Almost 30 years after creating a hit Christian show about talking vegetables, Phil Vischer is still worried that children don’t know about the Bible.
“The Christian faith provides a narrative that really makes sense of the world,” he explained over the phone this week. “Why is the world the way it is? Should I be surprised that it is the way it is? What’s the solution to the world being the way it is?”
“We’re not doing a good job, really, giving kids a basic understanding of the Bible,” he continued, “and the Bible is where this narrative comes from.”
Vischer has been committed to explaining this narrative for decades. He’s best known as the mind behind VeggieTales, a television show he co-created in 1993 to help children learn the Bible. In the show, biblical stories are relayed by a handful of talking vegetables, including Larry the Cucumber and Bob the Tomato, voiced by Vischer himself.
Despite the show’s popularity — it has sold 175 million videos — a rocky period led VeggieTales’s owner, Big Idea Entertainment, to bankruptcy in 2003. While the show is now up and running again thanks to a new owner, NBC Universal, and a new platform, Yippee, a streaming service for kids, Vischer isn’t sticking to talking veggies. He’s had another big idea.
Last September, Vischer released Laugh and Learn Bible for Kids: The Gospel in 52 Five-Minute Bible Stories. A 348-page children’s Bible aimed at grade schoolers, it tells the story of the Bible from creation to revelation.
“Kids want to be a part of a story,” Vischer said, explaining why he decided to write the book. “Everybody wants to be part of a story.”
“So much of the secularized world says there is no bigger story,” he continued. “It’s just random. It’s all just atoms. There’s no magic behind the curtain. There’s no storyteller. And so, if kids don’t have the story, they’ll find one somewhere else. They’ll turn to Star Wars, Harry Potter, you name it. Sometimes, in the church, we make the mistake of not presenting the Bible as a cohesive story. What kids never get is the big story that all those little stories fit into that helps them make sense of life.”
Last month, Vischer released a second children’s Bible, this one for toddlers. Laugh and Learn Bible for Little Ones has just 15 one-minute stories, which he said will be easier for 3-year-olds to comprehend when their parents read to them at night. This is the biggest perk of Vischer’s turn from television to books, he explained. Both of the children’s Bibles can encourage families to spend more time together as parents read to their children.
“Reading is not going away,” he said. “You can’t replace it with a screen.”
With each book, Vischer has tried to retell Bible stories in a way that will make sense to children, without changing the fundamentals of the story, he said.
“In the beginning, there was God, just God,” he said, reading from the first story in Laugh and Learn Bible for Kids. “Nothing else, no trees, no hummingbirds, no ants, no stars, no galaxies, no mountains, no whales, no bats, no kids, no grown-ups, no grandmas, no grandpas, no caterpillars, no lakes, no oceans, no horses, no elephants, and no frogs. Not even little tiny ones. Just God.”
The opening lines are a sort of mashup of the first chapters of the books of Genesis and John. Here, Vischer hasn’t simplified the words of the Bible; he’s expanded on them.
“I want that to sink in for kids,” he explained, adding that the book then goes on to introduce the doctrine of the Trinity, which he described as “incredibly challenging but incredibly important to learn.”
VeggieTales may have taught a generation about Daniel and the lion’s den, but it never addressed anything so complex as the Christian doctrine of one God, three persons. Instead, the series focused primarily on Old Testament stories, using biblical narratives as a way to teach Christian morals. Vischer said that’s no longer his goal.
When he first started writing VeggieTales, Vischer was a 24-year-old college dropout who had been kicked out of Bible college “for not attending chapel reliably enough.” With VeggieTales, he said, he was just “kind of regurgitating my own Sunday school upbringing.”
“Then, I got distracted by building what I was hoping was going to be the next Disney, and I was hoping to be the next Walt when VeggieTales became a pop culture phenomenon, and then it all fell apart, and I lost it,” he said. “And I realized that I had made the work I was trying to do for God more important than my own relationship with God.”
When he began to revisit his faith, his philosophy on storytelling changed.
“With VeggieTales, because we were so focused on Christian values, we had never really taken the time to explain Christianity,” he said. “It’s one thing to tell kids, ‘You should be more forgiving because it’s in the Bible, and God wants you to,’ but it’s another thing to explain how God helps us become people who want to forgive.”
“Otherwise,” Vischer continued, “the Bible is just a book of rules. It’s more homework. And kids hate homework.”
Vischer is done giving kids homework, and he said he’s hoping that his new books will help both parents and children learn more about the Bible in a way that lets them understand the world and their place in it. It’s not just about teaching morals. It’s about telling a story.
He’s working on a few other projects, too: The What’s in the Bible? video series, Bible study videos through RightNow Media, and The Mr. Phil Show, during which he discusses a book of the Bible and a figure from Christian history. He has something new coming up, too, but he said he can’t talk about it yet. It may seem like Vischer has a lot going on, but all of his projects follow the same theme.
“As we’re looking at a culture that’s so hungry for story,” he said, “we’re forgetting the central story that shaped Western civilization, and trying to bring that back to life for kids is, I think, a very valuable pursuit.”
At one point, Vischer may have forgotten that story. Now, he’s helping others remember.
