Whether it was writing for VeggieTales, or for my new educational series, What’s in the Bible?, I’ve always started with two goals: First, to lead my audience to a new understanding of a spiritual truth. Second, to make my lesson entertaining, or the first goal just isn’t going to happen.
This leads to the issue of generating even more “hard-to-please” Christian consumers. (“This Sunday school class isn’t as funny as VeggieTales! I’m outta here!”) I wish there was an easy answer to this problem, but there isn’t. Once upon a time, kids were more than happy to sit around the fire, listening to Pa read aloud from the “Good Book.” Of course that was typically after 8-12 hours of hard work in a field or a textile mill. Maybe even a coal mine.
Kids today don’t spend eight hours a day in a factory or a coal mine. They spend eight hours a day watching the Disney Channel or playing video games on an Xbox 360. As a result, dryly reading from the “Good Book” seems to have lost its appeal. Hence a talking tomato and cucumber, or a bunch of wisecracking puppets—and the problem of consumer Christians.
So what to do? I use humor to get kids’ attention, but then I try to slow them down at some point so we can talk seriously. Humor buys me that opportunity and earns me the right to talk seriously.
—Phil Vischer Veggie Tales Creator Wheaton, Illinois
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