June 18, 2015June 7, 2018 Peter Witkowski Vacation Bible School

5 Reasons Why VBS Is A Big Deal

i-love-vbs

Ah…Vacation Bible School, there is nothing like it. Screaming kids, water games, snacks with gummy worms hidden in them. What kid wouldn’t be up for a week of summer fun? (I was always ready for some gummies and water balloons!) Hopefully, we adults are also getting bit with the VBS excitement bug! Sure we have to manage all those sugar filled, crazy kids. But hosting a great VBS is worth the cost! Here are my top five reason VBS is a big deal!

1. VBS Connects Us To Our Community!

Yes, some kids spend their entire summer hoping from one VBS to the next. When they drop into our VBS, we should be thankful! Each time we connect with a new family, we develop a better picture of what our community is really like. VBS will help us to better understand how to ministry to our neighborhoods.

2. VBS Demonstrates The Love Of Christ!

Bible believing Christianity is increasingly unpopular in our culture. If we affirm biblical marriage and label sin as sin, we w kids free 1 ill be unpopular and perhaps even labeled as bigots.

One of the best means for fighting against the angry Christian stereotype is to love our neighbors. VBS gives us the chance us to do just that! As we serve our neighbors’ and co-workers’ kids, we can dispel many of the myths that surround our church. Remember the words of Paul: “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good” (Rom. 12:21).

VBS provides our church a premium stage for wowing the world with the love of Christ! Remember the words of our savior, “By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35). Let’s highlight God’s love this summer by loving kids via VBS!

3. VBS Fulfills The Great Commission!

Evangelism is not just something missionaries do. Nor is it something we do “out there.” Jesus said all of us are to be making disciples (Math 28:18-20)! We need to be sharing the gospel in Asia. But, we also must talk about the good news of Jesus in our towns, homes, and ballparks! VBS gives us an amazing venue for reaching and discipling the kids in our community! By participating in VBS, we get to experience the joy of obeying Jesus’ mission call!

4. VBS Connects Us To The Unchurched!

Many kids only come to church during VBS. By breaking out the wacky games, we can reach the usually unreachable. VBS expands the reach of the gospel into our community introducing Christ to kids who have never sat in a pew before.

5. VBS Can Lead To Redemption!

This is the big one. We have VBS every year because God saves. We welcome kids to church this summer because God uses VBS leaders to open the eyes of the blind. And I’m not talking about just the back kids. I’ve heard many reports of “good” church kids getting saved during VBS. Anytime the gospel is present, the Holy Spirit can move in powerful ways! He often works through VBS. Let’s hope and pray that God uses our VBS to bring many to salvation!

And now it’s your turn! Why is VBS a big deal to you and your church family?

Click Here To Register For VBS @ Amissville Baptist Church!

July 31, 2014June 15, 2015 Peter Witkowski Children's Ministry

Don’t Be Kid Focused

Jesus Focused

Although it sounds ironic, kids should not be the focus of our kids’ ministry. Now before you write me off as a kid hater or as a fuddy duddy who thinks singing along to cassette tapes makes a great Sunday school lesson, let’s consider John 3:30. Just as Jesus’ ministry had started flourishing, John the Baptist’s disciples come to John frustrated that all the focus has switched to the Jesus. Notice what John says, “He must increase but I must decrease.” This should be the heart of every biblical ministry, kids or otherwise. We are to be making a big to-do about Jesus. A biblical kids’ ministry will always be focused upon our Savior. Instead of seeking to satisfy our kids’ longing for fun with hi-tech, adventurous activities, our kids’ programs should be designed to introduce our kids to the awesome Savior of the world. We (including our kids) must decrease. Christ must increase.

Kid Focused And Failed

If we don’t decrease, weird things start happening. Recently, several kids from my church and I attended a Centrikid camp put on by Lifeway. My church kids had a blast and my adults were impressed with the camp’s gospel focus. Before we scrambled back on the bus to go home, I heard another church leader say, “Our kids have all been complaining that this camp is too much like church. We really miss all the games during the worship times.” Although I do not know everything about this church’s kid’s ministry, I do know that they think “church” is a negative thing to be avoided.

