I’m wading through “a Generous Orthodoxy” right now by Brian McLaren, a challenging, lengthy but worthwhile read, but at the beginning of Chapter One he mentioned something that triggered an avalanche of memories that had been held back in my mind for a long time:
Flannel graphs.
I'm not sure if you would know what they were if you didn’t go to a Protestant Sunday School as a kid, or if you never attended Bible School. But at any rate, they now seem horribly outdated and irrelevant, especially from a 21st century perspective.
They worked like this: a piece of cardboard or thin plywood – about, say two feet by three feet – was covered with a piece of felt that acted as a background. The board was placed on an easel in front of a group of wide-eyed, unsuspecting children who had NO idea what was coming next.
The teacher would then tell a story, using characters made out of felt that were placed on the felt-covered board along with other background items. It was kind of like Colorforms only way cooler, because there were all sorts of characters and items, whales, soldiers, palace columns, kings and queens, and as a little kid, the magic of seeing things stick to other things without use of glue (we didn’t even have Velcro, yet!) was nothing short of amazing. It defied the law of gravity! And if you were REALLY lucky that week, the leader chose YOU to be the assistant that placed the items on the board (and to help hold on the one or two that had a big, fat crease in them because they’d been mislaid inside the plastic Ziploc baggy that housed all the flannel pieces.)
So the teacher would place a character on the board, sometimes telling a story from the Bible like David and Goliath, or Jonah and the Whale, or whatever. But sometimes it would be another story.
The one I always remember when I think about flannel graphs involved a little frog that hopped all around a little sky blue felt lake with all of his little felt frog friends. I think there was a grasshopper or something in the story, too, but it’s hard to remember details from thirty years ago. But the story is essentially this:
(Brown felt leaves added to flannel graph) “Mr. Frog’s friends realized, one by one, that autumn had come and was leading to winter. Brrr…it’s sure getting cold they all began to realize (teacher brings out some frogs that have little felt scarves and mittens), and one by one they all began hibernating (teacher takes off frogs one by one from the board)…but not Mr. Frog (white felt snow added) and soon – oh no! The snow had come (grey flannel added to cover the pond) and now ice! The pond was frozen! Mr. Frog had waited TOO LONG!”
And a group of twenty wide-eyed children were surprised to see that, yes, clearly, Mr. Frog wouldn’t be able to swim through that ice – she wasn’t kidding. You could see it, just look at how gray it was, it was indeed frozen – the frog had waited too long. What was he going to do now?
But of course, he couldn’t do anything, the teacher would explain, leaving us all shocked, wanting more. A group of twenty school children, previously wiggling in our seats, now feeling an unsettling quiet move in like a midnight fog.
I was like six or seven -- I liked frogs, right? And at first many of us were wondering, what are you trying to tell us lady?
But I knew EXACTLY what she was telling us, I knew the pond was like heaven, and Mr. Frog had waited too long to ask Jesus into his heart and now he would die and never play with his froggy friends again, never taste another black, felt fly like the teacher had shown them do before and he would spend eternity in Hell for thinking he could try and slide under the doors of Heaven as the gate came down like a set of bank vault bars.
Those of us raised in the Church knew -- you couldn’t just pull a fast one on Jesus like that.
Morbid and frightening, to be sure, and from the perspective of a forty year old, I now think it's a little weird to think our Church leadership would use such blatant fear and terror to push a few more kids each week off the fence of un-decidedness into the Milk-and-Honey Promised Land of Protestant Christianity, but there you have it.
Life as a Free Methodist.
We don’t exactly do this with our kids any more, I suppose, but I don’t think we realize what they really might be bringing away from many of the stories we do give them: Jonah and the Whale (do exactly what God tells you to, or something terrible could happen); David and Goliath (consider this from the point of the CHILDREN of the Philistines); and my personal favorite, Noah and the Ark (we give them animals, and leave out the part about thousands of people perishing in a violent flood, scratching and clawing at the wooden ark doors, begging to have their lives spared as their lungs slowly fill up with water, while Noah and company only listen in pity. Ouch.)
We did get a glimpse of this children's perspective with our second child Isaac, who seemed most fascinated by one specific picture in a Bible Story book, a cartoon-like picture of Jesus hanging on the cross. He was mesmerized by this at age three, and would point to the blood spots on Jesus’ hands and ask, “Ow-y?”
I think kids get all this at some point – we all realized these things as we grew older, after all, and maybe it’s just a necessary part of growing up, that realization that what you were given as a kid was a greatly simplified, watered down version of what’s actually in that Bible book.
It’s insane to me that we tried to do this with adults (still do, though rarely now.) We had pastors explaining to people that no one knows when they’ll die, that you could walk from this VERY BUILDING, RIGHT NOW, TONIGHT, and get hit by a bus on your way home. If have haven’t read it already, Garrison Keillor’s “Lake Wobegon” puts into crisp detail exactly what Protestants experienced as recently as twenty or thirty years ago.
Christianity as Fire Insurance.
So all of this was conjured by a few words from Brian McLaren’s book. I’m excited to keep reading it, as I can already tell that even though McLaren’s about 10 years older than me, I’m going to identify heavily with much of what he’s experienced in his past.
I can’t wait to get to the good parts in the book – where he goes into more detail about the Flannel Graphs…
Flannel graphs.
I'm not sure if you would know what they were if you didn’t go to a Protestant Sunday School as a kid, or if you never attended Bible School. But at any rate, they now seem horribly outdated and irrelevant, especially from a 21st century perspective.
