Vbs Quotes

If it is true that a picture paints a thousand words, then there was a Roman centurion who got a dictionary full. All he did was see Jesus suffer. He never heard him preach or saw him heal or followed him through the crowds. He never witnessed him still the wind; he only witnessed the way he died. But that was all it took to cause this weather-worn soldier to take a giant step in faith. “Surely this was a righteous man.”1 That says a lot, doesn’t it? It says the rubber of faith meets the road of reality under hardship. It says the trueness of one’s belief is revealed in pain. Genuineness and character are unveiled in misfortune. Faith is at its best, not in three-piece suits on Sunday mornings or at V.B.S. on summer days, but at hospital bedsides, cancer wards, and cemeteries. Maybe that’s what moved this old, crusty soldier. Serenity in suffering is a stirring testimony. Anybody can preach a sermon on a mount surrounded by daisies. But only one with a gut full of faith can live a sermon on a mountain of pain.

We have made an assumption that faith development occurs in the church. What we have learned is that real faith development begins at home and in our personal relationships with each other. Even as a United Methodist pastor, I (Bob) left the faith development of my children to the church, thinking that the church would take care of it and believing by my setting the example of going to church that they would get it. This is the assumption that parents in most mainline churches make and that my parents made. We thought we had it covered by taking our kids to youth group, Sunday school, VBS, and confirmation. Yet, when they graduated and went on with their lives, we realized that all we had given them was church. We didn’t help them develop a personal experience/relationship in Jesus Christ.

Date et dabitur vbs. (Luke 6.38.)

Psittacus vbs alirum nmina discam: Hoc didic per m dcere, “Caesar, hav!

But teaching VBS may actually be a more painful way to my grave.

he saw that young people were not only not watching television news each night, but they were watching less and less TV, period. The high point for television news audiences came in the 1960s. In 1985 almost 50 million Americans watched a nightly network news program, but by 2008, when VBS was attempting to invent a new kind of documentary news, the number had declined sharply, to 29 million. The combined viewership of NBC, ABC, and CBS was about what Walter Cronkite’s was when he sat in the anchor’s chair and was the most trusted man in America

This prom sounds about as sexy as Vacation Bible School.