<\/p>\nI\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve only watched one Veggie Tales story. It was a televised Christmas special some years ago. I thought it was cute, and well done. It didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t convince me to change our practice in our church to NOT use videos in Sunday school or any children\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s programming, though. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not that we believed that there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s something inherently evil in media. We just held the conviction that: (1) kids were exposed to enough passivity-inducing media during the week—they didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t need more of that in church; (2) Christian education is about relationships, so we wanted lots of quality relationship time between teacher and child and among the children; (3) given that for most educational programming we had the kids for less than an hour we felt is was poor stewardship to give up that precious time to someone else or to entertainment.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The fact that I never watched any of the Veggie Tales videos, and that we didn’t have them around the house, probably had a lot to do with the fact that my kids were already at an age beyond its target audience. But perhaps not—we were never big consumers of “Christianese” products. And to this day our kids seem immune to Christian marketing kitsch. <\/p>\n
There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s an interesting interview on the Leadership Journal.net<\/a> website with Phil Vischer, creator of Veggie Tales. His story is a classic modern day rags-to-riches-to-rags (sort of) story. I found the interview interesting in many ways. First, I felt bad for the guy. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s never a pretty thing to see one\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s dreams and creation fail. Second, the interview had several elements we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve talked about over time:<\/p>\n As for Phil Vischer, I only wish him well and much success with his Jellyfish Labs <\/a> venture. Obviously he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a man of talent and imagination, two qualities in short supply these days. Also, he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s written a book<\/a> about his Veggie Tales venture, which sounds like a great read. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m adding it to the pile. <\/p>\n “I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.” Groucho Marx <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve only watched one Veggie Tales story. It was a televised Christmas special some years ago. I thought it was cute, and well done. It didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t convince me to change our practice in our church to NOT use videos in … Continue reading \n
<\/p>\n