Going Outside the Grounds—

**This is an interview between Jimmy Brock (Pastor at Resurrection Community Church)  and Heather Williams (Nursery Director at Chesapeake Presbyterian Church)**

How did you all get started doing backyard Bible clubs?

It’s something that our previous children’s ministry director had done at a church before and brought to us. She said that especially since we didn’t do VBS, this would be a great summer outreach and a good way to keep our children involved through the summer.

What does a backyard Bible club actually look like?

We have a host family who offers the space—a garage that they keep cleaned out as a bonus space, the backyard, the front yard.  Sometimes, especially in summer here when it’s extremely hot, they’re willing to open their living room and dining room to us to do some of the activities indoors. Then the host family invites their neighbors, and we basically do a one-house neighborhood VBS, meeting every day for one week for two hours. Depending on the host family, it could be in the morning or the afternoon or the evening.

So, you use an actual VBS curriculum for the clubs?

 Yes, it’s sort of like just having one group of the VBS at a time. Everybody does the games, the craft, the snack, and the lesson together. We can use the songs and videos, but we don’t worry much about decorations and that sort of stuff.

How many volunteers does it take, and how many of these clubs would you run in a summer?

 Well, you have the host family, and then we found it helpful to have a “support family” who lived nearby and would also come to guarantee one or two extra adults and another set of kids to get the group started. Usually we have someone else as the teacher and the assistant. We also try to involve our youth as much as possible with leading the games or assisting in the teaching. Sometimes, the host family provides snacks; sometimes another family who can’t be there will donate snacks. It needs to be flexible depending on how many clubs you’re running and how many volunteers you have available from your congregation. The most we’ve had was five in one summer, and at the time Grace had membership of about 150.

Oh, wow! Five seems like a lot for a church that size. How many kids came to each club?

 They varied somewhat depending a lot on the age of the kids in the host family and how many friends they naturally had in the neighborhood. Mostly, we had 5 to 10 kids per club. At least one club was bigger because the kids in the family covered a larger age span and had more neighborhood friends.

What does it take from the staff to make these clubs work?

The biggest thing from the staff is the enthusiasm for it. Whoever is presenting it to the congregation and to the rest of your staff and leadership has to be excited about it because then it will flow down, and the congregation will get excited. It becomes more than just another outreach thing we’re trying to do. It’s something we’re excited about—loving our neighbors and spreading the gospel to them in an accessible way.

Of course, on the staff side there is recruiting and coordinating the specific host families and volunteer teachers and other helpers who will fill in as needed. Some years, we’ve had mostly volunteers teaching and leading the clubs, and other years, we’ve sent different staff members to be the teachers at the clubs.

What sort of fruit have you seen from these clubs?

Host families have gotten to know their neighbors better. And it sort of breaks down that wall about faith and makes having those conversations easier. It’s a lot easier to have a conversation about the gospel with a neighbor when you’ve started building a personal relationship, and they don’t consider you a weirdo when you talk about Jesus.

We also have some of our teens who had been participants come back and help in some way. So, we’re seeing our teens learn to lead and teach. For me, it is very exciting to see a child who’s grown up in the church, want to turn around and invest in others, whether it’s their younger siblings or the other little kids at the church. To me, that’s just beautiful.

How have these Backyard Bible Clubs compared to other outreach ideas that you’ve considered or tried?

Well, a long, long time ago, when I first started attending, we did do a VBS. We don’t have a building, so we actually had to rent a space for a week specifically for VBS.

It was well attended by our church members, but they didn’t invite we didn’t get them inviting a lot of people from the community. On the other hand, with Backyard Bible Clubs we have definitely found that with it being small and the smaller size and families’ opening their homes, has help with we get a lot more investment into inviting people from outside of the church to come.

For a lot of people in our congregation, especially introverts, big events are intimidating. They may not attend and won’t, let alone invite other people. However, a smaller event at somebody’s house, is much more intimate and less daunting to invite others to attend.

I won’t pretend that these clubs have meant lots of new people have started attending our church, but we have seen relationships forming and deepening. We see our adults and teens growing in their faith and ability to invite and lead and teach and serve. And we know kids who might not otherwise hear the gospel are hearing it, and they are hearing it again when they come back to the club next year.  So we trust that God is at work.