Phil Vischer was the creator of Veggie Tales. Veggie Tales didn't work out the way he envisioned, or he envisioned it wrong. I'm not sure which--I haven't read his memoir. But I keep seeing excerpts from it popping up on the blogosphere and I must say, it sounds remarkable. Consider this:
I
looked back at the previous ten years and realized I had spent ten
years trying to convince kids to behave “Christianly” without actually
teaching them Christianity. And that was a pretty serious conviction.
You can say, "Hey kids, be more forgiving because the Bible says so,"
or, "Hey kids, be more kind because the Bible says so!" But that isn’t
Christianity, it’s morality.
American Christian[s]… are drinking a
cocktail that’s a mix of the Protestant work ethic, the American dream,
and the gospel. And we’ve intertwined them so completely that we can’t
tell them apart anymore. Our gospel has become a gospel of following
your dreams and being good so God will make all your dreams come true.
It’s the Oprah god… We’ve completely taken this Disney notion of "when
you wish upon a star, your dreams come true" and melded that with faith
and come up with something completely different. There’s something wrong
in a culture that preaches nothing is more sacred than your dream. I
mean, we walk away from marriages to follow our dreams. We abandon
children to follow our dreams. We hurt people in the name of our dreams,
which as a Christian is just preposterous.
Remarkable. Absolutely remarkable. Do you believe the gospel or some perverted version of the American dream and the gospel? What are you teaching your children? The gospel or the "power" of their dreams?
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