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VBS Is Grooming

VBS Is Grooming

Last updated on: August 20, 2026 at 1:20 pm by Stuart Delony

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VBS Is Grooming 2026-08-20T13:20:55-04:00 Stuart Delony

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An inflatable bounce house shaped like a white church with a steeple, cross, stained-glass windows, and a “Vacation Bible School” banner on a sunny church lawn.

Lifeway, the Southern Baptist publishing house that supplies VBS material to thousands of congregations, has repeatedly emphasized that Vacation Bible School is for the unchurched. | Image created in DALL-E.

For the past few years, a certain slice of American Christianity has had one move.

Drag queen reading a picture book to toddlers? Groomer.

Teacher with a “safe space” sticker? Groomer.

Librarian who shelved a story about two male penguins? Groomer.

JD Vance went on Fox News and told the country that anyone wishing to avoid the label should simply decline to “sexualize 6-, 7-year-old children.” Matt Walsh built a brand around the accusation. Laura Ingraham called public schools “grooming centers” on live television.

The word got cheap fast. Somewhere along the way, it stopped referring specifically to sexual abuse and came to mean any adult introducing children to ideas their parents might not have personally selected.

Fine. Let’s use their definition.

No, Vacation Bible School is not sexual abuse. Neither is a librarian shelving a book about two dads. That is precisely the point.

I say “their definition” as though I wasn’t once one of them. I was. I drank the generic Kool-Aid and ate the cheap sandwich cookies as a kid. I volunteered as a teenager. I worked VBS as an adult, on church staff, behind the scenes, holding the clipboard.

So when I tell you what Vacation Bible School is actually for, I’m not guessing from the parking lot. I helped run the machine.

With the brochure peeled away, VBS has two jobs. The first is getting kids saved. Saved, not discipled, because a decision can be counted and discipleship is work nobody has enough volunteers to do.

The second job is quieter. It allows an aging, shrinking congregation to look across a fellowship hall full of children and reassure itself that the faith isn’t dying after all.

Look at all these kids who came.

Nobody says out loud that they came for the games, snacks, prizes and inflatables. Before VBS is anything else, it is the church throwing itself a party about its own survival. And every year is a guaranteed revival for whoever printed the curriculum.

Step one: borrow somebody else’s children

VBS sells itself as outreach, and outreach requires a target. Lifeway, the Southern Baptist publishing house that supplies VBS material to thousands of congregations, has repeatedly emphasized that Vacation Bible School is for the unchurched. Its training material encourages churches to reach beyond their existing families, recruit through neighborhood events and make use of the fact that parents who would never attend church themselves may still send their children when invited by a friend.

The industry even has a name for those kids.

“Spiritual orphans.”

I heard that phrase in a planning meeting once, spoken casually over donuts in a fellowship hall. Nobody flinched. We weren’t talking about neighbors. We were talking about the great unwashed masses in need of our cleansing.

That word — orphans — tells you more about the mission than the promotional material does. These children were not treated as members of families who had made different choices. They were treated as vacancies.

The opportunity existed in the gap between what a child would happily walk into and what a parent might knowingly choose if the full purpose were printed on the registration form.

Step two: add enough glitter to hide the theology

The theme changes every summer. One year it’s a jungle expedition, the next it’s some unsettling mashup of Jesus and pirates. The decorations change. The songs change. The T-shirts change.

The emotional structure does not.

Monday is a warm bath: parachute games, glitter, snacks, prizes, hand motions and a near-stranger telling your child that he is personally and individually adored by the Creator of the universe. It feels safe because it has been designed to feel safe.

The theology with teeth usually arrives later, once the room is familiar and the adults have become trusted. Sin. Separation from God. Death. Hell. The possibility that something eternally terrible could happen unless the child makes the correct decision.

I have watched a room full of children who spent three days making lanyards go silent when the lesson finally reached the fire.

That quiet is the product.

The fun is not incidental to the process. It is the delivery system.

Churches sometimes defend the spectacle by saying children need engaging ways to hear the gospel. Perhaps. Notice how often the supposedly best news in human history needs a fog machine, a prize table and a person dressed as a talking cactus to make the sale.

Apparently the message is powerful enough to save your eternal soul but not strong enough to survive forty minutes without a snack rotation.

Step three: close the sale and keep the lead warm

The week builds toward a decision. A child prays a prayer, “asks Jesus into his heart” and reports the experience to an adult. The decision is recorded, counted and reported back to the church.

