Nothing like searching for your wallet and pulling out a VeggieTales CD.

(I’d brought it in the car to play for Joseph during one of our jaunts, and forgotten to remove it from my purse, obviously.)

I love VeggieTales – really clever stuff, especially the music. Love The Bunny Song. And the one where the Bob the Tomato is translating the self-aggrandizing song that Larry the Cucumber is singing in Spanish. Too funny.

But then, I started thinking – about this whole genre. Not the amusing music and wisecracks and cute characters, but the genre of having the cute characters act out Biblical stories. It’s pretty extensive, and it bothers me.

(I know. Ms. Spoilsport. But that’s my job)

See, I watch the vegetables, or the bugs or the furry animals dramatize David and Goliath or the Fall of Jericho, and there’s a level of it that just doesn’t make sense to me. We’re brining a sense of cuteness and fun, complete with sitcom jokes and musical comedy numbers into stories that are at root, very serious and part of an epic, not an episode in a cartoon. They involve sin and death and, through all of it, hope. People die.

It seems to me to be a fairly recent phenomenon, as well. History is full of attempts to bring the Bible and the faith to children in ways they can understand – simplified Bibles with beautiful illustrations, songs and poems that capture the story and its meaning. But as I search through my understanding of that kind of material that existed, say from the 19th century onward to the early 1960’s, what’s going on is a presentation of the Scripture, simplified, but still on its own terms. It’s not raw material that’s then shaped into something else featuring other characters and expressed in the pop cultural language of the period.

We struggle with this all the time – how to effectively convey faith to children and young people without diminishing the meaning of the content, but at the same time, making it a story they want to read and can easily see how to apply to their own lives?

I have just never been sure that this kind of approach – not using their language to teach lessons or communicate truth, but re-making Scripture stories completely over in our own image. It seems to diminish them, somehow.

So, the broader question is, how do we meet the needs of children and young people – the need to encounter and understand the faith in a meaningful way, without diminishing it?