Before there were multi-media presentations, Veggie Tales DVDs and interactive flash-driven websites, there was…flannelgraph. Flannelgraph boards were simply scenes painted on a piece of flannel to which paper characters could be affixed. They were the height of visual aided storytelling.

These boards were very popular in fundy Sunday School classes because they were cheap and relatively low tech. As long as the children being told the story didn’t have much exposure to television, they worked like a charm.

Among the lessons learned from flannel were these

• Everyone in the Bible was white.
• Nobody in the Bible was overweight or ugly.
• Adam and Eve lived behind big green bushes.
• Jesus and the disciples never changed their clothes.
• Jesus had long hair until someone pointed it out and then by the next week Jesus had evidently been to a Galilean barber shop and gotten a hair cut.