TLP 297: Sight & Sound & Your Family, Part 1 | Katie Miller interview

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My biggest hope that we can do at Sight & Sound is to create an atmosphere where people can come and have an experience with Jesus.

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Like, that's what we want them to have. We want them to come. We want them to have an encounter with the God of the universe that sees us, who sees the individual person.

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Welcome to Truth. Love. Parent. Where we use God's Word to become intentional, premeditated parents.

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Here's your host, A .M. Brewster. If you've been with Truth. Love. Parent. for any length of time, then you know that my family and I are passionate about Christian theater.

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And yet, we haven't really gotten around to having a show about it. Well, I am overjoyed to say that on today's show and the next, we're going to finally talk about Christian theater, acting, entertainment, parenting, and how your family can be built up in Christ via the medium of Christian theater.

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And to do so, I think I found the best special guests I could find. Back in episode 199,

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Your Child's Bungee, The Nature of Sin in Parenting, I introduced the show by telling everyone about my family's experience at Sight &

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Sound. My wife and I have always known about Sight & Sound. Being in Christian theater, you can't not know about them.

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Everyone knows about them. And though we had seen maybe one or two of their performances on DVD, we never really got around to seeing them live on stage until a couple of years ago when we saw

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Moses in Branson, Missouri over Christmas. And then last year, we were in the D .C. area and decided that we absolutely had to just stop what we were doing and go see

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Jesus. So we and my in -laws traveled to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and it was awesome.

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In fact, later that year, my fam and I had a chance to see the musical The Lion King live on stage. You know, that's supposed to be like the number one, you have to see it if you consider yourself to be a serious theater -goer kind of experience, and it was amazing.

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But all throughout, my wife and I just couldn't shake the feeling that the shows that we had seen at Sight &

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Sound, both in Branson and in Lancaster, far surpassed what we saw there in The Lion King.

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And hopefully we'll get a chance to talk about why that is later on. I want you guys to really get a vision for what this experience is like.

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But today, I have Katie Miller joining me, who not only works behind the curtain with the leadership and management teams of Sight &

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Sound, and who serves on the board of directors for the Sight & Sound Conservatory, but who's also been on the stage side of the productions, and who just so happens to be the oldest grandchild of Sight &

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Sound's founders. So you know, it's basically running in her veins. That's quite an intro there,

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Aaron. I feel like I have a lot to live up to now. Well, you know, but I also have to say this though, too. She's also married, and she and her husband have three children.

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So you know, they understand not only theater side of things, but they also understand what everyone that's listening to the show understands.

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We're going through parenting things, and it doesn't matter what our professional lives are like. We've got family. But again,

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I don't want to steal any of your thunder. I have set her up on a pretty high pedestal. So welcome, Katie. Thank you. Please tell us about yourself.

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I'd love to hear all the important things in your life. You know, like how much you love baking and blogging and, you know, the nitty gritty.

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Who is Katie Miller? Who is Katie Miller? Yes. Well, baking is definitely, you know, pretty much up there because carbs are life.

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So let's just get that part straight. That's where everything starts. You need that in theater.

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You need those carbs. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But no, yes, I have three children. My oldest is 13, and my son,

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Reagan, and my daughter, Anna, is 11. And then my youngest, Coulson, is six and just started first grade.

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So I'm kind of like, you're catching me right as I'm transitioning into a new season of all three of my kids being in school full time and just sort of very excited about what the

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Lord has in store for us. Very cool.

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And most of my world has been sight and sound growing up here and serving in many different capacities.

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And so it's a full life, and it's one that I'm very grateful to have. Lots of, actually, never, ever boring.

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There's always something going on in my life. And it's never, when you have three kids, nothing's ever boring, but you combine three kids and live theater and live theater that has animals and live theater that has animals and is your family business, and all of a sudden, there's never a dull moment.

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Yeah. And your whole family has done the stage thing. If I remember correctly, you've been on stage.

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In fact, how old were you when you started? I was four years old when I was on the sight and sound stage for the first time.

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Okay. So four years old. And your kids, aren't they like fourth generation?

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Yeah. So I'm the oldest of the third generation, and my kids are the oldest of the fourth generation.

