New Church Life Mar/Apr 2014 | Page 91

   :  ,    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