Ohio church adds value to their community; Celebrating more than a century of Vacation Bible School; Putting down your smartphone during church

Good News for Today

It happens with a couch or mattress. It happens with two chairs facing each other across a table.

While refugees’ initial days and months in America can be complex and filled with paperwork and immigration meetings, churches have learned that there are direct, simple ways to meet needs.

Not long after it began six years ago, Living Hope Church in Columbus was helping deliver donated furniture on behalf of a group of non-profit organizations. It became apparent that the items were going toward a growing migrant population consisting of those from the Middle East and Central America.

The need grew, and soon the church took it on as its own.

Pastor Aaron Taylor it’s been good for the church. It’s helped them work through the question – if our church was gone, would the community miss us?

He says now they clearly know the answer to that question.

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Despite its obscure origins in a rented room in America’s largest city, Vacation Bible School (VBS) has become a widely familiar term in our culture, identifiable with both kids and parents as a fun way to learn about God’s Word.

Vacation Bible School traces its roots to New York City where in 1898 Virginia Hawes, concerned with the spiritual formation of school children, rented a beer hall in the city’s East Side to conduct an Everyday Bible School. Hawes envisioned a place where kids could safely spend their summer while learning about the Bible and receiving spiritual nourishment.

By 1921, Vacation Bible School had spread well into the South and was a strong program across many denominations.

In Hawes’s time, there was an awareness that kids were not learning about the Bible as much as they used to. And that seems even more true today. VBS has consistently been about assessing the needs of the culture and deciding what timeless truth about Jesus needs to be shared.

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1. Church leader Thom Rainer wants to you to rethink using a smartphone or tablet in church service. He writes, “Smartphones and tablets often distract the person looking at them. I see it every week. Rarely do I see church members looking at their smartphones without some kind of notification popping up. Of course, they can’t wait to read the notification.
2. Smartphones and tablets often distract others. I wish I were not one of those prone to distraction, but I am. When that light on someone’s phone catches my eye, I immediately turn to it.

Read the full piece in the Baptist Press Toolbox.

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