Animate: Practice

I’m delighted to be part of the Patheos Book Club about something that isn’t a book – the Animate: Practices DVD from SparkHouse. The DVD is part of the Animate series, and this particular DVD focuses on a range of aspects of Christian life, including relatively obvious and specifically Christian ones like worship and sacraments, but also ones that are prone to be neglected or might even seems surprising, such as meals and money. Some of the speakers, like Brian McLaren, Phyllis Tickle, and Shane Claiborne, are probably familiar at least by name to many Christians. Others were unfamiliar to me before watching the DVD. Each speaker, in less than ten minutes, explores one aspect of Christian living, connecting it in some way to an anecdote from their own life experience.

I teach Sunday school, and I can easily see this DVD serving well as a discussion starter for a series of class periods. Unlike some DVDs that I’ve seen brought into Sunday school, this one keeps it brief, and doesn’t aim to merely inform, but to challenge, making it natural to go from watching to conversing.

Some of the clips explain terminology – as when Tickle recounts how her father shared with her the pre-Christian Roman background for the Latin term sacramentum. Others are peppered with Christian terminology that might be unfamiliar to those not of a particular church background. Several are very practical, and mention specific ways that individuals or the communities they are part of have sought to put their faith into practice in service of others. All of them, whether you find the specific stories and experiences ones that you can relate to personally or not, are ones that at least some present probably will relate to, and from those points of connection and disconnection, conversations can flow.

I particularly appreciate this particular DVD in the series, because as a religion professor I know I have a tendency to focus on the theoretical. I think most Sunday schools would benefit from making use of a DVD like this one that gets one thinking about practice and application, on the communal and not just the individual level.

Please do check out the Patheos Book Club hub for Animate: Practice, and see what others have said, or explore samples of the resources that are available to accompany the DVD. You can find samples of the videos themselves online on YouTube as well. Here’s one of them: