Our world is in serious moral and spiritual crisis and, sadly, children are suffering the consequences. The latest statistics from the U.S. alone are alarming:

• Barely one-third of young teens (36%) believe that God exists and is the all-knowing, all-powerful Creator of the universe.
• Nearly half don’t know if there is a God, don’t believe in His existence, or don’t care.
• Most of the youngest teens (61%) either believe Jesus Christ sinned while He was on earth or hold open the possibility He did. *

Given the U.S. is the main exporter of influence, these trends do not bode well for the rest of the world.

This is critical because it is during these years that a person’s thinking is established. Dr. George Barna, in his latest book Raising Spiritual Champions, states, “A person’s worldview starts developing in the fifteen-month to eighteen-month age range and is largely in place by the age of thirteen. That’s the prime window of opportunity for discipleship.”*

It is no mystery that the type of media most attractive to this age range is animation. Animation transcends cultural boundaries and speaks to a child’s heart in a way no other medium can. It consistently tops the lists of highest-grossing movies and tv shows; media giants spend billions creating animated content. Animation is also highly compatible with the digital landscape children are familiar with. They naturally watch, re-watch, and engage with content through gaming apps, websites, and social media. This is why it is so concerning that the content filling this space is becoming more and more antithetical to Christianity. A space traditionally reserved for kids and families has been turned into a playground of godless indoctrination. We simply cannot afford to abandon this massively influential space and leave it for the enemy.

And what better content to counter this influence than the ultimate source of Truth—the Word of God. This is why, together with generous partners like you, we created the animated Bible series Superbook and integrate it with the latest digital technology: the Superbook Kids Bible App, Superbook Kids Website, and online Superbook Academy discipleship curriculum. The results have been remarkable. Gordon Robertson, CEO of the Christian Broadcasting Network, stated, “The Superbook animated series is the most successful evangelistic tool CBN has created in its more than 60 years of ministry.” And this is why:

STREAMING

• 2 Billion + YouTube Channel Views
• 7.8 Million YouTube Channel Subscribers

BROADCAST**

• Projected 514 Million Viewers in 143 Countries
• Projected 364 Million Recalled Having Sung the Salvation Poem

APP + WEB

• 33.8 Million App downloads
• 10.7 Million Gospel Presentation Views
• 1 Million + Indicated Salvations

You can celebrate Childhood Evangelism Month and leave a legacy of influence for Christ. With your help we can do so much more, including:

• Translate Superbook episodes, the website, and Bible app into more languages
• Increase our ability to put lifesaving content in front of children
• Improve the app and website experience so we can reach more children
• Help disciple children around the world

And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard?

Romans 10:14

Together we can tell them.

Give to Superbook

*Dr. George Barna; Raising Spiritual Champions

**Brown, Fraser & Associates, a research company founded by Regent University professor Dr. William Brown and by Dr. Benson Fraser, carried out a study of CBN’s international viewership in 2023. To prepare this study, Brown and Fraser surveyed 16,282 persons in 136 cities or regions of 13 countries. Brown and Fraser applied the results from these and prior years’ surveys to project audience sizes and impact of CBN programming.  

Christian music duo Jenny & Tyler enjoy writing and performing songs about Jesus. When they’re at home they enjoy sharing stories and lessons from the Bible with their four kids. One of their favorite ways to do that is by watching Superbook.

“They're true to the scriptures. It sounds good. It looks good. I love the stories and the morality that's brought into it,” says Tyler.

Jenny adds, “Knowing that it's something you can trust is a huge deal. Because there's just so much out there that's supposed to be about the Bible, that's really wishy washy or just not what you really want. And this is so true.”

Their kids love the adventures and the lessons. Sarah says, “I like the characters, and how they have problems and when they go on adventures, they learn from them.”

“It's like, 'Oh, I can teach my kid about the scripture, but also about how that applies to modern day,'” says Tyler.

Jane says, “I like that they have a lesson at the beginning and end, like it starts with something like Chris or Joy or Gizmo do wrong, and then like the story in the Bible, David and Goliath, it teaches Chris not to be nervous and stuff like that.”

Tyler continues, “I feel the show has had a really sweet impact on them in that they will read a scripture and they'll say, 'Oh, yeah, we know that – we already know about that, Dad, because we saw it on Superbook.'"

Mary talks about her favorite, “I like Daniel and the Lions. Because he doesn't even have a scratch when he comes out. And he's not dead.“

“I love the selfishness of Chris and Joy are present in episodes, and how they deal with that,” says Tyler.

Sarah agrees, “Chris wants all the presents for Christmas to himself, but then he goes on a Superbook adventure and he gives the presents to a little boy. I think that he learned to prefer people over himself.”

Jenny even has a favorite, “One thing recently with the Samuel episode, our girls now will say, 'Maybe I need to say, Speak, Lord, your servant is listening.' And I'm like, Yes!"

Jane says, “I would tell my friends about Superbook because it teaches you about Jesus and it's also fun and entertaining.”

As they’ve met other parents, Jenny and Tyler are quick to bring up Superbook. Tyler recalls, “We met some folks, found out that they had three kids, three and under. And we were like, 'Have you heard of Superbook?" Because it's awesome.'" 

Jenny adds, “We would definitely recommend Superbook, because it's been so impactful for our family.”

Give to Superbook

REASONS WE ARE TANGLED UP

Jennie says, “I consider my fix-it nature a gift – a spiritual gift…but over the past few years, as I’ve been on a journey toward untangling my emotions, I’ve come to see things in a very different light…The truth is that I’ve been so busy fixing stuff that I’ve neglected the feeling part of me.”

Until a few years ago, she felt like her emotions were bad and would try to take over in situations bringing her pain and discomfort. As a result, she tried to deflect the pain instead of trying to understand what her emotions were trying to tell her. “Somewhere along the way, maybe from things I learned at church or just from growing up, I learned I wasn’t supposed to be sad or angry or scared. I was supposed to be okay. Or maybe it’s just because I hate the feeling of being out of control, and I believed these feelings were too scary, and sitting in the hard felt too hard.” 

During the pandemic, Jennie recalls falling into an emotional pit. She felt exhausted from the demands of work, kids, and trying to survive the challenges of a pandemic. Although she was tired, she wasn’t mad, sad, or happy. In fact, she didn’t feel anything. She would sit in her chair in the mornings reading her Bible, but her heart felt distant and cold. She experienced an emotional numbness and longed to feel again. Jennie began to realize that she had ignored, minimized, and rejected her feelings. 

UNTANGLE YOUR EMOTIONS

This past year, Jennie’s daughter Kate got married. The newlyweds began to talk about possibly moving outside the country for a few years. When they shared the news, Jennie’s airway constricted, and her chest tightened. Although she was happy for them, she didn’t understand why her heart and body couldn’t catch up. Her revved-up reaction was coming from something deep seated in her heart that had gone unaddressed.

She met with her counselor and began to realize that she had the same feelings when her husband, Zac, was in the hospital, and she was praying that God would spare his life. He had suffered a stroke and doctors were baffled as his blood pressure kept soaring. Jennie texted and asked everyone she knew to pray. Fear began to take hold of Jennie in the days that followed. She was afraid of losing him, and the life they knew, and being left alone. In her counseling session that day Jennie realized that every time Kate talked about moving away, subconsciously her brain and heart were being reminded of Zac’s hospital stay and the fear of being left alone. Things shifted for Jennie when she began to realize that “feelings were never meant to be fixed; feelings are meant to be felt.” 

