recap (paper copy) of what we had taught on that night. We included a promotion for family night on these recap papers.
p.s. Don't hand the take home paper to the kids. They will lose it or you'll find it in the parking lot. We personally handed these papers to the parents.
Family night was Thursday night.
We had regular VBS from Sunday to Wednesday and then Thursday night was family night.
Here was the flow of family night.
- Offering contest. We had an offering contest each night of VBS to raise money for a local children's home.
- Family game show. We had some fun games families competed in to win a prize. These were stage games. High energy. Fun. Loud.
- We shared the Gospel in a creative way.
- We invited families to attend our Starting Point class with their child. Starting Point is a class where the Gospel is clearly shared with parents and their children. Starting Point is available for you at this link. If you read my recent article - "Why I Don't Lead Children in a Salvation Prayer at VBS" you'll understand why I take this approach.
- After the Gospel presentation, the kids came up and sang some of their songs and quoted some verses they learned. This was a key factor in getting unchurched parents to attend. Unchurched parents will come to see their children perform.
- We then went out and had hot dogs, games, bounce houses, lemonade, and more.
- I walked around during this time and talked with parents. Especially with parents who were new that night.
Our attendance tripled that night. We had lots of unchurched parents who attended and on the Sunday after, we had several families who came to church for the first time.
We will continue to reach out to these families.
VBS family night. It works. If you've never tried it, consider doing it. It has been proven to be effective.