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And my two oldest kids are currently some of the kids in the cast of Jesus and have been doing shows for the last few years.

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So they are kind of continuing on in a very... Their childhood looks very different than mine.

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The scale was much smaller when I was on stage. But it's very fun to just see them on stage with cousins and friends and other actors and actresses that we have, and just how that has enriched their lives as they've continued to grow older is just really remarkable to watch and be able to identify with on a very personal level.

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Oh, yeah. Because you had those experiences. Now, the largest audience that sight and sound can host for a single production, how big is that?

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So both of our theaters in both Lancaster and Branson have 2 ,000 seats in them. So we are able, when we're maxed out, just over 2 ,000.

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And we typically here in Lancaster do 11 shows a week. So we're upwards of 22 ,000 people in a week that we're able to welcome through our doors, which is just mind blowing from where we came from, for sure.

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Definitely. Yeah, you were saying that about your kids, and I was thinking my son, his first legitimate stage experience was in a sacred play, and the auditorium seated over 2 ,000 people.

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And he's like three or four years old, right? And I'm like, man, you know what? The first time

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I was on stage, it was like for a Christmas cantata with 200 people, you know? But wow. Our kids are spoiled.

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What in the world? Yeah. Well, and I don't know that they know the difference. You know, like when I was a kid on stage and at our original location, which was a 600 seat theater, standing there, it might as well have been 10 million.

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I mean, you know, it's just a lot of people. And even for my kids, I don't think they, like they have also grown up not really knowing any different.

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And so, you know, for them, when people are like, wow, you're on stage in front of 2 ,000 people. It's funny. They kind of always get this glazed over look like, yeah, like that's, that's what it is.

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I don't know. That's my life. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's kind of funny. Tell us about your grandparents.

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What was the, what started Sight & Sound? Their story is just incredible.

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And every time I get the opportunity to tell it again, it kind of just, I don't know, it never loses. It's the parts about it that are so special.

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So my grandfather grew up as a Lancaster County farmer and thought he was going to be a farmer for his whole life.

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And when he was 17 years old, his family experienced a series of tragedies and ended up losing the family farm.

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He was engaged to my grandmother and all of a sudden he found himself as a newlywed without a vocation and trying to kind of make ends meet and find his way.

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And he had always had a bent towards creativity. He remembers, you know, always for Christmas and birthdays asking for art supplies and opportunities to take for camp.

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He wanted a camera very badly growing up. And so he began to use his creativity to make ends meet.

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So he was painting landscapes here in Lancaster County. He would go around and knock on doors and go to families that he knew that had farms and say, hey, can

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I paint your farm for you as like a legacy item for you? And then they would say yes, and he would go ahead and do that.

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And that's how he was making ends meet. And he began to actually pedal paintings out of the back of his car.

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And as he fell in love with landscapes, he realized that he needed a way to take reference photography.

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So he invested in a camera. And as he began to fall in love with photography, as much as he did the actual painting and artwork, that began to open more doors for him as well.

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And one summer, his pastor at his church said, hey, Glenn, we're looking for something to do for families on a

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Sunday night. Would you and Shirley mind bringing some of your photography that you've been doing as you've traveled throughout the country and doing a slideshow for the church?

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And you know, this was back in the 60s. So there was not, you know, we didn't have Netflix. That was not a thing. And so doing a slideshow was a really big deal.

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And so they narrated it. They put music to it. He kind of created his own, like, cross -dissolve feature.

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He's very entrepreneurial and inventive in many different ways. And after that one night of doing that slideshow, they began getting requests from all over to just, hey, can you come to our school?

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Can you come to the civic organization? Can you come to this church? And over the next few years, as they began having their first couple of daughters, they were both on the road almost every single night doing these slide projections.

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And they both started to get really tired. And he often says, like, you know, I looked at Shirley one night and I was like, you know, do you think we could get people to come to us?

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Because we're getting tired of splitting, you know, you take this daughter, I'll take this daughter. We'll go to these separate places.

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And so they did. They rented an auditorium at a local college here in Lancaster for a summer and sold out almost every single show for the summer.

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And it blew their mind. And what was such a blessing was that the amount of finances that they were able to raise throughout that summer was just enough to put a down payment on a plot of land and build their first theater.

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And so in 1976, we officially opened what was at the time the Living Waters, the

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Sight and Sound Living Waters Theater. And we operated that all the way through the early 90s until we got to the place that, you know, demand for the shows was outpacing the capacity of of that location.

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So we built another location about a mile down the road in the early 90s. And it seemed like we were kind of on the path to,

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OK, we got this, like we have this theater. This is what we're doing. And we had just premiered

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Noah. So up until the mid 90s, we had been doing review style shows and. And you had been a part of it by then, obviously.

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Yes. Yeah. All through. Yeah. I was born in the 80s. I'm a child of the 80s. So all throughout my childhood, yes, had been on the stage.

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And in the mid 90s, we premiered for the first time our first full length, huge scale biblical show

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Noah. And it was kind of this moment for us as a family to go, oh, my goodness, like this is the thing we're called to do.

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It's Bible stories like all of our shows up until that point had had a ministry focus. But seeing the reaction of the audience to be able to be sitting in the middle of the arc when act two opens and be inside the story that they had, you know, grew up with, cherished, read in their

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Bible books and their storybooks and all the different things, all the different ways they've experienced Noah audiences.

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The response was just completely remarkably overwhelming. And we all kind of as a family,

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I mean, I was, you know, 12 years old, but still we had this moment of going, oh, my goodness, this is what we can do. Like this is the thing we can do that's different than what we're seeing everywhere else, what we're experiencing, what people can come and get from sight and sound that they can't get everywhere else.

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And so for us, it just felt like, okay, we, not that we have this figured out, but we have this figured out.

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And then it was only a year after we premiered that show that we had a tragic fire at the theater and lost everything.

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And yeah, it was a turning point for us in our history that at the time felt like the end.

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But in hindsight, looking back, it really was the beginning to set the stage for where we've grown today. That is so amazing.

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And I've seen on DVD productions of Noah, and it is amazing.

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And I want to talk about what the experience is like, but not quite yet. We're going to hang on to that for a second. But I actually did a very small

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Christian theater in Illinois area. The director wrote their own story of Noah, but it was inspired in many ways in our staging and whatnot off of what you guys had done.

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So that was actually the first time I had had a chance to see it because she was talking about how impressive and how amazing that performance was and how it really pulled everyone into the experience of Noah.

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And that inspired her to write her script for Noah. So I got a chance to see it then. And yeah. Wow. So, so amazing.

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And I just want to take a moment here really quickly to encourage all the listeners right now to join us next time, okay?

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Because Katie's going to come back, but she's also going to bring her friend, Brandon Talley, and he's been playing the role of Jesus in their current production that we've referenced here a couple of times and it's called

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Jesus. And among other things, we're going to talk about some of the benefits of getting your kids involved in theater.

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Now, obviously there are some potential struggles too that come from when you get your kids involved in theater and we're going to talk about that as well.

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But then we're also going to hopefully talk about how teaching your kids the theater arts can help be a big part of dealing with unique parenting issues.

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It's kind of strange. You might not even think it would be intuitive to say that, but it's true. There are some amazing experiences.

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So we hope to do that on our next show. And I hope you guys join us for that because I'm really excited to take this idea of Christian theater and step away from entertainment and inspiration and really try to make it practical in our families, how it can actually help us to parent better.

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So definitely join us for that. Katie again will be back and so we will be joined by Brandon. But I want to now kind of just transition a little bit so we can kind of have a better idea,

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Katie, of what you've been doing. You've been on the stage and we kind of left our story with this fire and it's seeming like the end.

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Talk to us a little bit about what happened next. Talk to us about where the theater went and how you guys came back to life in a way.

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And then talk to us a little bit about what you've been doing in the past since then. I know you've done a lot of stage work, but you've also done a bunch of stuff from corporate communications manager and all this, the member of the brand team and whatnot.

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So let's talk about that. Sure. Yeah. So it was 1997 when the fire happened and at the time my grandparents were in their fifties and they just, you know, to be completely honest, they weren't sure that they wanted to come back.

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It felt like an just completely overwhelming undertaking and not necessarily being certain that they wanted to at that stage in their lives.

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And they talk about the infamous kitchen table conversation. That's how we lovingly refer to it, but it was three days after the fire and it was the first moment in three days that they had a time alone.

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We'd had constantly people, their house is only about a mile away from the theater here. So their home had become the hub of all of our displaced offices and a leadership team and management teams as we were just trying to say,

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Oh my goodness, where do we go from here? And it was three nights later, they sat down together and my grandfather looked at my grandmother and he said,

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Shirley, do you want to come back? Like we're 55 years old. We've been working really hard our whole lives.

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What do you want to? And my grandmother is definitely the quieter of the two.

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And she, he always says, you know, she sat there for a few minutes and then she looked at him and she said, Glenn, if we don't come back,

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I don't think I could live with myself for another day. This is more than just the thing we do. It's the calling

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God has put on our lives. And in that moment they said, okay, whatever it takes, we're going to come back.

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And so my grandmother, after that conversation went up to bed, but my grandpa decided to go out to his office.

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He had an office in the corner of the barn that's right outside of their house. And he sat down in, in his, what we call his milk house offices in the milk house part of the barn and began praying and actually stayed up all night long and sketched the exterior of the theater as it exists today.

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And it is remarkable. We still have that original sketch and when you hold it up beside a photo, I mean it, it looks like it was done the other way around that you sketched the exterior of the theater.

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It is an exact image of what he sketched out that night. The architects used it as their main point for their design work.

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And we were able to miraculously, I don't have time today if we could do a whole podcast on all the things that the

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Lord did through that season, but we were able to miraculously open with our existing theater here in Lancaster 18 months after the fire and we premiered again with Noah.

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Yeah, it was just, it was completely the way that the financing came through, the architects came through.

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It just from start to finish, it was a miraculous season for our family's lives. And it really did.

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Even for me, you know, I was 12 years old when the fire happened and I hadn't known any other life than Sight and Sound.

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For the most part, I had been homeschooled. All of my friends were at Sight and Sound. It was the hub of my family.

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We were all here. And so for me in one day to watch, you know, what was my life at the time, what felt like my life anyway, burn and just kind of have that uncertainty of the future and then see

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God's faithfulness throughout it. It was just such a, I don't know, it was such a special time for me just as a budding teenager to go, oh my goodness, like I think

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God has a plan in all of this. And if he has a plan in all of this, he has a plan for me too, whether my plan intersects with Sight and Sound's or not, there's a plan that he has for me.

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And I ended up going to high school throughout, I wasn't homeschooled anymore for high school and did different things at the theater throughout that season.

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Worked in concessions, worked in the box office and in our guest services areas.

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And then from there, worked in the contact center, taking reservations, making phone calls and then eventually worked with our human resources department doing events for our employees and serving our leadership team in an executive assistant capacity for a few years.

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And most recently, I have been a part of our brand development team, just partnering to continue to grow this thing that is

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Sight and Sound that we are all very passionate about and being able to partner very closely with our marketing teams and brand director creative teams and have just been loving it, especially the last couple of years.

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It's just, it's been so fun to watch this place and this organization that I love so much and the people here grow into what it has become today.

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That is so amazing. So amazing. And I love the passion and the fact that you've had all of these experiences.

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You've worked in every different arena. I mean, did you have a chance to make those amazing spice almonds?

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I did. I spent many years roasting almonds. Now, before we move forward,

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I do need, I want to go back to something you said. So your grandfather sketched out the, basically the exterior. Did it include that iconic lion and lamb?

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It did. I know I can't say for certain. Now I'm like trying to picture it in my head. If the original sketch had the lion and lamb, but I believe it was only a little bit after that, that he would have put that on.

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We opened with that lion and lamb in place, put it that way. So it's been there since we opened. Yeah. And having gone to both of the campuses now and having seen, it's like an identical building in both places.

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A lion and lamb is out there and it's so great. So great. Okay. So we referenced the almonds.

