On Veggies and the Gospel

Very sweet thoughts and honest conviction shared here by the creator of Veggie Tales.   I found this excerpt on  Hutchmoot, a conference where Phil Vischer will be speaking.  It looks like these words about his dream that came true (Big Idea Productions/ Veggie Tales) then suddenly collapsed, are from his memoir Me, Myself & Bob.  

I looked back at the previous ten years and realized I had spent ten years trying to convince kids to behave “Christianly” without actually teaching them Christianity. And that was a pretty serious conviction. You can say, "Hey kids, be more forgiving because the Bible says so," or, "Hey kids, be more kind because the Bible says so!" But that isn’t Christianity, it’s morality.

American Christian[s]… are drinking a cocktail that’s a mix of the Protestant work ethic, the American dream, and the gospel. And we’ve intertwined them so completely that we can’t tell them apart anymore. Our gospel has become a gospel of following your dreams and being good so God will make all your dreams come true. It’s the Oprah god… We’ve completely taken this Disney notion of "when you wish upon a star, your dreams come true" and melded that with faith and come up with something completely different. There’s something wrong in a culture that preaches nothing is more sacred than your dream. I mean, we walk away from marriages to follow our dreams. We abandon children to follow our dreams. We hurt people in the name of our dreams, which as a Christian is just preposterous.