A Multimedia Blast From The Past *or* How The K4T Website Began

The website pillar of the Kids 4 Truth ministry began a looooong time ago at the Sprint Imax Theater at the Kansas City Zoo. The year was 1999 and I was in seminary with my dear friend Josh Darnell. I was also directing the children’s ministries at my church. One of us had heard about the new IMAX movie entitled “T-Rex: Back to the Cretaceous.” The radio ads made it sound as if there would be dinosaur carnage a-plenty, on an IMAX screen no less! So we went.

But instead of enjoying the expected special effect footage of T-Rex ripping up weak PACHYCEPHALOSAURUSes and snatching DSUNGARIPTERUSes from midair, we were subjected to sheer and boring evolutionary propaganda for almost an hour. The agenda of the movie was/is to convince us that chickens evolved from T-Rex. Utter multi-media nonsense spewed forth from dark presuppositions. I love how Bahnsen put it: the unrighteous person, through self-deception, ;pushes and holds back the truth and is very much like the person sitting on a volleyball in the pool and then with sincere panic wonders “Where in the world did the volleyball go?” (Romans 1:18)

The dino movie inspired me to do two things: 1. Write the KC Zoo some forceful and wish-I-would’ve-been-more-mature-at-the-time-cause-they-sure-could’ve-been-a-lot-more-gracious letters and 2. Use multimedia to effectively communicate truth instead of error. In particular, I conisdered ways we might beautifully, creatively, and reverently communicate the Biblical account of the Creation to a large audience. A Multimedia Blast! (Version 1.0 of www.kids4truth.com)

At the time, Rob Gillen was an acquaintance working for a company called “Conserve-A-Net.” It was a filtered internet service start-up company. Marie Tabler was working for them too. I knew Conserve-A-Net was looking for more traffic in hopes they would increase their customer base, so I suggested a potentially win-win situation: Let’s create a fantastic children’s website that will point a ton of people to Conserve-A-Net. Rob liked it, so he wanted specifics. I shared with him my idea about the Creation presentation. He liked that too. At this point Marie was brought into the mix since she was looking for a project on which she could develop her newly acquired Macromedia Flash skills (she had just attended a Flash training seminar). A few short months later www.kids4truth.com was born. Simon memory gameVersion 1.0 of the website was released in May of 2000 and the homepage looked like a UFO to some. Personally, it made me think of the SIMON Memory Game. (You can see the “Conserve-A-Net” logo and link in the lower left hand of the monitor).

Several other components were assembled for the release, but the Creation Dynamation (Dynamic+Animation) was far and away the hook that was grabbing traffic. An unsolicted, grass-roots e-mailing effort began to spread the word about the Creation. Our site #’s were staggering to us, in the millions. The number of emails we received quickly reached the thousands.

But the goal for the K4T website was not just to be a one-hit-wonder. The long-term goals were for the site to serve as a platform to promote the Kids 4 Truth Clubs (which were in mostly formative stages back in 2000), and for the site to complement the clubs’ philosophy, methodology, and hardcopy curriculum.

Over 5 years have passed since we went live and I thank the Lord that those goals are now beginning to be realized. God brought along just the right servants in order to accomplish a God-honoring dream or two. Over 50 people are now actively involved in our humble ministry. To those of you that have been used of the Lord through this ministry, thank you. Thank you for being a part. I believe this is God’s ministry, and that He has been pleased to use us.

That being said . . .  God doesn’t need us. He could raise up rocks to do what we do if He wanted to. May this seemingly paradoxical truth keep us humble and yet continuing to dream God-honoring dreams and working hard to accomplish them! May we always be all about His marvelous truth.

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Published Nov 24 2005, 06:45 PM by BobRoberts
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