“I try not to speak in my upper register, or people think I sound like Bob the Tomato,” says Phil Vischer, co-creator of the VeggieTales video series. Sure enough, when he gets excited, Vischer slips into his Bob voice without quite realizing it. But he has already told his personal history in Me, Myself, and Bob—an introspective and witty mea culpa to all that went wrong with his first venture.
Now he uses his excited voice to talk about a new joint venture between his Jellyfish Labs and Tyndale House Publishers, called What’s in the Bible? Phil describes the new series as an ambitious plan to cover the major teachings of the Bible in a 10-DVD series—a broad overview that states basic evangelical truths for children in grades four through six.
To be honest, after reviewing the first three DVDs in the series, I was left with a few questions. Then I noticed a reviewer for the Dallas Theological Seminary Book Center had called the DVDs “two of the most life-changing titles of the year.” With my curiosity piqued about Phil’s conceptual development process, I quickly learned an interesting surprise.
Phil Vischer is one of those rare public figures who still answers his own e-mail and is quick to pick up the phone to talk. In the process, I found Phil Vischer to be zealous, even passionate, about teaching the Bible correctly. We may not agree on the best way to answer difficult questions of curriculum development, but I was left with a new understanding that we were asking the same questions.
Phil says the new DVD series was motivated by a generation of children raised outside the church. And some children even end up inside churches where they are not receiving enough sound Bible teaching.
“We’re trying to address a few issues,” Phil says. “Fifty percent of adult Christians can’t define the word ‘grace,’ according to the most recent Gallup poll, and this is supposed to be the defining doctrine of Christianity. Christian leaders have spent the last 30 years telling us who to vote for and taking positions on political issues, but they have not been teaching us the Bible.”
Some kids get snapshots of Bible stories but are missing what Phil calls “the connective tissue.” So in the first video, he begins by asking children, “What makes all of these stories fit together—why wrap them up in one piece of cowhide? Because all of these stories put together tell one story. The Bible tells the story of God and what He has done for us.”
In our conversation Phil phrases his concerns carefully, expressing appreciation for faithful Sunday School teachers who have been proclaiming this message all along (and he said a few nice words about denominational publishers still producing carefully written material, as does RBP).
But he has a valid point about the larger Christian world. Brian McLaren spoke for the emerging church in A New Kind of Christianity, a book that summarizes “the story line of the Bible” by asking, “How can we participate with God in the healing of creation?” Certainly McLaren gives an answer that is something less than the gospel, describing the fall of humanity as “a coming-of-age story” where “human beings progress from the life of hunter-gatherers to the life of agriculturalists and beyond.”
Lesson learned? It has become trendy to talk about the story line of the Bible, but this does not necessarily lead to carefully planned educational programs.
Teaching theology to children
“I’m definitely presenting a conservative evangelical theology,” Vischer says of the new video series. But he admits that even the label “conservative evangelical theology” is not nearly as specific as a particular church group (like Baptists!) would teach. “Where there is consensus, I will present one position,” Vischer says, explaining that he usually studies from the ESV Study Bible and the NIV Study Bible, using the notes to get a feel for what evangelical commentators emphasize in a passage. As he develops his scripts, they are passed through the Tyndale Bible department, and then to his mother, Scottie May, professor of spiritual formation at Wheaton College. “My mom is still a key gatekeeper, sometimes my worst critic,” Phil says. And in aiming the new series at an older age group than the original VeggieTales series, he intends the gospel message to be loud and clear.
At this point I admit my own misgivings in reviewing the first What’s in the Bible DVD. During the lesson on the books of the Bible, Sunday School Lady (a puppet) teaches children that “the Old Testament has 39 books in Protestant Bibles, 46 books in Catholic Bibles, and 50 books in orthodox Bibles!”
Ouch. Hearing that made me nervous. Uncomfortable, even. Where are you headed with this, Phil? I want my own children to study the books of the Bible, memorize their correct order, and understand why the Bible has 66 (and only 66) books. I’m happy that our own church uses our association’s Sunday School curriculum, happy that my children are learning about canonicity in their middle elementary years. But raising the idea in children’s minds that some church groups believe differently about a very important matter? Ouch. Phil’s thought is at least thought provoking.
“I want them to have some background so they are not completely taken aback if they run into a Catholic or Orthodox person,” Phil says, emphasizing how the DVD affirms 66 books in the canon. (Phil’s right; it does.)
For this new video series, he is perfectly willing to raise some difficult issues, “stepping on land mines every day,” as he puts it, in order to better prepare children for questions they will have later.
It’s a tough call. Raising the possibility of apocryphal books with third and fourth graders inevitably leads to a technical discussion that might fly right over their heads. And in the new DVD, the discussion of Jerome’s translation of the Latin Vulgate probably does just that.
For me, it’s a perfect illustration of the hard choices that curriculum developers must make as they carefully plan a scope and sequence addressing the whole counsel of God. Knowing how and when to dive into the details is a special skill, a development step that is too often glossed over.
Or as my wife recently observed, some curriculum developers have fallen into the trap of teaching too much too soon. Carla noted this just after teaching from material developed by a respected Bible teacher (insert famous name here). She rebelled at the idea of teaching an entire lesson on the Seventh Commandment (yes, the adultery one) to a classroom full of . . . first graders. Ouch.
Then Phil tells me a bit about a brewing controversy: The new video series does not take a position on the exact nature of creation in Genesis. Instead, it reports that some believers embrace literal 24-hour days of creation, and some do not.
“Where there is controversy, I think it is important to teach the controversy,” says Phil.
I’m going to guess that many of our parents will end up doing just what I did when we got to this part of the presentation. Hit Pause. Ask questions. “Okay, now when we are at church and your Sunday School teachers talk about creation, what do they say about how long the days were?”
“Each day was 24 hours, Dad.” That’s right. Give an extra hug to your Sunday School teacher.
So I suppose part of the question is about our pain threshold when purchasing “nondenominational” DVDs such as this. Are we willing to use a little Parental Guidance Suggested when allowing our children to see them? Or do we hit Play just before coffee break, hoping the content will affirm our beliefs?
Back when VeggieTales were at the height of their popularity, Vischer was surprised at who was watching. He intended the series for preschool children, with an essential message (“God made you special; He loves you very much”) crafted for children who are not yet capable of abstract thinking. “Should we teach sanctification and justification for preschool children? No, too soon,” Phil says. Hearing complaints that VeggieTales was weak on the gospel, Phil was puzzled until he began to understand that older children were watching the videos too. Even college students.
“Now we’re trying to put more meat in with the milk,” Phil says.
How silly is too silly?
Early on, when he was looking for a partner for his new project, Phil had a formal presentation with Tyndale House executives—one of whom was the son of Ken Taylor (founder of the company and translator of the Living Bible).
“Mark Taylor turned to me and said, ‘Are all of the characters going to be this silly? How are you going to create any reverence for God?’ ” Phil recalls.
This is a legitimate question. When critics weighed in on the original VeggieTales series, they tended to offer concerns that the cartoon format unsuccessfully mixed fun with Bible teaching. “That’s tricky,” says Vischer in response. “With VeggieTales my goal was to go through the story, mark off what is sacred, what is the essential message of a passage. Don’t mess with that message, don’t parody, it’s sacred.”
Then, Phil readily admits, he often inserted jokes and visual gags—such as when Daniel (portrayed by Larry the Cucumber) leaves the lion’s den and says to the lions, “See ya guys later! Thanks for the pizza!”
He’s heard my questions before, and pauses for a second before saying, “In some cases I think we probably went too far.”
It’s a question he’s still thinking about. “Kids are tuned by our culture to expect things to be entertaining. My mother hates this! She is a proponent of slowing kids down to make them think deeply about God. But kids spend all week watching Hannah Montana on TV.”
The development team took a different path for the new “What’s in the Bible?” series, mixing puppets, cartoons, and real people (that would be Phil) talking about the Bible. His intention was to show a clear difference between serious didactic content and, uh, the silly parts.
So, yes, when it comes time for Phil to talk about the canon of Scripture, he cuts to cartoon pirate (“who knows a lot about church history”) right on cue, asking if someone said “cannon” (insert explosion sounds here). But this is followed by a spelling lesson on the difference between the word with two n’s and “canon,” the Biblical set of books. And yes, the silliness eventually cuts back to Phil, who clarifies that church councils have agreed on the 66 books we have in our Bibles today.
“When it is really time to talk about something serious, I won’t try to do it with a puppet. I don’t think I can,” Phil says. “It’s the Mr. Rogers part of me. I want to explain the tricky parts of the Bible as an adult human.”
The tricky question of baptism
“I don’t yet have an answer!” Phil honestly replies when I ask him how he’ll handle the matter of baptism in the new series. (We both laughed when I asked him about this—I’m guessing he knew the question was coming, given the title of our magazine.)
Here’s where the matter of “what to teach our children” becomes a bit tricky. Phil himself was immersed as a child, after he became a believer, an important doctrine taught by the Christian and Missionary Alliance in which he was reared. Now that he and his wife, Lisa, have children of their own, they have chosen to teach the same to their children. (Their family attends a C&MA church near Wheaton, Ill.)
But living just a few miles from Christianity Today, Phil well understands that the larger evangelical world does not have a consensus about believer’s baptism, even though we may share essential beliefs about the gospel. Some important issues continue to stretch the logical limits of his current plan to “teach the controversy.” At the very least, Phil says, he’ll want to emphasize that baptism does not bring salvation. “I would have a hard time leaving that in the air. That is centrist evangelical belief. No evangelical should believe that baptism saves a person.”
Our conversation has been interesting and cordial, so he gives a good-natured laugh when I repeat the baptism question.
“I imagine I’ll get a lot of feedback from a lot of people!”
“I have no problem with denominations teaching their distinctive theology. They should. But if kids come through their teaching with no idea that anyone else believes differently, they can get blindsided and end up wondering, Why didn’t anyone tell me this?
“Some of what we learn in church is so watered down. Some teachers skip the tricky bits. Some paint Christianity like African folk tales, as if the story was ‘How the Zebra Got Its Stripes.’ Suddenly the students get to junior high science and learn—Wait!—that’s not how a zebra got its stripes. And then they begin to ask more questions. They get to college, hear one obnoxious professor, and their faith is knocked out from under them.”
So for all of the times our children have heard sound teaching about the “tricky bits” of the Bible, well, hug your Sunday School teacher today. And here’s a hug to Phil for giving us some thought-provoking questions.
While we’re at it, let’s hug those curriculum developers from Regular Baptist Press. They plan carefully, helping us teach the whole counsel of the Word.
Tricky, indeed.
Kevin Mungons is managing editor of the Baptist Bulletin.
