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Welcome to another episode, the place where we talk about kids' ministry and take a peek behind the scenes. We try to share a little bit of what we've learned that works for us and some of our failures so you can avoid them. We release a new episode every Friday, and this is your Backstage Pass to see the magic or disaster that happens behind the scenes of our kids' ministry. I'm your host, Gabe Baker, and today I'm joined by Brother Bren Ayer. How are you doing, Bren? Hey, I'm doing all right. How are you doing? Doing good. You want to introduce

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today's topic? Yeah, today's topic is stepping into another world.

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There's something special, you know, like about walking into a place like a store that pays attention to detail and like the customer experience. So for example, if you walk into a Ross or Marshall store, there's a certain atmosphere and you're most likely just looking for a deal. But when you walk into the Apple store, even if you're not an Apple fan, you have to acknowledge that it's completely a different experience altogether. And I think the key word here is intentional. And so in our Sunday schools, we should be intentional, whether we do themes or not. Here at our Sunday school, we thrive on theme style Sunday school. So our goal is for kids, or anyone for that matter, to walk into our set intentionally. And just be amazed. We want them to be transported to another world. And when kids walk into a set that's done right, you now have their full attention. And that in itself is priceless. That's why we do themes, right? I mean, if you can, I think themes are a powerful thing to do.

SPEAKER_01 1:39

Yeah,

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I agree. One of the things I put in our notes is, and I've said this when people ask about our Sunday school is VBS. They're like, is it like a VBS? And for a long time, I didn't know. We were talking before, but I didn't even know what VBS was or what's the other one. I've seen it. Awana. I think it's called a one. Have you ever seen that? So I haven't heard VBS before. Yeah. Well, I didn't for a long time and my wife actually used to do, we called it a kid's day. And now that I kind of know what VBS is, that's basically what she was doing. Without even knowing it. It was awesome. She had the fire department come down with a fire truck and police even. It wasn't just that, but it was all kinds of activities. It was really cool. Yeah, that sounds pretty cool. VBS has themes. So if you Google VBS right now, you can find packages or whatever. You can get themed decor like posters and stuff. The example I was telling you about is they have a picture of maybe a pirate ship. Well, we build one. And so that's kind of what I mean by, for us, a theme is VBS on steroids.

SPEAKER_01 2:53

Which I think our first one was the hot air balloons. I think. Oh, yes. I remember. It might have actually been a pirate ship with... Oh, you know what it was? It was a ship. Well, not a pirate ship, but it was a ship. It was a scuba diving. Yes. Because Brother Joey Boggs, he was a scuba diver.

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Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:10

Yeah. Man, I vaguely remember that. I think I was in Sunday school at the time. Were you

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like a kid in Sunday school? I think I was a kid in Sunday school. Really? Oh, wow.

SPEAKER_01 3:17

Yeah. In fact, that was... I don't know if anyone knows Brian Kutcher, but we were really good friends at the time, and he thought I was really nerdy because I knew all the memory verses. But it's kind of funny. We talked about it recently.

SPEAKER_02 3:32

Yeah. Now Brother Brian Kutcher is evangelizing. Yeah. He's the nerd. Shout out to Brother Brian Kutcher. He's awesome. Yeah, we love him for sure. We actually, that was when I mentioned it on another podcast, but pastor, I believe it was before he was pastor, right before he became pastor. And that was when we switched our Sunday school. So he was the catalyst. He switched our Sunday school to basically the style we do now. It's morphed, obviously, evolved. And so he was involved in it back then. And we used, what was that curriculum again? It was by – I think by UPC or something. Oh, UPC. I don't know because I wasn't even – Oh, because you were – yeah, you were a kid. Anyway, it was some kind of curriculum. Oh, Kids Power Hour. That's what it is. Kids Power Hour, which is a great curriculum, by the way. We write our own now, but we used their curriculum for that theme. That's where that theme came from. Treasure or something. Treasure or Dive On Down or something. That's when we kind of switched over to having that theme style curriculum. sunday

SPEAKER_01 4:40

school which is pretty awesome man i don't know we've grown tremendously too yes definitely definitely especially the building and everything i mean we had you know you could just about reach up and touch the ceiling now i mean i guess if you're yeah not a kid but you know if you're oh you're talking about down there where we're down there yeah i mean here i mean the ceilings are 12 to 15 feet slope ceiling

SPEAKER_02 5:01

yeah yeah 12 to 15 feet and yeah it was like at eight foot

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Yeah, where you can just, people can reach up and tack up their blue, you know, for the sky.

