Nashville, TN — Lifeway Christian Resources, the publishing arm of the fifteen-million member Southern Baptist Convention, announced today the theme for the Summer 2018 Vacation Bible School curriculum. “The Search for the Scrolls” will allow kids of all ages to join Big Daddy and his wife, Dottie, on their quest for tiny fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
This year’s themed VBS kit is not quite what you’d expect. Rather than including creative ideas to turn your church into the caves of Qumran, this year Lifeway is providing churches with the ability to convert their sanctuary and educational space into a Swiss Bank vault, a Palestinian junk shop, a tea room for negotiations, and the materials necessary to make and authenticate their own forgeries of the ancient scrolls.
“We’re very excited about the opportunity to train young children in the disciplines of biblical archaeology, ancient manuscript authentication, and of course the art of bargaining with well-known fraudsters who have overtaken the Middle Eastern antiquities market,” Big Daddy said. “And Dottie is excited about all the flapjacks, Devon cream and fancy teas that are part of any serious effort to swindle donors into coughing up millions to buy bogus scroll fragments.”
Kids 5 and up will be able to enter a Swiss Bank vault, armed with their notebooks and accompanied by a Sunday School teacher dressed as a Swiss banker to “view” the parchments their friends have fabricated in the “fragment lab.” And with no training whatsoever, they will be just as equipped to authenticate Dead Sea Scrolls as if they had earned a correspondence course doctorate from the University of South Africa.
Of course, some kids will have to play the role of seminary professors and staff during this year’s “Search for the Scrolls.” Basically, that means they won’t be given any lunch and will have their snacks taken from them. Because, honestly, every seminary professor should know that little scraps of illegible and fraudulent fragments are more important than their salaries or retirement, right?
And when they are done “authenticating” the “Dead Sea Scroll fragments,” Vacation Bible Schoolers will be guided to write down their experience for their parents to self-publish.
For more information about Big Daddy and Dottie’s multi million-dollar spending spree and the bogus scroll fragments they purchased and self-authenticated, click here.
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The Baptist Blogger 
I thought this was going to be a satirical article….”VBS themes suggested by Paige Patterson”….