VBS Kool Aid in a Paper Dixie Cup

Sometimes on the warmest, stickiest mornings and evenings, I have startling little recollections of my childhood. A heatwave on the highway and I’m lost; I’m stepping in an ant pile barefooted and it’s fifth grade and I can smell the sweat and the powder-fresh deodorant of the girl holding my hand in this game of Red Rover.

When people use the phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid” in conversation, they’re usually referring to something that’s a bad idea in the same way that over 900 people drinking Kool-Aid laced with cyanide in 1978 at the Jonestown commune was a bad idea. But whenever I hear that phrase I just think about Vacation Bible School, called VBS for short. My mother did not ever give me Kool-Aid at home but I sampled all flavors of Kool-Aid at church — specifically during snack time at VBS — so Kool-Aid and the Bible are somewhat married in my head.

VBS is a way that children can attend six and sometimes seven days of Sunday School in a week, and I put in my time at quite a few VBS camps over the years. Sometimes these programs I attended were advertised as a VBS camp. Other times the church hosting would name its program something different, something snappier and more in tune with the trend-following Evangelicalism of the aughts, something like life camp or freedom camp or fine arts camp. Some of them were at night and some of them were in the morning but most were the same deal and have blurred into one, long, tie-dyed memory in my head. I got a brightly-colored, Hanes tee-shirt that was three times my size at every single one.

I grew up very devout and a rigid, quintessentially Southern interpretation of Christianity was a big part of my life for many years. Church was an integral part of the week and I had lots of fun sometimes at church and sometimes at VBS. I remember a massive patch of soaped-up tarps staked into the ground along the hill out behind the church building — a makeshift Slip N Slide for after Friday’s final assembly. I remember a food fight and kids squirting ketchup and mustard and hurling lunch meat at a teen VBS leader. I remember water balloon wars.

“Ladies, please wear knee-length shorts over a one-piece bathing suit and both boys and girls should take part in the water balloon fight while wearing the VBS tee-shirts we gave you,” the pastor said.

Visiting pastors would come in to preach the Gospel at VBS. One time, a pastor told us that we were sinning against God when we lied to our mothers about brushing our teeth. The Lord hates lying lips (and teeth, apparently). 

In my memories, the church sanctuary is massive and very cold, almost like a cave. I can feel myself sitting on a scratchy reddish seat and staring at the tithe envelope on the back of the chair in front of me; coltish, with a strawberry on my knee from falling off my bike and with goosebumps on my arms.

One year, I took a small notebook into the pastor’s daily sermons with me. This was when I wanted to be an artist and it seemed to me that I was losing valuable sketching time during the Apostle Paul series that was going on that particular VBS week. On the third day of camp, I drew what seemed to me then, a beautiful woman wearing a regal gown and in my head, the dress was a deep scarlet color.

I signed my work and then the pastor caught me.

“Young lady, is it too much to ask that you give God one hour of your undivided attention a day?”

A slight reprimand from the pulpit but, to my fourth-grade mind, it was monumental. I blushed the imagined color of the dress I’d drawn, because I was very shy then, and I didn’t take a sketchbook to church again.

As I got older, I volunteered at VBS a little but church in the summertime became more about missions trips and outdoor choir performances. The youth pastor loaded all of us up on buses and took us to various impoverished communities with lots of work to be done and lots of mosquitos. Much like water balloon fights during VBS, during our bouts of brush-clearing and porch painting the girls were still required to wear knee-length shorts. The boys worked in cargo shorts that were knee-length, too, but they were allowed to go shirtless.

“If he don’t got a ring, he don’t get a thing,” my youth pastor said over and over in his Tennessee drawl.

The uneven dress codes weren’t the only contradiction at home in that youth group or that church. The church was located on the outskirts of the large, diverse city of Atlanta, and, as such, the congregation was also large and diverse; there were more than 100 of us in the youth group, and white kids like me were the minority. 

The diversity of our group could have made you wonder if the Southern Baptist Convention — the faction to which the church belonged — was progressing beyond a past checkered with racism and prejudice. After all, the convention began in 1845, when the Southern Baptist church split from its fellow congregations up North in defense of the institution of slavery. But my church’s leadership put forth little to no evidence of efforts to reflect in leadership the true diversity of the Southern body of Christ. Those powerful few at the forefront of the church, from my Tennessean youth leader up to the main pastor, were white, male, financially comfortable. 

Sometimes my youth group traveled on missions trips and service outings to work in mostly white communities, and sometimes we went to mostly Black ones. Sometimes we worked in towns that reflected the racial diversity of our own number. All of the towns we visited were struggling though, with broken infrastructure, underfunded schools and libraries, fading roads that we repainted, and sagging, sighing porches that we propped up on cinder blocks while God and the hotter-than-hell summer sun shone down on us.

My family didn’t live in Atlanta and so we drove about an hour to get to that church, making a small pilgrimage on Sundays from our home up in North Georgia. Knowing his pity for the people our youth group helped in the summers, I sometimes wondered what my moneyed youth pastor, a man ever-clad in Brooks Brothers suits and saddle shoes, would think about our little three-bedroom ranch house up near the Appalachians, or about the fact that my dad was a plumber. Years later, I wonder what he would think about my now-separated parents, about my mom at home in that same ranch house teaching my younger brothers the Scripture. I wonder if he would pity us.

Can you properly counsel, lead, advise, or love those you pity? Pity and empathy are two distinct qualities. Many Southern Evangelicals are flush with pity. Sometimes, though, they like to label their pity as empathy and pretend to walk in shoes in which they could never fit. 

One Wednesday night in my senior year of high school, just before a midweek worship session, my youth pastor told me he liked a t-shirt I was wearing and asked where I bought it. I’d bought it at Walmart, and I told him so, and he told me very kindly that it didn’t look like a Walmart-brand shirt. I said thank you with a respectful smile, but the phrase was followed by a question mark.

Thank you for pitying me? It can be overwhelming, mesmerizing, and obsessive, the process of overcoming the pity someone else holds for you. You may find yourself drinking the Kool-Aid of their pity over and over and over. 

I was an awkward, wary teenager. I wish that youth pastor had talked less about engagement rings and my virginity, his Sunday best and the Gaither Family’s hits and told me that everything would be alright.

Some people can remember the feeling of juice from a rocket-shaped popsicle running down their arm and not feel melancholy. When I visit my mom and go to church with her, I wish I could come out of the sanctuary blinking at the hot Georgia sun, filled with the Holy Spirit and humming that tune the triumphant Gospel quartet just sang.

But I can’t because, in my mind, in church, I still am a little girl in a size XXL tee-shirt. I am a girl drinking grape Kool-Aid from a Dixie cup who didn’t brush her teeth and then lied to her mother about it.

I am a girl who sometimes shops at Walmart and whose house is too small to fit the full expanse of the prosperity gospel. 

The Southern Evangelical church left me with a bundle of contradictions. It left me with a bunch of broken angles that I am somehow meant to fashion into something holy that makes space for me, for my family and friends, for loving thy neighbor. The church left me saying thank you, with both a respectful smile and a question mark.

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