SPEAKER_02 5:10

Yeah, we had, that's right. We did, and I'll tell you that blue plastic is kind of hard to find. We have somebody that works in construction that has been able to find me something. We use it for water a lot. But yeah, we had a bunch of blue plastic, thin, it was really thin blue plastic. And we, we wore that out. We use it so much. I mean, it was, we were putting duct tape on the corners to tack through to give it more strength.

SPEAKER_01 5:35

We're at the sheetrock out too. Yeah. And the sheetrock, there's some spots where you just push, push the tack up and just fall out. Just turn into mush.

SPEAKER_02 5:45

That was our first one. And we had, we even did. So with that, it wasn't really, it wasn't VBS, but it was the kids power hour and they had decor ideas, but we came basically right out of the gates. I mean, we built a ship. that everybody could get into. And

SPEAKER_01 6:03

you step right into the room, there's a little dock and we walked on the dock, you know, there's water all around and we followed it right onto the boat. Yeah. I thought that was pretty awesome.

SPEAKER_02 6:11

Yeah. Yeah. And the dock was kind of cool because we had to, uh, set up every Saturday night and take down every Sunday morning after Sunday school. And so everything had to be mobile. And so the ship was in like sections and it even had a, um, I always forget the stern and bow and we're in a pirate theme right now. I can't,

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I

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should remember that, but the front, the front even curved, you know, and we, but it was in pieces and we were able to take that apart and store it. And then the dock, that was the cool thing. It was like, I think one by threes or something screwed to fire hose. Oh, is that what it is? It was fire hose and you could roll it up. But then when you unrolled it, the fire hose was on the bottom. So you didn't see it and you could kind of curve it a little bit. And so you walked on the quote unquote dock to get to the ship and then we had blue plastic all around or whatever.

SPEAKER_01 7:09

Yeah. And I mean, the setting up too is pretty awesome. I mean, just in general, it's a lot of fun when you get, a crew of people. Yeah. Cause I started on the, on the hot air balloon. That's when I started helping set up. Okay. And there's like, you know, we had like 15 people and it was just kind of a fun time, you know, getting this stuff out, setting it up. Yeah. It's

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kind of a little party.

SPEAKER_01 7:28

Yeah. It was like Saturday night. We had two different crews. I think one crew is like every other weekend.

SPEAKER_02 7:35

Yeah. And then people wanted to help. And I remember a couple of times even like having pizza and stuff. Yeah. It was like, it's just, it was a fun time. I mean, that goes to show you can, do some pretty awesome. We did some incredible themes. I have pictures of incredible themes in a non-permanent space.

SPEAKER_01 7:52

Yeah. I mean, we did this theme, the one we're doing right now, the pirate theme. That's where I actually came on to Sunday school. But yeah, we did this theme. We did hot air balloon. We did Narnia theme. Narnia

SPEAKER_02 8:04

looked so cool. I have pictures of that. It looked really awesome.

SPEAKER_01 8:07

Man, I wasn't actually in, I don't, I think I was out that quarter or that theme, but yeah, And then there was the one with Celestial. Oh, what is it called? It was. Was it Space? No, it was the Celestial Kingdom or something. You don't remember that one? It's like people's names are like their characters are what they are. It's like Envy. Oh, was it

SPEAKER_03 8:32

Pilgrim's Progress?

SPEAKER_01 8:33

Pilgrim's Progress. That's right. I couldn't think. I just remember Celestial. I want to do that again. I

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want to do it again. Weren't you the main character in that one? I think so. Pilgrim? I think so. Yeah, we did that. We did Pilgrim's Progress,

SPEAKER_01 8:47

and that room felt so big. It did. It's crazy to think about how you made it look so big with so little space. It's kind of crazy to think about. One

SPEAKER_02 9:00

way to make a room feel bigger, it is kind of almost like a maze style. We would block off... you know, completely floor to ceiling with, you know, hanging things or whatever. And we would make it to where you kind of go around that, that wall for lack of a better term. And there's a whole new

SPEAKER_01 9:23

looking area. Yeah. I mean a different, there's a different ceiling. Sometimes there's sky. Sometimes I think there's just netting or sky with netting, you know, and yeah, the lighting change, the lighting with black lights on some of them. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, It was pretty awesome. I mean, the mazes were really cool, too. Yeah, we did. We talked

