As you may have heard, Faithlife’s motion graphics designers are hard at work producing Bible videos for kids. The project has been dubbed Bible Sounds: Anthems for Little Theologians, and the team hopes to break the mold of Christian TV shows for kids.

How, you ask? By throwing away the idea that kids’ stories need to have morals.
If kids can only visualize the Bible in moral platitudes, it becomes little more than a big, boring book.

The Bible is living and active (Hebrews 4:12), and its truths permeate all of life. As the church, the stories and adventures we point our kids to should reflect that. Drawing inspiration from the Bible should free artists to tell beautiful, powerful stories of the intersections between faith and life. But sometimes looking at Christian trinkets and other faith-based art, you’d think that biblical inspiration was a burden!

“If my kids are going to watch videos,” animator Fred Sprinkle says, “I want the videos to teach them something about the Bible or spark their imagination with a vision of God’s kingdom.”

Expecting more from Christian kids videos

It’s not just that moralizing is too simple. Sprinkle says, “I doubt the power of songs and videos that directly exhort kids to ‘obey your parents.’ I do, however, totally believe in the power of the stories in the Bible that implicitly show the beauty of obedience to a loving, grace-filled parent, like the prodigal son.”

When people asked Jesus to explain complex theological concepts, he often told parables. 2,000 years ago Jesus embodied the long-since clichéd rule of storytelling, “Show, don’t tell.”

So why do so many Christian TV shows for kids feel the burden to explicitly tell kids what to take away from the story?
Bible Sounds is being produced with biblical literacy in mind. “We focus on the Bible,” Fred says. “We don’t focus on behavior modification.”

While our motion graphics artists have been producing Bible art for years, and a number of Faithlife employees secretly double as talented musicians, the team recruited the help of Pastor Luke Morton and Jeffrey Kranz, founder of Overview Bible to write theologically-rich songs and scripts.

In this video, Fred tells a little more of the story behind Bible Sounds: