revelation, not revelations

As part of my youth director responsibilities, I teach Sunday School for the youth group at my church. Last Sunday we began a study of the book of Revelation, in response to the desires of some of my kids. I haven't done an in-depth book-focused study with my kids yet, so this is going to be something new.

I took a class on the book of Revelation my senior year of undergrad. It was a theology elective with Dr. Allen, a professor who likes to point out how we're all heretical on one point or another. And for this class, we had to write two major papers. However, rather than writing the papers, I and four friends instead filmed two video projects.

Our first project was called Philadelphia, Ephesus, and Laodecia [sic]: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, and it featured us interpreting three of Paul's seven letters to churches literally in pun-filled ways. (Ex: "I will write on each of them the name of my God and the name of his city" - I write the phrases on Josh's arms and belly with a big marker.) Our second project was called The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and did what it says on the tin - we saddled up makeshift stick-horses and rode them around the campus "killing" people.

I'm going to go ahead and admit something here because we already have our degrees and Dr. Allen can't dock my grade now - we didn't really do much research for these projects. I don't mean to say that we didn't read anything or learn anything about the concepts therein. I just mean that we put a lot more effort into filming and editing and coming up with ridiculous scenarios than, say, doing the actual academic research and reflection that our classmates were. While other students were reading journal articles, we were doing this:

We put the videos up on YouTube, although the Four Horsemen are now incomplete because one (and, mysteriously, only one) was flagged for copyright infringement (music) and blocked. This really wouldn't bother me except that the computer on which these videos were saved crashed and I didn't have the files backed up. Thus, Part 2 may sadly be lost to history. (Part 1 is still going strong, with an inexplicable 3,026 views as of the last tally.)

I've wondered to myself if these videos were an academic waste of time, if we somehow "cheated" the system by getting away without writing anything. However, we were able to rally a diverse cross-section of the Howard Payne campus to participate in these things, even recruiting an entire class to pelt each other with paper balls with the professor's blessing. (Sadly, this amazing scene is in the blocked video.) We engaged with the subject matter in a new and different way, making it our own. We got our friends to actually discuss and think about the book of Revelation without getting hung up on tangental arguments about the Rapture or other topics.

And in the end, isn't that what learning is all about?

Finally, I'm going to show my kids part of the first video before our discussion this Sunday. You can't say the video isn't useful if it can be used as a teaching aid.