SPEAKER_02 9:41

about mazes in another podcast recently. The other thing that is important about theme is, or for us anyway, is story, the storyline. Yeah, because, I mean, with every theme, you kind of have a story that goes with the theme. Exactly. I guess that's where, like with a VBS or something, you can do a theme, but when we do our themes, it has a story behind. And we know, you know, how long it's going to be and who the characters are. And so the reason that we do that is kids will follow along with the story and it keeps them interested. And we leave cliffhangers, you know, and they're like, they want to come back. What's going to happen next? Yeah. They keep

SPEAKER_01 10:23

asking, you know, like, Oh, what's going to happen to William? Yeah. Yeah. When he got captured, you know, kids were asking out, you know, out in church, you know, what's going to happen to William? Yeah. You know, things.

SPEAKER_02 10:33

And that's good. And especially like with, you know kids that don't come you know our outreach kids that come on the bus or or visit is maybe it's their first time or whatever but they come and they're like we will do some kind of recap sometimes especially if we have a lot of guests but we'll some kind of times kind of remind people okay we're on the we're on a pirate ship william got kidnapped and we'll just kind of hit some bullets and it kind of reminds the kids you know, that come every week where we are in the story. Not that they really need a lot of reminding, but then it lets new kids know like, Oh, that's that happened.

SPEAKER_01 11:12

You know

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what they

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missed

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out on. Yeah. Well, they missed out on it. And then they want to, they're like, Oh, I want to come back and see, see that. So like, I thought about talking about, you know, we're in the pirate theme and I don't want to give too much away in case, in case some kids listen to this. It's probably too boring for kids. Maybe even adults. I don't know. But in case they listen to it, so Survival Quest was a theme that we did fairly recently. I don't know. It's been several months ago. And so Survival Quest, I guess to explain it, and you could maybe help, but it's very, very loosely kind of based on Robin Hood,

SPEAKER_01 11:56

right? Yeah, it's like a medieval-style game. Yeah, it's pretty loosely, you know, we had a character Radigan instead of Robin Hood. Yeah. And, you know, he was trying to think of what Festus did, you know. So, well,

SPEAKER_02 12:11

Festus would be, and I got the, I did get the idea from Robin Hood, but then I, you know, made it our own, obviously. But in fact, Radigan has a bow and arrow and you happen to be an archer, which makes it handy.

SPEAKER_01 12:27

Yeah, I think, yeah, I agree. It's like, it's not Robin Hood. It's just kind of that timeline. And we

SPEAKER_02 12:33

kind of did the, I believe, and there's very different versions of Robin Hood, I suppose. But the general version of Robin Hood, I think, is where like the king or some leader, I think it's the king, goes off to war. And then there's the evil sheriff of Nottingham. There we go. The sheriff of Nottingham is evil, I think. And that's the whole story. antagonist and protagonist thing. So we did kind of the same idea. We had King Marcus, which is Brother Steve Arter's character. He goes away to battle in the very first week. And Radigan is in there, but he's like sitting with the kids and he wants to go, but he's not old enough. Yeah, he's wanting to be a soldier. He wants to be a soldier and he can't go to battle. And so King Marcus leaves Festus his right-hand man in charge. And Festus is the evil antagonist, which of course is Brother Keech. Brother Keech is our resident bad guy. But yeah, so he leaves Festus in charge. And so Festus immediately by week two is already partying and stealing candy from the kids and making the kids do the work and stuff. And so Radigan stands up to him. gets exiled which we have to explain what that means you know to the kids but he gets kicked out of the kingdom and anyway then there's princess alora and festus tries to force her to marry him and she runs away and of course radigan and his his uh team of people that also been exiled are out in the forest you know and they do training and that's interactive Yeah. In our theme. So they get to come out and the kids get to come out and be a part of it and train. Yeah. And they get to train and, you know, stand up against the evil Festus. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So we have a lesson obviously each week and most of our themes have like a lesson pack. And so I kind of create it where it's, there's an overall umbrella of the lesson. Like the one I was just talking about to somebody is our space theme was like, there was an overall umbrella and the umbrella was relationship to god or relationship with god and then it had like three weeks about you know worship or something and then we put in the oneness um and so it had all of those and then there was like a review portion the last four weeks or something so it has a structure and there's a direction we're going with our lessons But as much as we can, so we use Bible stories a lot for that part, but as much as we can, we incorporate the lessons into the theme as well. You know, the

SPEAKER_01 15:20

theme story. I mean, the kids really look up to the characters. And so if the characters aren't following a theme, you know, guided by a lesson, then, you know, they're just kind of listening to a story with no point. Yeah, with no point. And so, yeah, they see, you know, Radigan or William, you know, Williams in the current theme, you know, they see him standing strong, you know, against Scar. Right. And, you know, it kind of makes them think, you know, maybe, you know, why stand strong against, against whatever the big boy at school. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 15:55

Yeah. And that's what we are trying to kind of do is make that character relatable to the kids, you know, and we do it in different ways. We have Dunst characters and stuff too that do that. But in fact, in the, end of that theme survival quest is the big you know the big climactic battle or whatever and the fight between you know as princess elora looks on radigan and festus battle it out and so that's a big hurrah you know and then in the final moments radigan you know, it looks like he's going to lose. And then he, because Festus of course cheats. And so, but in the final moments, Radigan has Festus at his mercy and everybody's like, here's the point where he's going to just run him through with a sword. And then he shows forgiveness. And so that's the, and right when King Marcus walks in and sees by accident, Radigan's forgiveness. Yeah. You know, forgiving Festus.

SPEAKER_01 16:54

And which God, you know, he doesn't accidentally see it, you know, he's always watching. So it's like, you know,

SPEAKER_02 16:59

Yeah, he sees not just what we're doing. All right, so set design. Let's talk about that. We kind of covered a little bit, but let's just talk about that a little bit. So we could talk about the one we're doing right now. I wrote, you know, we titled it, what do we say? Stepping into another world. Yeah. Oh, and that's kind of the

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whole point of step into another world. There you go.

SPEAKER_02 17:23

Yeah. So that's kind of the goal is we have, we're upstairs in a metal building. So when people come, when the kids come up the stairs and they walk in, especially for the first time, but we want to, every time they come in for it to be like, wow, you know? Yeah. And so in fact, when we're getting ready to build a theme for, Every time I go up, and I'm not that tall, but I go up to the doorway and I get on my knees and I look at the room and I start thinking about how this is going to look. First impression. And then we want to build on top of that impression. But first impression, what do the kids see?

SPEAKER_01 18:01

Yeah. I mean, the space thing was really good with that, I think. Yeah. Because, you know, it's that hallway with those lights and then that door that opened up, you know, Clancy made that door. Yeah. It's pretty awesome. Yeah. Airlock. I think... I think you and Clancy made it. Clancy made the battery powered thing. That was pretty awesome. Yeah, Clancy did the bulk of it.

SPEAKER_02 18:17

I kind of designed the look of it. And then Clancy, yeah, he got a window, auto window operator and somehow set those cables up. And then we hooked it to a battery. And, yeah, it was pretty cool. Yeah, it was pretty awesome. Opened like an elevator door. Yeah, split from the center by parting. It was pretty awesome. Yeah, and that's the thing is if they come up and they see something like that, it's like, whoa, what in the world am I walking into? And so there's something in the theater industry. They talk about the fourth wall, not breaking the fourth wall, and that's addressing the audience directly. And I think in the film industry also there's something with that that they call suspending theater. And what that means is, you know, that guy can't, like, I don't know, lasso a helicopter and climb up the rope while it's flying, you know, but you are willing to suspend disbelief because you're into it. Yeah. And then you can break that, usually on accident, you can break that by... not doing a camera transition well, or like in more our environment, theater set or something by maybe addressing the kids, which we do by design usually, but laughing at an incorrect part inappropriately or something like that, it breaks that suspend of disbelief. So I've said a lot of things there to kind of lay the foundation for what we're trying to do is we do want them to step into another world. We want them to come up those stairs and be like, we have sound effects going and we have all this decor happening. And then, of course, the acting and costumes, all that. We want them to be like, oh, I'm in. I'm now getting on a ship.

SPEAKER_01 20:06

Yeah. Yeah. I'm in the middle of the ocean right now. No escape.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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And our sound effect, we got a cool track that's basically... It's got some distant seagulls in the background. You can hear the ship creaking. There's a bell that randomly brings, like, you know, in the wind. And then we have some underlying music that goes along with it. Which helps tremendously.

SPEAKER_01 20:32

Sound, like, without sound, man. It would be difficult. It would be very difficult. I remember we used to

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do it without sound.

SPEAKER_01 20:42

Yeah, we've done it a few times. I remember down there, like, We didn't have the sound that day or something. And it was after using it. And then we used it. Then we had, I can't remember why, but we weren't able to use it that week. And it was really difficult to like flow. Cause you know, you're, you're going off. No, there's no background noise, nothing going on. That setting. It feels dead. Yeah. It feels dead. It feels like, yeah, the kids, you know, are kind of just like, they're just people talking up there. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 21:12

You know, It's funny that you mentioned that because I remember, I forgot about this, but I remember a long time ago, I had thought about this. So we're going to be starting some training here at a little, I don't know, it might be the next year here, but in a few months, I plan on starting some Sunday school training. It's kind of official training, whatever that means. But I thought that would be a great way to maybe like, Because we use the music and we are probably always going to use music and sound effects. And we use it 100% throughout, basically. But I thought, what if we take a skit and you have to do it and make it dynamic without that? So it's not a crutch that you're leaning on and depending on. Yeah, that could be difficult. Yeah. But then you add that in. You know, it's kind of like training with a heavier ball or heavier boxing gloves or something. Yeah. You add that in and now you're just like lighting your feet. You're able to really flow. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, one other thing I wanted to say is, so I think I have in here about special effects. So we have like, we don't have our lights set up. I want to get our lights set up, but we have fog machines. And so right now when you come up the stairs, you basically kind of step right onto the dock and go to the ship. But there's also to the left, there's a playground that's supposed to be a cave basically in there. So there's some tunnels, a climbing wall, a slide, climbing net. There's a whole upper level to it. We turn on the fog and it's all foggy over there. And then you come on the ship and the ship has like a mast, there's flags hanging, there's ropes everywhere. And it has the upper deck on the front But we have all this stuff happening. The other thing that I was reminded I want to do, I want to work on is aromatizers. I've never heard of that. Okay. So Disneyland uses them apparently, and there's other places too, but we come up here and you hear the sound of the ocean and the birds and everything, and it's the aroma. And so it's actually like a sense, like it sprays scent, right?

SPEAKER_01 23:24

Oh, that's cool. Yeah. So, you know, I think I've told you this. I guess for those that don't know, I'm an electrician. But I worked on a 40X movie theater.

SPEAKER_03 23:34

Oh,

SPEAKER_01 23:34

that's right. And it was considered an amusement ride. And they had it to where, like, if someone, you know, was driving the car or whatever, and it hit the puddle, water would splash on your face. So, there's, like, stuff in front.

SPEAKER_02 23:46

Like, just squirting.

SPEAKER_01 23:47

Just squirting from your face. Oh, that's cool. But they also had scent machines.

UNKNOWN 23:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:51

And so if there was like dirt, you could like kind of smell the dirt. You could, you know, like you were just talking about the aroma. That's funny. I didn't know that, you know, other things did that, but yeah, I thought that was pretty awesome. Yeah. I want to do that. And

SPEAKER_02 24:04

this would be the perfect one. So maybe I need to fast forward my

SPEAKER_01 24:08

timeline on that

SPEAKER_02 24:09

because this would be the perfect one. So the sea air,

SPEAKER_01 24:12

you could do that salty smell, fish smell, you know, there's lots of scents. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 24:19

Cause this one would be easy. Like, I don't know. I'm not ready to give away our next theme, but there's other themes that are harder to do a scent for. Like space. We did space. What would you do there? What kind of scent? Yeah, that'd be difficult. Brother Arter and I talked about on another podcast, we talked about our Western theme. That one would probably be easy. You could do cows and stuff. Sometimes we would just have to open the windows. And then our sets also are interactive. Meaning, like, they're not just a backdrop, you know, a scene setter. There's doorways that you can go through. Or, like, the whole playground. The kids can climb up. Like, to get up, to go down the slide, which is a pretty fast slide. But to go down that slide, you have to climb either a climbing wall. It's not very steep. It's a climbing hill. But it's basically a ramp out of wood. And we put some You actually sanded down the handholds.

SPEAKER_03 25:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 25:23

And so we put handholds on there. Or you can climb the net. It's basically a big cargo net. So that's interactive. So you had to climb up. So sometimes we'll do training, quote-unquote training, and they had to go over there and navigate the playground. There's a tunnel that you can crawl through. Of

SPEAKER_01 25:42

course, you have someone at the bottom, someone at the top. It was really fun when I was at the top because I think I was a pirate the first time we did it. Aaron was down at the bottom and I was like, all right, you got to be careful. You want to make sure to pick your feet up. We don't want to fall. And I kick him down.

SPEAKER_02 26:01

You

SPEAKER_01 26:01

know

SPEAKER_02 26:02

why that's funny? Because the last time we did the training a couple of weeks ago and we were going over there and There was a couple of kids that were saying something to me like they were scared to go. They were like... Brother Brennan kicked us. I was like, oh, you're fine.

SPEAKER_01 26:23

You know, if they asked me not to do it, I wouldn't do it. Be careful. But a lot of them really liked it. And, man, it's great. Aaron was laughing because, man, you can get them going fast. Yeah, well,

SPEAKER_02 26:32

that slide is pretty steep. It's basically the max that you can go with a playground slide for pitch. We built it, but, yeah, I did look up

SPEAKER_01 26:46

codes. Yeah, a lot of them. the kids really liked it. Yeah. And of course some were like, please don't do that. I was like, okay, I won't, I won't.

SPEAKER_02 26:53

Well, we're getting close to our time, but I want to kind of hit this last one a little bit is costumes. So let's talk about that a little bit. You go all out. What did you do for this, this theme? You got, you got some costumes.

SPEAKER_01 27:04

Yeah. So mostly I go to Amazon cause it's really easy. I mean, you just find, you know, So pirate theme, you look up pirate pants, you kind of look through, they're roughly about $20 for a pair of pirate pants. You kind of just see, you know, what would look good. And I mean, you look on images on Google images for like pirate and you kind of see what they're wearing. They're wearing like a blouse shirt, you know, cause it's, you know, Victorian style. And so they got those cuffs, um, Um, you know, they got the pirate pants, they got a ton of belts. So, I mean, that's absolutely his straps.

SPEAKER_02 27:40

Aaron was talking, uh, on another podcast about your costume. and i was like yeah i got these boots i was like okay i'll see you in an hour gotta put my boots on

SPEAKER_01 27:52

yeah you know it's funny you mentioned that to me too uh you mentioned that to me i was talking with uh adrian and anisha we went downstairs and we're talking about something you know unrelated to science schools i waited you never came down i was like he was serious it really does take an hour

SPEAKER_03 28:09

it's a long time

SPEAKER_01 28:11

yeah it's like i'm glad mine are slip on slip off yeah but yeah you could find some good boots uh and you don't have to necessarily look up pirate boots you just look up boots and you know caution boots and you know you can see something that would look decent or like gauntlets you know like

SPEAKER_02 28:28

medieval and pirates kind of can yeah we can cross

SPEAKER_01 28:31

over yeah they can cross over um there's a lot of stuff that can cross over but yeah you just kind of get that i mean you want to i mean i guess if you're wanting to go all out then you know you don't have to get know super high quality stuff you just have to get a lot of stuff yeah a lot of

SPEAKER_02 28:48

stuff and if it can last at least 16 weeks

SPEAKER_01 28:52

yeah

SPEAKER_02 28:52

yeah now we do recycle costumes every six years if we can if they're still around when we do a new a theme again you know

SPEAKER_01 29:02

yeah i mean you can definitely recycle i mean i think the pants i actually had were from radigan but they're okay you know they they look decent for a pirate so it's like you can do a pirate But, you know, if you get just pants and a shirt, it's like, that's cool. But, you know, you've got to have the hat. You've got to have a bandana. You've got to have a sword, a flintlock pistol. I just recently, just this last Sunday, it came in the mail. But it's a strap that holds a sword and a pistol. And it comes across the chest. And so then I got a sash and then a belt over the sash, you know, to kind of hold it, but also add – to the look yeah you know there's there's so much yeah you know and it's just so much of little stuff and it adds actually a lot to detail

SPEAKER_02 29:49

and yeah exactly yeah and i think that's kind of like you know if somebody's listening to this they might be like oh my goodness that's over the top and it is but it's a lot and you don't have to do that much but for what we do you know if you're a smaller classroom setting it might not be appropriate to go quite that far. Yeah. But do something, you know, you can do a costume of some kind and have, have some stuff that you can grab for kids to throw on for part of the story or whatever. But when we do, we're doing, when we're talking about stepping into another world, you know, the best examples we can give is what we do. So even if it doesn't apply, hopefully somebody can get something out of it, pare it down or whatever. So when we're talking about stepping into another world, all those details are, Those

