It was hard to contain my excitement the day, a few weeks ago, when Jim Wideman agreed to an interview for this project! For the unfamiliar, Jim is an author, leader, consultant, speaker... a man whose opinions are some of the most sought-after in children's ministry ("CM") circles -- seriously, he's been involved in that world for over THIRTY years, has worked at something like 5 churches, one of which is perhaps the single most influential church in seeing CM go from an afterthought to a movement. And as I learned in our interview, his memory for dates, people, places, and a general timeline for CM is, as my Western coworkers would say, "Like a steel trap." Heads up: I could have easily written a blog post about Jim himself, but that info is available in his books, so this post features Jim more as a conduit of information. It'll read more like a narrative about the '70s than a biography of Jim.Today, CM is an industry, a business. Music, costumes, conferences, books, lighting, stage design -- as far as your imagination (and your budget) goes, there are products being sold. It's clear: there's an overwhelming demand for all things CM. Even just the staggering amount of conversations happening in churches and even blogs, there's a buzz that, as far as we know, is new. It hasn't been around before, which is pretty cool for those of us looking to improve in our CM efforts! But it hasn't always been that way.
In fact, just a few decades ago, the conversation was almost nonexistent. CM itself consisted of kids sitting with their parents during church. As Jim and many others have confirmed, the usual sentiment was, crassly put, "Sit down and shut up." Quite the contrast to today's puppets and pyrotechnics! The thought of a separate church service for kids just hadn't shown up on church leaders' radar yet. As Jim informed, you'd be hard-pressed to find a church of under 1,000 people that even had a children's pastor/director. But everything changed in the '70s.
The '70s was an absolutely explosive decade for CM. Virtually all Protestant churches shifted from a "Sunday School" model to "Kids Church". Let me magnify this shift. The typical adult, church service has the following elements in some order, at some time: worship songs, offering, communion, sermon, and prayer. Sunday school, for our discussion, is an age-appropriate educational format ("class") that kids attend in lieu of the (adult) "sermon", or perhaps in addition to it. "Kids Church", however, is ALL of those adult elements offered to kids, in a separate room, with no parents in the room except perhaps for volunteers. A kid's entire church experience on a Sunday is this separate-from-family experience. It's literally kids-church. The formal name and details changes from church to church, but that new model took prominence in the '70s.
With this format of person-on-stage speaking to an audience came insane production value. Think Michael Jackson's "This Is It!" DVD.
Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. Prepare. Practice. Visually, audibly, kinesthetically enhance the experience. Deliver the experience. ... you know, production value! We could do a whole book on the companies whose bottom-line probably doubled in the '70s (Oriental Trading, etc.) due to CM product sales! Jim, himself, actually invented musical accompaniment to puppet skits, "puppet tracks", around this time.
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My favorite discovery during my interview with Jim came forth when he brought up Bozo the Clown. CM and nonprofits set the stage for a rather complex counterpoint which surprised me. Nonprofits/parachurch orgs like Focus on the Family, Campus Crusade, and LeSEA Broadcasting Network started offering higher and higher amounts of "Christian culture" to, in a sense, battle the "sinful messages" of secular TV and music. Many provided "family friendly" alternatives to the free-spirited "make love not war" media. I even remember as a child shows like McGee & Me, and Adventures in Odyssey. BUT. While you had church people taking up arms against secular media, CM leaders -- and church leaders in general -- were actually taking their cues from secular culture on how to do church better! CM leaders took notes on teaching methods from Sesame Street, the Muppet Show, Bozo the Clown, etc.! Such shows were successfully using creative methods to teach vowels and consonants - so churches adopted these to teach Bible stories. You can still find this today - I even attended a conference in March where the opener was a pyrotechnically enhanced version of Katy Perry's "Firework" sung by the worship band. This juxtaposition of battling the content while adopting the methods is absolutely fascinating. One of the first "children's evangelists", they were called, to capitalize on this was Von Saum, a.k.a. "Captain Hook", who took his name right from the Peter Pan story.
So, like, the interview was choc-full of information. But the key question I had for Jim was, "What need was children's church trying to meet? Why did it suddenly enter so many people's thoughts as a thing to do?" His answer was totally surprising and, much like your favorite (or, maybe, your least favorite) episode of American Idol, we'll find out the answer next time! (The sound of cyber-tomatoes whizzing by my ears suddenly fills the room...)
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My favorite discovery during my interview with Jim came forth when he brought up Bozo the Clown. CM and nonprofits set the stage for a rather complex counterpoint which surprised me. Nonprofits/parachurch orgs like Focus on the Family, Campus Crusade, and LeSEA Broadcasting Network started offering higher and higher amounts of "Christian culture" to, in a sense, battle the "sinful messages" of secular TV and music. Many provided "family friendly" alternatives to the free-spirited "make love not war" media. I even remember as a child shows like McGee & Me, and Adventures in Odyssey. BUT. While you had church people taking up arms against secular media, CM leaders -- and church leaders in general -- were actually taking their cues from secular culture on how to do church better! CM leaders took notes on teaching methods from Sesame Street, the Muppet Show, Bozo the Clown, etc.! Such shows were successfully using creative methods to teach vowels and consonants - so churches adopted these to teach Bible stories. You can still find this today - I even attended a conference in March where the opener was a pyrotechnically enhanced version of Katy Perry's "Firework" sung by the worship band. This juxtaposition of battling the content while adopting the methods is absolutely fascinating. One of the first "children's evangelists", they were called, to capitalize on this was Von Saum, a.k.a. "Captain Hook", who took his name right from the Peter Pan story.
So, like, the interview was choc-full of information. But the key question I had for Jim was, "What need was children's church trying to meet? Why did it suddenly enter so many people's thoughts as a thing to do?" His answer was totally surprising and, much like your favorite (or, maybe, your least favorite) episode of American Idol, we'll find out the answer next time! (The sound of cyber-tomatoes whizzing by my ears suddenly fills the room...)
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