Gospel.com Blog

Have you given something up for Lent? We’ve talked a bit about the common practice of choosing something in your life—a habit, a particular type of food, etc.—and voluntarily foregoing it during the weeks leading up to Easter.

Among my own circle of acquaintances, two things seem to come up frequently as things to give up during Lent: unhealthy food (soda, fast food, etc.) and television.

I’ll leave the food topic alone for now (and I should note that not everything people choose to give up for Lent needs to be “bad” or unhealthy); but the practice of giving up TV is something I’ve also seen written about a lot online. (And feel free to substitute another entertainment medium—your iPod, video games, online video, etc.—for “television.”)

Most of us have from time to time had the feeling that we invest too much of our lives in passive entertainment, to the detriment of our spiritual and personal growth. If the idea of going cold-turkey on your TV sounds weirdly intriguing, here are a few resources to help you think it through:

• Revive Our Hearts has a standing 30-day TV-free challenge that encourages Christians to turn off the TV for a month and observe the resulting effects on their personal lives. You can sign up for daily emails and read a number of helpful articles at the challenge website; and they also host a great series of radio shows about bringing your family’s television under control.
• Al Menconi has written extensively about the challenge of keeping TV-watching and passive entertainment balanced healthily in your family life. For starters, read his list of 10 steps to control TV in your home, and see his many articles about how entertainment affects us.

If you read through these resources, you’ll notice something important about them: the point of these efforts is not to arbitrarily cut TV out of your life, or to feel holier-than-thou because you don’t watch American Idol, or to rob your life of fun. It’s not about banning TV in your house forever, or making you feel guilty for watching your favorite show. It’s about becoming more aware of the way you use your time throughout each day and week.

It’s an experiment you can try any time of the year, not just during Lent. How about it?

Today, a couple of quick updates from the COMIX35 ministry! COMIX35 is a Christian comics ministry that publishes and distributes evangelistic comics around the world. They also do a lot to identify and recruit promising comic artists from within the Christian community.

They’ve got updates on two comics contests that they’re running:

• They’ve launched the Christian Comics Competition for U.S. Prison Inmates as a way of identifying talented Christian artists in the US prison system. The first phase of the competition asks prison chaplains to recommend inmates who “exhibit exceptional talent in the areas of drawing and storytelling.” The three candidates who make it to the end of the contest will help produce a short comic for inmates and at-risk youth.
• The deadline for the Manga Messiah video competition has been extended to March 4 to give all “amateur and professional video producers, YouTubers, and GodTubers around the world” a chance to get their entries in. The competition webpage has full details on the contest, as well as free music tracks you can use with your video.

Take a look at these contests, and while you’re there, get to know COMIX35’s unique comics evangelism ministry!

Your best bet for family entertainment on DVD this week is a collection of Big Idea’s new made-for-TV episodes of 3-2-1 Penguins! The collection is titled Save the Planets! and features three of the most recent episodes aired on NBC and Qubo. Says Greg Wright, “If you’re a fan… have no fear. If anything, the pace is quicker, the jokes come faster, and the laughs follow right behind. Honestly, this is some of the funniest stuff I’ve seen on DVD in a long, long time.”

Also new on DVD this week:

• The Genius Club
• Reprise
• The Promotion
• Then She Found Me
• Married Life
• Outsourced
• Hidden Secrets

Visit the DVD releases page at Past the Popcorn for details on these and other titles.

We’ve mentioned Al Menconi Ministries in the past as a good place to go to for game and music reviews from a Christian perspective. Here’s a quick roundup of some of this month’s reviews. First, on the game front:

• The latest Turok game for the XBox 360
• Rainbow Six Vegas 2, the ninth (!) installment in the Rainbow Six series
• Mario Kart Wii, the ever-popular Mario racing game

And on the music side of things:

• Capital Lights’ This is an Outage
• Amy Courts’ These Cold and Rusted Lungs
• Seventh Day Slumber’s Rescatame

Beyond reviewing specific games, Al Menconi writes a lot about the challenge of understanding pop culture and developing Biblical standards for the cultural artifacts we read, watch, and listen to. Take a look through his frequently-updated essay archives—there’s a lot of great advice there, especially for parents who want to help their kids live moral lives in a faith-challenging culture.