SPEAKER_01 30:39

little details do make a difference. I mean, if you think of dressing, like you look at Pentecostals, Pentecostal men, how they dress versus say a high school kid at prom, you know, that's, Doesn't go to church. He wears. Doesn't know

SPEAKER_02 30:52

how to put on dress

SPEAKER_01 30:53

clothes. Yeah. He wears a dress shirt, not tucked in slacks with some air forces. Yeah. And the slacks are baggy. Yeah. It's like, but then you look at, you know, a Pentecostal guy, he's got his shirt tucked in. He's got a nice belt. He's got his tie. Maybe he's got a hanky. Yeah. He's got sharp, you know, maybe cuff links, you know, with the cuff shirt. Right. You know, just there's a lot of detail to where, you know. if you use that analogy, you know, on Sunday school, you know, when you see someone, you know, if they just have, you know, they're just their pants and shirts, like, you know, they're, they're pirate. But if you're got a whole theme going on and you see them, you know, with their hat and all these little details, it kind of makes it, it makes a difference. Yeah. It really does make a difference.

SPEAKER_02 31:39

And I, and especially for, you know, we, we have a large staff, uh, about 30, uh, large for us. Um, And so on any Sunday, we have 10, and we rotate through those people. So there's many people that are not in a bunch because of the rotation. But then there's main characters, like you're one of the – or several main characters. So we have main characters. And so the main characters, our staff is pretty good about if they know they're a main character, they go and buy them. buy stuff on their own. Sunday School doesn't have to buy it. Sunday School does buy costumes, but they buy their costume for that main character.

SPEAKER_01 32:23

And I mean, you don't always have to buy costumes either. Shamra, I mean, I don't know if she even bought anything, but she came up, she looked like a pirate

SPEAKER_03 32:33

yeah

SPEAKER_01 32:34

like i don't know what her wardrobe consisted of

SPEAKER_03 32:36

yeah

SPEAKER_01 32:37

but she just made stuff up and it she actually looked like great it looked fantastic she's been a dime she's super creative it was super creative yeah and

SPEAKER_02 32:45

goodwill is another spot

SPEAKER_01 32:46

too yeah i mean thrift stores yeah definitely i mean clancy too he uh he went to i think goodwill okay he got a shirt cut off the sleeves and You know, got a shirt for $1.50, cut off the sleeves, you know, had another shirt under that. So it's like a vest with a shirt. It looks,

SPEAKER_02 33:05

you know, great. It looks fantastic. And so you don't have to always go to Amazon. And then even our segment characters, when I say segment, you know, our Memoryverse or Flight of Salvation or whatever, a lot of times we've done it two ways. right now the way we're doing it is when you go out we do a lot of teams of three so the three people go out for memory verse if we're on the navy ship they got on kind of navy clothes if we're on pirate ship they got kind of pirate clothes and i might not be a super detailed costume because it's just a segment they don't have a character name or anything yeah but then we've also done it the other way where there is like the offering crew has a certain costume and it transcends themes Yeah, regardless of what theme you're in. Yeah, regardless of what theme. And I think for a while it was – or let me – I was thinking of Memoryverse. I said offering, but Memoryverse has like their black and white referee shirts. Yeah. Black. They're kind of like a cowboy hat and black and white sunglasses. And I think a white bow tie that just is elastic. So they're all matching. And you can just throw it on and come out and do the Memoryverse and then come back. We try to make our scenes immersive where you are – You are immersed into another world. And so you're stepping into that different world. And then the other way that you can do that with a theme, if you're trying to create a theme, is it takes a little bit of work, but a continuous storyline. And so this is something people hopefully can take away from this is if you can do that continuous storyline and build a theme around that. And we do Bible stories every Sunday. I'm not talking about that. It can be incorporated, but I'm talking about it being kind of separate. Most of the time when we do it, it's separate. And then our set is designed to suspend reality. Kind of like I was talking about the suspend disbelief. So reality is, you know, we're in a metal building. It's got carpet, sheetrock on the walls, but we want to suspend that reality for a little bit. You're actually on a pirate ship now. Yeah. And then cautions. We just talked about that. So each character has a caution and we are

SPEAKER_00 35:15

over our time. So I think We're going to wrap it up here. All right. Awesome. I'm getting random stuff here. Because I'm so nervous. I'm wrapping my bag. Pinching my arm.