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Now I'm actually not a huge fan of almonds myself, but when you walk into a

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Sight & Sound, you see the spectacle outside, this massive building, this giant lion and lamb. It's so great. And I love that right from the very get go, everything's pointing to the

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Bible, pointing to Christ, pointing to the glory of God. It's so amazing. But once you walk inside, you get smacked in the face with probably the most delightful aroma known to mankind.

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It is so amazing. And it's these spiced almonds. Is that like a proprietary blend you guys make that there?

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I don't know. I mean, I guess so because it's not something that we necessarily publish, but yeah, it's funny.

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Like we started roasting those, I think right after we opened the theater here, right after the fire.

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And they have become one of the most famous aspects of the complete

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Sight & Sound experience. And it totally cracks us up because even when we post photos on social media, we'll be posting all of these beautiful, epic shots of the shows and we'll get a lot of really great interaction.

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And then we like post a photo of almonds and it goes viral and we're like, what just happened? Like people are coming here for the almonds and the show is like a fun little side part of what they come here for.

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Well, I heard once of this ice cream shop and everyone loves their water. Their ice cream was so good. It made the water taste good.

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I'm just going to say that everything else you guys do is so amazing that it makes the almonds taste that much better.

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It just has to work that way. It has to work that way. Yeah. So we went to Branson. It was during Christmas.

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My family, my parents were there and my in -laws were there and my family of four were there. Our kids are very close in their age.

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My son is almost 13. My daughter is almost 10 and it was amazing.

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The first time we saw it, we saw Moses and the production was just so huge.

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I mean, I've seen a lot of stage work. I did stage work at Bob Jones University and they have a massive stage there, but the stage was huge.

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Like you can't see it, the whole thing from side to side. You got to turn your head unless maybe you're sitting in the very back row of the balcony.

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You might be able to see it from side to side, but I kind of doubt that. And you guys have come to a place now where you've got the technologies where the sets, not only is the set design absolutely gorgeous, but what adds more gorgeousness to it is the fact the way the set moves.

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Because changing from scene to scene, it's not just like, oh, we have to get this out of here and make room for something else.

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It's an experience. It's an art form just to watch the sets move and to see the digital backgrounds that are used in some situations is so amazing.

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Help us, help the person who's never seen this before, kind of get a picture in their mind of what they could expect to see unravel in a sight and sound production.

22:45

Well, one of the things that we are most known for is that panoramic stage and the experience of feeling like you are right in the middle of the story.

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We don't have to do a lot of adding to these biblical stories. They are epic by themselves.

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So whether it is Moses and the parting of the Red Sea or Samson and a temple collapsing, or even just all of the story elements throughout through the stories of Jesus, where Peter's walking on water and Jesus is clearing the temple, there are so many spectacular elements to the stories.

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The thing that we are passionate about is bringing them to life in a way that our guests that come, our audiences that come, feel like they are truly part of the story.

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And more than that, we want to continue to do these stories justice, like they deserve a big stage.

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They deserve to be as big as what they were when they really happened thousands and thousands of years ago.

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And so for us, the 40 -foot high set pieces and the live animals running up and down the aisles and the

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LED screens and the thousands of lights and all of the different special effects and technological things that we use to tell the stories.

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The angel of death flying over the audience. Yes, the angels that fly. All the things that happen, they really come back to telling the story, the messages in the story, and there is no greater compliment,

24:09

I should say, that we ever get than when we hear from audiences and guests that come and they leave with their families and they write us a note later and they say, you know what?

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We went home and as a family for the first time in a long time, we sat down and read the Bible together. We sat down and we wanted to know, like, was that really in the story?

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We didn't remember that. And so whenever we hear that we inspired people to turn back and go back to Scripture themselves, for us, that's what it's all about.

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That's the thing we all get up every day to do. The Bible is just, you know, so full of life, so full of things that are relevant to today, and we want people who may not think of the

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Bible that way to walk out of our doors going, oh my goodness, I never thought about Scripture that way, and now

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I want to check it out more for myself. And that's exactly, exactly what it did for my family.

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We actually listened to an audio of the entire book of most of,

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I think most of the book of Exodus in preparation for seeing Moses, because that's what it's all about.

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It's all about the Scriptures. And what you guys do is you take the Scriptures and you literally put us right smack in the middle of it.

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And you put us into the middle of it in such a way that it's so real, like you don't doubt it.

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The writing is fantastic, the acting is fantastic, the music is just pitch perfect, it's exactly what it should be.

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It's one of those things, sometimes you listen to music in a production and you're like, that was nice, it fit there, but this is music you want to listen to at home, because it's so perfectly sums up the whole point of this whole narrative, the whole theme of that particular scene within the story you're telling.

25:46

It's just really pulls you in. Yes, the animals help. I love the animals. My daughter loves the animals. You've got these camels and everything going everywhere.

25:53

You've got even these little animals, like rats, like you have to be paying attention. This one scene in Moses, if you weren't looking, you'd miss the fact that this rat would run down this master and go into this spot, and then later you have another one over here.

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It's like, they're training rats for this, this is fantastic. Yes, we have a just completely ridiculously talented team of people.

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Between our two locations, we have over 650 employees that all work together, whether they are training animals, or writing shows, or building set pieces, or sewing costumes, cleaning our facilities, welcoming guests.

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They're all bringing the thing they're designed to do that all comes together to create this whole experience.

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The details matter, God's in the details. For us, the set pieces, having the detailing and animals, not just the big ones, but the small ones too, all of those things add up to creating an experience that you don't necessarily walk away being able to articulate how all of the things wove together to tell the story, but they really do.

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They contribute. Look, here you are, what, five, three years later, talking about the rat in Moses. Exactly.

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Exactly. Now, I talk about the rat, but I also have to talk about Rodney, because what was really cool is that we saw

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Rodney Coe, who was, I think, playing Aaron in that production of Moses. Yes. And then we went to Lancaster years later, and we saw

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Jesus, and I recognized the voice. It was - Well done. Yes. That's impressive. I recognized the voice.

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And what was so cool, and you talk about people doing everything well, throwing their energies into it.

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My wife, we were the last ones to leave the theater. We were just loving it, and she's getting pictures, and Rodney photobombs.

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He played, who did he play in Jesus? It was Nicodemus. He played Nicodemus. Yeah. Yep. So he played

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Nicodemus, and he photobombs her picture. And then we get into a conversation, and he's telling us his testimony, and we're sharing things, and we're talking, and we're laughing, and we're crying in the parking lot.

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We're praying together in the parking lot. But that was just an extension of, that was a perfect end cap to the day, because the beautiful thing is, we sat down, and we sat down next to a complete stranger, right?

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But this man who was sitting next to me is also a Christian. And so immediately, we're brothers in Christ.

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We've never met, but we have this connection in Christ. We're here to see the story of Christ, and we're talking, and we're encouraging.

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We ended up exchanging emails and having a back and forth after the fact. I mean, a guy, a random guy

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I sat next to in a theater, we emailed back and forth for a while, and we're encouraging each other. I love the fact that at the end of the show, there's a call to a prayer.

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There's an invitation to say, if anything that you heard today impacted you, if you want to talk about what you saw today, and there are people down front, and I love that that is the passion.

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This is not just solely about entertaining. This is about sharing truth for the purpose of life change.

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And I think a lot of the people go to participate in that, and I love that you guys engender an atmosphere, whether it's the actors on stage, or the people selling the almonds, or the people down in front willing to pray with you after the performance, you engender that atmosphere.

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Yeah. Well, thank you. That is an incredible compliment, and it really is. Our chief creative officer and president, he is very fond of saying, my biggest hope that we can do at Sight &

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Sound is to create an atmosphere where people can come and have an experience with Jesus. That's what we want them to have.

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We want them to come. We want them to have an encounter with the God of the universe that, like I said earlier, parted the

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Red Sea, that led his people out of slavery, and all of the different miracles that we watched happen throughout all the

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Bible. But he is also the God who sees us, who sees the individual person, and we try to remember our teams.

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Our shows are long. They're big. Our show runs are very long, and so the thing we are constantly trying to encourage our employees and our cast members and crew members that are doing this day in and day out is to remember that when they're looking out into the audience, yes, they're seeing a crowd of 2 ,000 people, but they are seeing individual people with individual stories who are here to be inspired, to be reminded, sometimes to be introduced to Jesus for the first time.