Think about this for a second, a church’s children’s ministry is calling the Word of God and the body of Christ boring, unattractive, and expendable. The only way for a kid’s ministry to conclude that Jesus is boring or an obstacle to happiness is to think that ministry is all about you and your kids. Equipped with this mindset, people come to church to have fun, make friends, and feel loved. Each kids prominence and desires is increasing. But this mindset contradicts the purpose point of church and fails its followers. As counselor Ed Welch notes:

God has given us gifts to serve rather than needs to be served. Any other perspective is less than biblical and will ultimately lead us toward misery rather than joy – p. 167

If we truly want our kids to be happy, we will have ministries that cause us all to decrease.

Jesus Focused And Approved

Immediately, someone will object that kids learn differently. They don’t belong in church. They can’t be expected to survive waves of the adult world.

Yes, kids do learn differently. I fully support having children’s programs that use music with motions and visual object lessons to introduce children to Jesus. I am constantly looking for ways to better connect the gospel to the kids of FBCE. But the goal of children’s ministry is always to link kids into the church by making much of our awesome God. Just as the children in my church enjoy hanging around my wife, the kids in hte “Fun Zone” or the “Happy Village” of our churches should leave Sunday with a growing love for Jesus and his bride, the church. As longtime Sunday school teacher, Jack Klumperhower, writes, “We shouldn’t let fun become a tool to keep kids interested so we can feed them good news on the side. Jesus isn’t a side dish…[he’s] the selling point” (p. 155). Jesus must increase!

Now many fear that we will lose kids by going all gospels on them. Perhaps, some kids will check out. Or some may bug their parents until they convince the family to find a church that is more “fun.” But friends, a majority of the kids in our ministry are not Christians. Naturally, they are going to find the gospel offense because by they are: “lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God” ( 2 Tim 3:1-4).Unredeemed kids reject the gospel because the are blind sinners.

The Defining Question

Today, we all face the following question: how should we respond to kids who find the gospel and the people of God offensive? How we answer this question will radically shape our children’s ministries and our kids’ view of Jesus and the church. We have two options.

First, we can appeal to our kids’self-love as many mainstream churches have begun to do. We attempt to compete with Nickelodeon, Disney, and PS4’s by offering slimy games, cheesy videos, and kidcentric Bible lesson’s- Jesus loves you; he wants you to be happy.

Second, we can challenge our kids with the hope of the gospel like the Centrikid camp staff did. We can preach Christ crucified abandoning gimmicks and manipulative story telling. Moreover, we trust that:

The Holy Spirit is working, and once [kids] get a taste of Christ, they will be irreversibly captured for his kingdom. Rather than pander to kids…[we] offer life to kids who are thirsting for something more – 156

Go Gospel

If we hope to reach kids for Christ, we must choose the way of the gospel. If we go with the cool appeal, we will ultimately lose. The church can never outpace the world’s indulgence of self-love. One day, our kids will discover that the pursuit of wealth, alcohol, sex, and a host of other things is more fun than Sunday school worship bands; they’ll leave the church. But if we give them Jesus who outshines all this world has to offer, many will believe on the Lord Jesus Christ! They will stay, grow, and begin introducing others to Christ. Jesus must increase, we must decrease.

Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever. – I John 3:15-17

Works Cited

Klumpenhower, J. (2014). Show Them Jesus: Teaching The Gospel to Kids. Greensboro: New Growth Press.

Welch, E. T. (1997). When People Are Big And God Is Small . Philipsburg: P&R Publishing.

April 17, 2014July 8, 2014 Peter Witkowski Discipleship

Playing With Water

A Shhh..splash flowed by a showering of water radically interrupted the pastor’s orderly explanation of baptism. As he tried to recover, ripples of laughter echoed through the congregation who just saw the latest baptism candidate show off his cannonball skills in the baptistery. Although I did not see the faces of the boy’s parents, I can imagine they probably had a few streaks of embracement on them. And quite frankly, most parents would be embarrassed to see their child turn baptism into a juvenile joke for quick amusement. As parents, we have a responsibility to both encourage our children to publicly display their faith and to help them understand the spiritual significance of baptism. How do we do guard against cannon balls? Well first and foremost, we must explain the gospel to our children. Our three foot tall man and our four foot tall woman cannot truly believe or rightly interact with the baptism pool without an understanding of salvation. With a right view of God in place, we then have to help them understand exactly what baptism is, means, and does. Put on your goggles and let’s dive into the: who, what when, where, and why of baptism!

Who

Admittedly, a host of opinions about baptism have circled around the church for ages. And I have been both sprinkled as an infant and submerged as an adult. Today, I do not intend to set the world aright with this short blog post. While infant baptism is practiced in many Bible believing churches in an effort to establish a child’s spiritual heritage, I believe baptism is more than a baby dedication tool.

