: ,
donation we were able to hire Curtis and Matthew Childs to develop two videos
aimed at teens: Joseph’s Brothers in Your Head and It Doesn’t Work without
Benjamin. They teach specifically New Church ideas about the internal sense
of the stories in the Word and how it illuminates our own lives. Together, they
have been viewed more than 2,000 times.
One of our other videos for the Joseph series was called Forgiveness
Experiment, (www.bitly.com/ForgivenessExperiment) which introduced New
Church ideas about sin, and how forgiveness works. This has been quite popular
with a variety of ages, being viewed 2,290 times. Last year, while working
on a series of Sunday school lessons on the story of creation, we developed
similar “object lesson” activities including a water experiment, (www.bitly.
com/CleaningSelfishThoughts) which demonstrates the idea of cleaning selfish
and untrue thoughts from our minds; and Light and Darkness Experiment,
(www.bitly.com/LightAndDarkness) demonstrating the separation of light and
darkness in the creation story, and the distinction between spiritual thoughts
and natural thoughts.
After the initial push to develop the videos related to the Joseph story, we
quickly realized that the YouTube channel could also be an effective way to
share materials that we already had repurposed as videos.
Janet Lockard embraced this opportunity, creating several videos for young
children from illustrated stories from the Word that had been part of our old
Early Childhood Religion Program. On one of these, The Call of Samuel, (www.
bitly.com/TheCallOfSamuel) elicited a comment: “I love this; hoping to use it for
Sunday school lessons, but…we don’t have internet or anything in our church.
Is there any way we could use it, please?” Happily, we were able to explain that
all the videos can be downloaded to laptops or tablets, and then shown without
internet connection.
We were lucky enough to have two different sets of illustrations for this
story so we made a second video using the song, The Lord Calls Samuel, (www.
bitly.com/TheLordCallsSamuel) by John and Lori Odhner. Not surprisingly,
songs make popular videos. We have been blessed to be able to use some songs
by New Church composers, including Christine Taylor and Hildegarde and
Warren David.
The most frequently watched video developed to accompany the Creation
Sunday School lessons this past year was the Seven Days of Creation (www.bitly.
com/GCED7DaysOfCreation). While the song is very simple for young children,
we are pleased that it seems to be enjoyed by all ages. As one person wrote: “The
Day One video is just so fantastic! The New Church of Phoenix used it to open
their Journey program, showing it to children and adults alike during their
worship service. The response was amazing. It touched people emotionally.”
One of the most delightful things about working on these videos has been
187