I have knelt beside children and walked them through the words.

Then I filled out the card.

The numbers looked impressive, although accounting was always creative. Most of the decisions at the churches I served were not made by unchurched children encountering Christianity for the first time. They came from children who already attended the church. Many of them had made the same decision before.

Nothing says eternal security quite like renewing your salvation annually beside a bowl of Goldfish crackers.

The unchurched kid is the mission the program advertises. The church kid recommitting is the number it actually runs on.

But the decisions still counted. A profession of faith was a profession of faith. A recommitment was spiritual movement. A raised hand was a data point. By Friday, every church could announce that God had moved mightily, and the numbers were available to prove it.

The child was often taken aside for a private conversation. An adult asked questions, gathered information and passed it to a follow-up team. In the best possible interpretation, this was pastoral care.

It was also a warm authority figure speaking alone with a child whose parents were not present, learning what the child believed, recording the answers and opening a line of contact with the family.

Then came follow-up. Churches were encouraged to stay in touch with children and their households after VBS: phone calls, mailers, doorstep visits, invitations to fall events, prayer lists and reminders about next summer.

I made some of those visits.

You knocked on the door, made pleasant conversation and left behind a flyer. On the walk back to the car, you assessed whether the mother seemed receptive, resistant or merely polite.

We called this loving the family. Marketing departments call it lead nurturing.

Yes, they wrote the strategy down

None of this requires reading sinister intentions into innocent church volunteers. Much of it has been openly articulated as strategy.

The most obvious example is the 4/14 Window, a missions framework focused on children between the ages of four and fourteen. The logic is straightforward: most religious commitments are made young, while a child’s moral and spiritual framework is still being formed.

The movement describes children as among the world’s “most ready and reachable” people.

Not merely people deserving care.

Ready.

Reachable.

The children are both the target of the mission and one of its tools, since converted children may also draw parents, siblings and friends into the church.

A promotional video for the strategy was titled “Aim Lower.”

I am not inventing that.

You can’t accuse them of hiding the ball. They made a slide deck.

Consent enters the building rather late

The problem is not that VBS contains a worldview. Every adult in a child’s life hands down a worldview. That was never the objection.

The problem is that conservative Christians have spent years insisting that exposing a child to an unwanted worldview is grooming — especially when the adults doing it possess institutional authority and the parents are not in the room.

By that standard, VBS is not a marginal case. It is a model example. The church deliberately seeks children from outside its own community. Apparently parental rights are sacred until the parents belong to the mission field.

When a librarian places a book about two dads on a shelf, conservative media calls it psychological predation. When a church uses games and sugar to teach somebody else’s six-year-old that he is sinful, endangered and in need of conversion, it is called outreach.

The difference is not the presence of ideology. The difference is whose ideology gets treated as invisible.

The part I didn’t see until I left

I keep saying “we” because I mean it.

I believed we were helping children. Most of the volunteers believed that too. There was no secret room where church leaders sat around plotting how to manipulate second graders. There were mostly tired adults cutting cardboard decorations, counting juice boxes and trying to keep one child from biting another.

But good intentions do not erase the structure. We built a week around lowering children’s defenses, establishing trust, creating emotional intensity and asking for a life-altering decision before their parents arrived for pickup.

Then we counted the decisions as evidence that God had blessed the program.

Set the political hypocrisy aside and there is a harder question underneath it, aimed less at the people shouting “groomer” online than at those still running the machine.

If the gospel is what we said it was — the best news a human being could ever receive — why did it need to arrive smuggled inside a week of lights, foam, prizes and sugar, pitched to children too young to understand the full stakes?

You don’t pad what you believe in. You pad what you’re afraid won’t sell on its own.

We spent a fortune entertaining children into decisions and filed the cards under revival.

The bounce house was always the tell.

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About Stuart Delony

I’m Stuart Delony, a former pastor who walked out of the church but couldn’t shake the ways of Jesus. These days, I host Snarky Faith—a podcast and platform that wrestles with faith, culture, and meaning from the fringe. I’m not here to fix Christianity. I’m here to name what’s broken, find what’s still worth keeping, and hold space for the questions that don’t have clean answers. If you’ve been burned, disillusioned, or just done with the noise—welcome. You’re in good company. You can read more about the author here.

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