I think believers’ baptism is a more faithful and accurate fulfilling of Christ’s command to baptize “them in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit” (Matt 28:18-20). The word baptize always means immersion or “to dunk” when used in the Greek. Moreover whether it’s the believers at Pentecost, the Philippian jailer, the Ethiopian Eunuch, or anyone else, baptism as recorded in the Bible is always a direct expression of faith by those who have repented of their sins upon hearing the gospel. As the theologian J.L. Dagg wrote, “the apostles and their fellow-laborers required repentance and faith as qualifications for baptism” (p. 69).So who gets baptized? Those who have repented and believed on the Lord Jesus Christ should be baptized.

A Quick Caution

In our effort to faithfully practice baptism, we must be careful not to make the church ordinance, “the basis of division among Christians” (Grudem, p. 967). Rather we should seek, as Dr. Bruce Ware’s encourages us, to:

“be gracious with those of different practices…let’s work to understand and follow as best we can what the Bible teaches. Baptism matters, to be sure. But the truth that baptism points to matters even more” (p. 205).

Even though they sprinkle, we can and should still fellowship with Presbyterians, Lutherans and others who affirm the gospel. Let’s be careful not throw the church out with the baptism water.

What

Baptism is a physical sign established by Jesus to picture what happens in our hearts when we believe on the finished work of the cross (Romans 6:3-7). Christians go under water to symbolize that they have died with Christ from sins of this world. Then seconds later, they pop out from the water, revealing that they have been given new life “through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him [Christ] from the dead” (Col 2:12). The ordinance of baptism is a beautiful picture and public declaration of how God redeems the lost.

When

The easy answer is: “As soon as a person repents of sin and confesses Jesus as Savior, he/she should be baptized.” We see both Philip and Paul baptizing new believers shortly after they confess Christ (Acts 8:36; 16:33). And when adults who have counted the cost of following Christ embrace Jesus as their Savior, they should be baptized quickly.

But we also want to protect the waters of baptism from religious cannon ballers who pursue the sacrament either hoping to please parents or to appease the Christian culture. Before the onset of the middle ages, the church responded to this dilemma by requiring baptism candidates to attend a three year training class (catechizing) to ensure that they understood the faith. Today, the church expert, Mark Dever, recommends that children should not be baptized until they reach an age of maturity during the end of their high school years (Dever & Alexander, p. 106).

At FBCE, the staff follows a more Grudem-esk view of baptism believing:

“It is impossible to set a precise age that will apply to every child, but when parents see convincing evidence of genuine spiritual life and also some degree of understanding regarding the meaning and trusting in Christ, then baptism is appropriate” (p. 982).

In short, we will baptize children upon a credible profession of faith. We define a credible confession as the ability to clearly articulate the gospel, the nature of baptism and one’s personal testimony, citing the evidence of good works. We also want to know if the child’s parents have noticed their child displayiing the grace of God in her life. Once a child has met with a pastor, written out her testimony, and demonstrated her love for God in her daily life as observed by her family, the FBCE staff will baptize a child. Admittedly the process is rather elastic, taking weeks and even years to complete. But as Pastor Art Murphey noted, “Children need time to understand and show signs of maturity before they are baptized” (p. 127). Baptism is not a race to see who can get the wettest the fastest.

Where

Being the doorway into the blessings of church membership, baptism should always occur within the context of the local church (I Cor 12:13). The location of the baptism matters little. As long as your local church is present, an ordained church member (pastor, elder, or deacon) performs the baptism (signifying that church affirms the work of Christ within the heart of the person being baptized) and immersion occurs, a baptism is truly a baptism.

Why

We are to pursue baptism as a sign or act of faith. Going under water does not save; nor, is dunking necessary for salvation. As I Peter 3:21 makes clear, “the removal of dirt” does not produce salvation. Moreover, the thief on the cross repented and was never baptized. Yet, he was promised eternity by Jesus (Luke 23:43). Regardless of our or our children’s piety, their baptism will never save them.

Rather, baptism is act of obedience in faith. If you “confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved,” then you will naturally want to follow all of Christ’s commands (Romans 10:9). What is Christ’s first command after repent and believe? It is to be baptized (Acts 2:38). In the New Testament, all who trust Christ eagerly identify with their Lord and Savior via the waters of baptism. Christians go into the waters of baptism proclaiming that God has already regenerated their hearts.