When violence becomes a children’s sermon

I watched the video once. 

Then I watched it again because sure­ly I had mis­un­der­stood what I was seeing. 

A man was being marched down the aisle of a church at gun­point dur­ing Vacation Bible School. Around him, chil­dren chant­ed, “Take him out!” and “Blow him up!” 

This was­n’t a movie. 
It was­n’t a mil­i­tary train­ing exer­cise. 
It was­n’t satire. 
It was Vacation Bible School. 

Let that sink in. 

Vacation Bible School is sup­posed to be where chil­dren learn that they are loved. It should be where they hear sto­ries about kind­ness, com­pas­sion, for­give­ness, and hope. It should be where they dis­cov­er that every per­son bears the image of God. 

Instead, these chil­dren were being encour­aged to cheer for violence. 

Some will argue it was “just a skit.” But chil­dren don’t learn through dis­claimers. They learn through exam­ples. They remem­ber what adults cel­e­brate. They absorb what earns applause. 

As I watched that video, I could­n’t help but think of my Great Gran. 

She nev­er stepped behind a pul­pit. She nev­er held a micro­phone. She nev­er put on a pro­duc­tion to teach us about faith. 

Every morn­ing, she sat at her kitchen table with a cup of cof­fee, her well-worn Bible open before her. She always said the most impor­tant words in Scripture were the ones print­ed in red. “Those are Jesus’ words,” she’d remind me. “Start there.” 

She believed the church wasn’t con­fined to four walls. “My church is right here in my kitchen,” she’d say, lay­ing a weath­ered hand across the pages of her Bible. 

She taught me that fol­low­ing Jesus looked less like win­ning bat­tles and more like feed­ing neigh­bors, offer­ing for­give­ness, car­ing for the hurt­ing, and treat­ing every per­son with dig­ni­ty. She did­n’t preach fear. She prac­ticed love. 

That was her ser­mon. And it has last­ed far longer than any skit ever could. 

When adults hand chil­dren imag­i­nary ene­mies and encour­age them to shout for someone’s destruc­tion — even sym­bol­i­cal­ly — we should not be sur­prised when they begin to divide the world into peo­ple worth lov­ing and peo­ple worth eliminating. 

The irony is almost unbearable. 

The Jesus I read about nev­er hand­ed His fol­low­ers weapons. 
He stopped Peter from using one. 
He told His fol­low­ers to love their ene­mies. 
To pray for those who per­se­cut­ed them. 
To for­give sev­en­ty times sev­en. 
To turn the oth­er cheek. 

To wel­come chil­dren — not fright­en them into spir­i­tu­al warfare. 

Somewhere along the way, parts of American Christianity trad­ed the teach­ings of Jesus for the lan­guage of con­quest. The church has become so con­sumed with defeat­ing “the ene­my” that we’ve for­got­ten who Jesus said our neigh­bors are. 

And now that rhetoric has reached our children. 

If your first instinct after see­ing that video is to defend the church instead of ask­ing whether some­thing has gone ter­ri­bly wrong, then per­haps we’ve become more loy­al to insti­tu­tions than to Christ Himself. 

This isn’t about pol­i­tics. 
It isn’t about denom­i­na­tions. 
It isn’t even about one church. 

It’s about the sto­ries we hand to the next generation. 

When chil­dren asso­ciate faith with fear... 
When they asso­ciate right­eous­ness with dom­i­na­tion... 
When they asso­ciate God with vio­lence... 
We should­n’t be sur­prised if they grow up believ­ing that cru­el­ty is holy. 

Children deserve bet­ter than that.  They deserve a faith that teach­es courage with­out hatred. 

Conviction with­out cru­el­ty. 
Justice with­out vengeance. 
Strength with­out violence. 

When I think about the faith that shaped me, I don’t remem­ber elab­o­rate pro­duc­tions or dra­mat­ic per­for­mances. I remem­ber an old woman in a mod­est Eastern Kentucky kitchen, qui­et­ly read­ing the words of Jesus before the sun had ful­ly climbed over the hills. I remem­ber the smell of cof­fee. The creak of her chair. The gen­tle­ness in her voice. Those moments taught me more about God than any spec­ta­cle ever could. 

If the church can­not be the safest place for a child to learn about love, then we have wan­dered very far from the car­pen­ter who wel­comed chil­dren into His arms and warned adults not to cause them harm. 

Maybe the ques­tion isn’t whether the skit went too far. 

Maybe the ques­tion is how we arrived at a place where any­one thought it belonged in Vacation Bible School in the first place.