Malta Area VBS hosts over 100

Several local churches came together for the 2019 Malta Area Vacation Bible School last Monday, July 22 through Friday, July 26, at Mustang Football Field.

The event which included Malta Community Church, Grace Fellowship, Lighthouse Baptist, Little White Church, Malta Assembly of God Church, and Elim Lutheran Brethren hosted students from age 3 to sixth grade and was themed Jesus; My Saviour and Friend.

“The kids have two-and-a-half hours of wonderful fellowship games as well as Bible training,” said Orvin Solberg, Lay Pastor at Elim Lutheran Brethren. “Vacation Bible School is important for a number of reasons. First, it is very important to train the young children about Jesus and the ways of the Bible. Another very important aspect is that it harmonizes the churches where we all work here together, and there are lots of other benefits.”

Teaching and serving as camp counselors was a group called Christian Youth in Action, a group that consisted of several high schoolers, one college student, and Dave Howe, the State’s Director of the Child Evangelism Fellowship group.

“These teenagers go through two weeks of training,” Howe said. “We train them thoroughly on how to do crowd control and how to keep kids engaged. So the kids are standing up, sitting down, and talking.”

Groups were broken up from age three to age six, age seven to age nine, and nine to twelve. The stories and messages are similar but built for each age group.

The event was headed by Malta’s Janice Knudsen who accepted the message of the gospel at a very young age.

“I have a special interest in Vacation Bible School because that’s where I accepted Jesus as my Lord and Saviour when I was about five-years-old,” Knudsen said. “It means a lot to me to teach these kids about God because there is not a lot of hope in the world and this is one way we can give these kids some hope for the future.”

Knudsen explained why the event has become a group event, rather than simply one church at a time.

“We started off VBS with each of the churches doing them on their own but, we have more energy and help if you combine the churches so we discussed things with a few churches and we were all on board to do it together and it’s been great,” Knudsen said.

There was also a rally held on Thursday night, which featured a free meal for the students and community.