They worked like this: a piece of cardboard or thin plywood – about, say two feet by three feet – was covered with a piece of felt that acted as a background. The board was placed on an easel in front of a group of wide-eyed, unsuspecting children who had NO idea what was coming next.
The teacher would then tell a story, using characters made out of felt that were placed on the felt-covered board along with other background items. It was kind of like Colorforms only way cooler, because there were all sorts of characters and items, whales, soldiers, palace columns, kings and queens, and as a little kid, the magic of seeing things stick to other things without use of glue (we didn’t even have Velcro, yet!) was nothing short of amazing. It defied the law of gravity! And if you were REALLY lucky that week, the leader chose YOU to be the assistant that placed the items on the board (and to help hold on the one or two that had a big, fat crease in them because they’d been mislaid inside the plastic Ziploc baggy that housed all the flannel pieces.)
So the teacher would place a character on the board, sometimes telling a story from the Bible like David and Goliath, or Jonah and the Whale, or whatever. But sometimes it would be another story.
The one I always remember when I think about flannel graphs involved a little frog that hopped all around a little sky blue felt lake with all of his little felt frog friends. I think there was a grasshopper or something in the story, too, but it’s hard to remember details from thirty years ago. But the story is essentially this:
(Brown felt leaves added to flannel graph) “Mr. Frog’s friends realized, one by one, that autumn had come and was leading to winter. Brrr…it’s sure getting cold they all began to realize (teacher brings out some frogs that have little felt scarves and mittens), and one by one they all began hibernating (teacher takes off frogs one by one from the board)…but not Mr. Frog (white felt snow added) and soon – oh no! The snow had come (grey flannel added to cover the pond) and now ice! The pond was frozen! Mr. Frog had waited TOO LONG!”
And a group of twenty wide-eyed children were surprised to see that, yes, clearly, Mr. Frog wouldn’t be able to swim through that ice – she wasn’t kidding. You could see it, just look at how gray it was, it was indeed frozen – the frog had waited too long. What was he going to do now?
But of course, he couldn’t do anything, the teacher would explain, leaving us all shocked, wanting more. A group of twenty school children, previously wiggling in our seats, now feeling an unsettling quiet move in like a midnight fog.
I was like six or seven -- I liked frogs, right? And at first many of us were wondering, what are you trying to tell us lady?
But I knew EXACTLY what she was telling us, I knew the pond was like heaven, and Mr. Frog had waited too long to ask Jesus into his heart and now he would die and never play with his froggy friends again, never taste another black, felt fly like the teacher had shown them do before and he would spend eternity in Hell for thinking he could try and slide under the doors of Heaven as the gate came down like a set of bank vault bars.
Those of us raised in the Church knew -- you couldn’t just pull a fast one on Jesus like that.
Morbid and frightening, to be sure, and from the perspective of a forty year old, I now think it's a little weird to think our Church leadership would use such blatant fear and terror to push a few more kids each week off the fence of un-decidedness into the Milk-and-Honey Promised Land of Protestant Christianity, but there you have it.
Life as a Free Methodist.
We don’t exactly do this with our kids any more, I suppose, but I don’t think we realize what they really might be bringing away from many of the stories we do give them: Jonah and the Whale (do exactly what God tells you to, or something terrible could happen); David and Goliath (consider this from the point of the CHILDREN of the Philistines); and my personal favorite, Noah and the Ark (we give them animals, and leave out the part about thousands of people perishing in a violent flood, scratching and clawing at the wooden ark doors, begging to have their lives spared as their lungs slowly fill up with water, while Noah and company only listen in pity. Ouch.)
We did get a glimpse of this children's perspective with our second child Isaac, who seemed most fascinated by one specific picture in a Bible Story book, a cartoon-like picture of Jesus hanging on the cross. He was mesmerized by this at age three, and would point to the blood spots on Jesus’ hands and ask, “Ow-y?”
I think kids get all this at some point – we all realized these things as we grew older, after all, and maybe it’s just a necessary part of growing up, that realization that what you were given as a kid was a greatly simplified, watered down version of what’s actually in that Bible book.
It’s insane to me that we tried to do this with adults (still do, though rarely now.) We had pastors explaining to people that no one knows when they’ll die, that you could walk from this VERY BUILDING, RIGHT NOW, TONIGHT, and get hit by a bus on your way home. If have haven’t read it already, Garrison Keillor’s “Lake Wobegon” puts into crisp detail exactly what Protestants experienced as recently as twenty or thirty years ago.
Christianity as Fire Insurance.
So all of this was conjured by a few words from Brian McLaren’s book. I’m excited to keep reading it, as I can already tell that even though McLaren’s about 10 years older than me, I’m going to identify heavily with much of what he’s experienced in his past.
I can’t wait to get to the good parts in the book – where he goes into more detail about the Flannel Graphs…
I am excited that you are reading all these great books...makes me want to go back and read them all over again. This book is deep and difficult at times but pays off in some incredible ideas. It makes me think of one of your other posts. After reading most of these books I had more questions than answers...I ended up feeling less sure about what I believed (not a bad thing at all) but somehow more confident about my relationship with God.
ReplyDeleteI agree very much with your last sentence. I was a little put off by how long it has taken me to actually get through all the bs at the front of the book (2 intros? a chapter 0? seriously--) but I can tell the read will be worth it. I'm excited, too, to have so much other good reference material cited in it, that it makes me want to spend like a thousand dollars and take six weeks out of my life to read...oh, wait, I work for the government, I can do that anyway...
ReplyDeleteYou're going to love the book. And quite possibly not be too fond of being a Free Methodist. Or any denomination for that matter. Keep processing brother.
ReplyDelete