Movie Camp

Movie Camp at Nordeast: Ethical, Cultural Training can be Fun by Dean J. Seal

This week had our second movie camp of the summer, and it was a treat. I used to look down on the task of teaching kids, because I wanted to work in the realm of grown up ideas. But I was wrong to think you can't do both. And as every teacher knows, the pleasure of the work is what the teacher get to learn. And when dealing n the classics, it is always wise to review them on occasion so that you remember what they are saying.
Movie camp is an idea I stole from my wife Kirsten. She started doing movie camps when our kid was in a home school environment. Kids love to make movies, and Kirsten gave them free reign. We still do a secular one every year, and the titles of the two films were "Don't Drink the Windex" and "Volcano Espionage!" Guess which one was done by Boys and which is done by Girls.
The idea here is to gather the kids together (ages 8-13) and do theater exercises to warm them up and get them comfortable. Then after lunch and some running around on the conveniently located playground, I read them several parables. Then they pick one or two and re-write them to make them contemporary. By putting the stories into their own time, they learn that the lessons of the stories are also for their own time. It's one method of learning about the Bible in a way that involves a lot of running around, putting together costumes, learning how to talk like Arnold Schwatzenegger, and going in front of the camera.
We settled on The Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37) , with a touch of the Tax Collector and the Pharisee (Luke 18:9-14). The Tax Collector, you may (or may not) recall, felt bad about what he did and who he was. The Pharisee was proud, boastful about how good he was. We made the Pharisee one of the people who walks by the robbery victim, and we made the Austrian-born Governor of California the other miscreant who would not stop; no other governors stand out enough. The Tax Collector was recast as a Foreclosure Expert.
The Good Samaritan was made a homeless person. She brings the robbery victim to a nice hotel. After two days, the Governor and the Foreclosure Expert come through the lobby. The Expert is guilt stricken, and returns the Deed to the Homeless Person, and gives her money from his last three foreclosures. This adds a Zachaeus element to the closing, which satisfies everyone's sense of justice.
What do the kids learn besides a couplke of Bible stories? Mario Puzo, author of The Godfather, said "All writing is re-writing." In that sense, these classes give kids an essential skill, experience and confidence in the process of writing. Another secular benefit is simple cultural literacy. Stories like The Good Samaritan are at the center of the dominant culture, Christianity. There is also ethical instruction, the surprise that a stranger may be more ethical than the rich and powerful. And then there is the religious instruction aspect: this is how jesus taught. He taught in metaphor, which means there doesn't have to actually be a good Samaritan to make the point of the story. This teaches them to discern the difference between literal and figurative, which should be a remedial task when anyone looks at the content of the Bible.
Two of our students were from a family that does not go to church. I explained thatthte stories are taught in the mode of Aesop's Fables, the Greek stories which carried morals of that tradition. Then we weren't a proselytizing class that would be about selling smething to the kids. It makes the stories of value to anyone, no matter what your tradition is.
To me, it is obvious that the rich and powerful have less morality than the poor, but most people are brought up in America to believe the opposite. They believe that the rich are virtuous and that the wealth 9s an indicator of God's pleasure. They believe the poor are being punished for something- otherwise they would not be poor. They think people are poor because they are lazy, and others are rich because they work hard. All we need to do now is look at Bernie Madoff, Gov. Spitzer, Gov. Sandford, and any number of other headline grabbers to understand that this is not self-evident; it also makes me think the ones who are caught are just the tip of the ethical iceberg. And it shows that Christianity, practiced the way Jesus taught it, is counter to American culture. It is indeed counter-cultural, and Un-American to follow Jesus.
Comparative religion is not taught in our schools, which makes our kids less able to understand other faiths, and also to understand their own. Former President Jimmy Carter just left the Southern Baptist Convention because they still refuse to ordain women; but it's more than that. They teach that women are to be subordinate to men, which leads women to believe their faith requires them to stay with battering husbands. A faith misunderstood can be a powerful force of destruction. As Stevie Wonder put it, "You believe in things you don't understand, and you suffer."
This is why the Movie Camps are not just a nice way for kids to spend a summer day; it is part of a core mission of the Church, our mission to teach our kids to think, and to show them how the Bible can help them to reach a moral and ethical structure of their own, to inform them in the decisions they make for the rest of their lives.