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And so it is something that we as an organization, as a group of fellow employees all work together.

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And to your point, you said it earlier about Rodney, like share the same passion. And we love hearing those stories when the experience continues well beyond the stage and into the parking lot and hopefully even beyond that.

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Oh, definitely. And they have. And we've told many people ourselves, we posted so many pictures and things on Facebook, and we've just told people, it was cool, one of those times that we were,

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I think we were at Jesus, if I'm not mistaken, a friend of ours was in Branson, and they were seeing Samson, maybe during the same time, maybe not.

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And there's a couple of things I want to point out before we move on, and I want to talk about, so how our listeners can participate, how they can see this.

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Obviously there's going to the show, but there are other options and I want to talk about that. But I just want to, two things that struck me.

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So we're going to see Moses, right? And we know about the parting of the Red Sea and I'm a theater guy. I've done this a lot.

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I've been in many different shows and I'm thinking to myself, okay, impress me sight and sound.

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How are you going to do the parting of the Red Sea in such a way that it's really going to, you know,

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I feel like I'm really right there. Oh my word. You win.

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I lose. Congratulations. You did it. It was so cool. And I, to try to explain what you did would completely destroy it.

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I just want to say to the audience listening that it was amazing. It was so well done, but despite the size of that and the grandeur of recreating the parting of the

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Red Sea. Okay. That was amazing. I have to tell you, now I've seen a couple of them on DVD and I've been to two shows, but the one thing that absolutely blew my mind came from Jesus this past September.

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And you might know where I'm going with this, but it was the cleansing of the temple. So if you know the anecdote from scripture, you know that Jesus goes in and he is kicking people out of the temple because they are sinning, they're defiling the temple.

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He's throwing people out and the animals are all being driven out. And he goes up center stage.

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Okay. This is what you're actually seeing. He goes up center stage and Jesus grabs the table with all the money on it and he just flips it.

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And what happens is that moment just, I think it sent goosebumps all up and down me. And if you don't know what's happening, it just, you can't believe what you're seeing because we see it all the time in movies, right?

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In the movies, something will happen and all of a sudden time will slow down to help you appreciate what it is you're seeing.

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But that's exactly what happened real life on stage. All of a sudden, everything goes into slow motion.

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And it wasn't just that the table was falling six feet in slow motion. It wasn't just that all of the actors are moving in slow motion.

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What absolutely blew my mind is that all of the money that was on the table is falling to the ground in slow motion.

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Now I am, I'm not going to give away how they did this. I had to investigate myself. I went down stage and I'm like looking after the, during intermission,

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I'm trying to figure out how this happened and I figured it out and it was pure genius. But being able to capture that moment, the intensity and the passion and to be able to put in that element that really was so beautiful and so amazingly well done.

33:34

Absolutely fantastic. That scene, I mean obviously the crucifixion and so many other things that you guys covered, just so powerful, equally powerful, but that particularly, that image is seared into my mind of how you guys pulled that off and it was so well done.

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So we built this up, okay, and we've kind of set the stage, if I can put it that way, for how amazing this experience is.

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Thank you. Actually, I feel really embarrassed that I said it like that. That's okay. I say it all the time too, like not trying and I'm like, okay,

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I need to pull back on that one. Yeah, you need to stop setting the stage. But we want, we want the listeners to be able to get this experience.

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So obviously there's going to Branson and it's right there in the, kind of in the middle of the Midwest there and then over on the

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East Coast, we've got Lancaster and if you can do that, plan it into a family vacation, take some time to get to those locations, you will not regret it.

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But how else can a family do that if perhaps that's maybe not so feasible? Yeah, no, we, you know, are as passionate as we are about telling these

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Bible stories, about inviting people to come join us and have these experiences. We also are passionate about making them accessible and we recognize that not everyone, as much as we would love to have everybody, we know not everyone can come to Lancaster or Branson every year.

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And so a couple of years ago for the first time, we began capturing the live shows on film and then having them for movie theater events all throughout the nation.