We’re talking about culture this week, and thinking about one of the most basic and important questions that Christians ask today: how do we engage and challenge our culture with the Gospel of Christ? Society around us is saturated with false and destructive ideas, memes, and values; how do Christians bring the Gospel message to bear in such an environment? (more…)

Al Menconi Ministries has put together a nice video introducing their media ministry and talking about the importance of making wise entertainment choices for your family. You might already know about Al’s ministry—we’ve noted the site’s many essays about entertainment topics and video game reviews—this video does a good job of introducing Al and his discerning approach to entertainment:

As you can see, Al Menconi Ministries isn’t about telling you what you can and cannot watch; they’d rather help your learn to make entertainment choices that are right for your family and in line with the Bible’s moral teachings.

Are you a gamer, or the parent of a gamer, who looks at the vast array of video games on store shelves and wonders which ones are worth playing? There are countless video game reviews available around the internet, but it’s tougher to find reviews that talk about the moral aspects of popular games.

Al Menconi Ministries has a team of game reviewers who don’t just ask if a game is fun to play—they also ask if it’s a morally good way to spend your time. In April alone, they’ve reviewed nine games, including:

• Turning Point: Fall of Liberty
• Super Smash Bros. Brawl
• Need for Speed: Pro Street
• Lost: Via Domus

…and many more. If you’re worried about the type of moral content you or your kids will run into in the latest games, AMM’s reviews are worth checking out. Take a look at their grading criteria and browse their large archive of reviews (over 300 reviews, going back to 2002!).

It’s difficult to imagine that someone who has been in the entertainment business for nearly fifty years could possibly quality as a “discovery”—but that’s very likely how Donny Osmond will be perceived for his turn as the bigger-than-life college dad Doug in Disney’s latest G-rated release, College Road Trip.

Osmond is, of course, with his sister Marie, one of the more famous faces and voices of the Osmond family, which is just about to embark on a world “50th Anniversary” tour. He has countless hit records, both as a solo act and with his family members, he has headlined hit Broadway shows—and he has raised children. He has been happily married for 28 years.

One of the central themes of College Road Trip is the need that kids have for love and trust, a theme that had “better resonate with every parent,” says Donny Osmond, who plays one of the parents in the film. “I was watching Oprah last night, and Bill Cosby was on. It was such a great episode to wake parents up, because that’s what kids really need from their parents. It was either Bill or the guest host who said, “Parents, wake up!” When you tell your kids that they’re stupid, they’ll believe it. How can they have any respect for themselves when you don’t have any respect for them?”

Read the full interview with Donny Osmond.

posted by Greg Wright of Past the Popcorn

It might have started out as a pastime for geeks, but video gaming today rival movies and TV as one of the chief sources of entertainment in American households—in fact, if your household doesn’t have an XBox, Playstation, or Nintendo console, you’re probably in the minority. So with hundreds of game releases each year vying for attention, how can parents (and gamers) discern which ones are worth the money and time?

Al Menconi Ministries has one of the most active game-review teams of any Christian ministry on the internet. They’ve reviewed hundreds of games for the PC and every major game console from the Playstation 1 to the XBox 360. Already this month they’ve reviewed Final Fantasy XI Online, Gears of War, Heavenly Sword, Assassin’s Creed, and many others. You can browse through their review archives to find the game review you’re looking for.

What makes AMM’s game review process unique is the effort they put into rating and commenting on the moral content—positive and negative—in the games they review. Each review contains a content scoresheet; the intent is not to tell you which games you should or shouldn’t play, but to educate you about game content so that you can decide for yourself whether it’s a game you feel comfortable playing (or letting your kids play). As with their reviews of movies and other entertainment media, AMM wants to help you cultivate Biblical discernment in yourself and your family, rather than just give you a list of things to embrace or avoid.

AMM doesn’t just review games, though—they’ve got a sizable archive of articles about video games and the moral issues connected to them. Notable articles include a recent guide to family-friendly games and an explanation of the video game industry’s rating system for parents. So if you or someone in your family is a gamer, bookmark the AMM site and check it next time you see a game that looks interesting.

Each week, Past the Popcorn offers a thorough look at the latest round of films opening on big screens.

The film release slate right after the holidays is characteristically thin. But all three movies reviews this week at Past the Popcorn are strong entries. And an interview with Big Idea founder Phil Vischer sheds some light on the new Veggie Tales movie.

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