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So we started, we did that for the first time in 2017 with our show of Jonah and Jonah was in 650 movie theaters nationwide, all 50 states.

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And it was just for us such a very cool moment to recognize that more people than ever were having this shared experience at the same time.

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And Erin, you referenced something a little bit ago when you talked about the community aspect of coming and sitting alongside others that share passion for the

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Bible and are having the experience with their families. And it is a big part of why we do what we do.

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We recognize the community aspect of it. And so nothing made us more excited than when we heard of youth groups and church groups and school groups and family reunions and all these different things that were happening in all four corners of the country at the exact same time, having a sight and sound experience in their own backyards and movie theaters.

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And so it has begun, it has continued to be something that we do every year. And so this, we've done

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Jonah, Moses and Noah in movie theaters and we have not announced what our 2020 plan is yet.

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So stay tuned for that. We'll be making that announcement in October. But we are just excited about continuing to see where God takes us in the future, what he has for sight and sound as we continue to grow as an organization and provide more opportunities for people to have the sight and sound experience.

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And if you missed those events and you want to continue to have other ways to experience sight and sound, we do have a lot of our shows on film for both in the

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DVDs and then also just for digital download on Amazon and iTunes and places like that too. Yeah.

36:45

And I would highly encourage that if nothing else, definitely, you know, cause in Jonah, you've got, you've got the, the, the giant fish, the whale, you know, swimming through like the audience is under the water.

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I mean, it was just so amazing. Even though it's stage productions, I can say are always better. They're live.

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They're great. If there's the energy coming from everyone in the room, but the way these have been shot and the way they've done it, it's such an amazing spectacle.

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And again, the stories, I hate using the word stories, the historical accounts are so powerful because it's

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God's word and God's word does not return void. And they're true to that. And it really is a wonderful thing.

37:20

Now, there's also something else you do. In fact, I mentioned earlier that you're on the board of the Sight and Sound Conservatory. Tell us a little bit about that because that's another way that some people, a small handful perhaps choose to continue to engage with you.

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Yeah, we are in our sixth year, I believe of the Sight and Sound Conservatory, which is a year long program designed for raising up the next generation of students of performers in the performing arts.

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But always from a Christian worldview, wanting it to be an expression of faith. And so it has begun to just be such a special part of what our

37:57

Sight and Sound family is here. And one that we continue to hope to see grow in the future as, like you said, it's a handful.

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Right now it's very small. We intended it to be a small program, but we want to continue to see that grow in the future.

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And we're actively working towards continuing to make some more of those opportunities more readily available.

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Now, we're going to talk more next time about how getting involved in theater and acting and whatnot can be a huge benefit to our children and can help us with some cool parenting experiences.

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But if you are already in a place where you have a child who's looking to graduate from high school and they are passionate about theater and they love the

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Lord, this might be something to consider that they may not have already considered as they can continue furthering their education in this particular realm, because Sight and Sound does it so incredibly well.

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I haven't participated in the conservatory, but I can only imagine that their excellence is carrying through to that as well.

38:53

So, Katie, as we wrap up the show today, please share with us the best ways for the listeners to immediately get introduced to Sight and Sound.

39:00

Where should they go? Yeah. I mean, the best way is always our website, and that is sight -sound .com,

39:07

and you'll be able to see on there what shows we have available, what our upcoming schedules are.

39:13

There's always social media. We love interacting with our guests and fans there. So we're on Facebook and Instagram primarily, and that's a fun way to just get a lot of behind the scenes photos and first announcements of what's coming up next.

39:26

Awesome. So, as we wrap up today, I want to encourage all of you, please, to engage as much as you can with this amazing ministry.

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Find them on social media. Go look them up. You can obviously start by sharing this episode so others can be introduced to them, and then head over to sight -sound .com.

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Check out all the information there. And then again, please join us next time as Katie, Brandon, and I discuss how theater can be a very practical and exceedingly helpful resource for you as you parent the way

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God called and created you to parent. We'll see you next time. Truth. Love.

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Parents. Is part of the Evermind Ministries family and is dedicated to helping you become an intentional, premeditated parent.

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Join us next time as we search God's Word for the truth your family needs today.