1.  Getting past fine – noticing your feelings. Suppressing your emotions can have lasting consequences. One afternoon while driving home Jennie noticed she felt uneasy. Her breath was short and her chest felt tight. She did an assessment of her emotions and realized that while nothing had happened of significance that day Jennie was in a season of intense stress. Zac was spinning emotionally; finances were less certain and the demands of figuring out dinner for the night began to mount in her mind. Instead of having a meltdown she allowed herself to notice what she was feeling. When she got home, instead of having a breakdown, she and her family sat down and each talked about the stress of their days. They faced the hard emotions together. She says, “Emotions are best healed in community.”
2.  The vocabulary of emotions – naming what you feel. Anxiety and depression are not feelings; they are something the doctor diagnoses. “Emotional wholeness begins by noticing and naming what we feel and then deciding what to do with it, allowing these emotions to draw us to God and one another,” shares Jennie. 
3.  Give yourself some space – feel your emotions. Jennie’s husband Zac struggles with depression. When Zac spiraled into his first emotional low in 2014, Jennie was in survival mode for herself and her family. Zac has emerged from those months of depression and is in a completely different place today. His business is doing well. She watched him live this book as she wrote it. Expressing his emotions regardless of the circumstances has allowed him to be lighter, more hopeful, and peaceful again. 
4.  You are not alone – share your feelings with your community. In a recent small group meeting Jennie talked about challenges she was facing at home. She shared how Zac’s business was struggling, how she was dealing with a pressure-cooker experience at her work, and one of their kids was veering off the rails and seemed destined for a crash. After talking she asked the ladies in the group what they “felt” about what she discussed. One told her, “I feel proud of you for telling us (about her struggles) and for walking through such a difficult season with Zac with grace. Their words of empathy and comfort made Jennie feel seen and comforted. 
5.  What to do with what you feel – choosing what is next. A relationship with God changes everything. 
“He untangles the knots through seasons of tears and raw honesty and running again and again back to Him... because He cares for us. He wants all of us. He wants to know it all.” In 2018, Jennie was speaking at a conference in Texas. A collective confession unfolded before her eyes. After she spoke, she asked those in attendance to set down the burden they’d been carrying. Kids began standing up from their seats and shouting their hidden sins such as “pornography” “suicidal thoughts,” etc. Months later she spoke at Baylor University and the same thing happened. Then she spoke at the Passion conference in Atlanta to sixty-five thousand students and the same thing occurred. God isn’t afraid of our brokenness, and neither should we be. Be honest about your emotions and your desperate need for God. 

EMBRACING THE HEALING

“Living life tangled up emotionally is not really living at all,” reveals Jennie. As you too grow in emotional health Jennie wants you to remember a few things:
•    Your feelings do not have authority over you; rather you have authority over them because of Christ Jesus.
•    When you begin to acknowledge how you truly feel and you share those feelings with others, remember that we are broken people living in a broken world. 
•    God longs for us to use our emotions to help us become better at living life.
•    Some thoughts we can interrupt, and some feelings will not go away no matter what we do. God is with us through it all. 
•    When you learn how to feel your feelings and not run from them, you can free up all that energy you were pouring into not feeling and contribute something beautiful to the world. As you become more emotionally healthy you also increase your capacity to serve, give, and care.

JENNIE’S INFO.

Jennie is a Bible teacher, author, and the visionary behind IF: Gathering, a women’s ministry providing gospel-centered study resources, an annual conference, and opportunities for community. She is also the Founder & Visionary of Gather25, a 25-hour global prayer gathering. In 2022, she began to wrestle with the question, “What if Jesus came back in 10 years?” In an effort to reach the billions of people on earth who don’t know Jesus, Jennie began to assemble a team to be mobilized to share the Gospel. Throughout 2023, this group began to dream about what a gathering of the global Church - every man, woman, and child who follows Jesus - could look like, and Gather25 was born. Major partners began to step in visiting each continent to build relationships and explore possibilities. Then, in February of 2024, the first invitation went out to the 100,000+ women of IF: Gathering. The first of its kind event will take place on March 1, 2025, for in person and on-line attendees. 

To purchase Jennie Allen's book, Untangle Your Emotions, and to discover more about her ministry, please visit her website: www.JennieAllen.com. More information about her global minoistry, IF:Gathering, can be found at www.IfGathering.com.

“They let people know that he was around, but they weren't particularly afraid of it or uh everybody wasn't hiding out. And they just kind of went about their business, knowing that there was a bear there,” says Casadi. In the summer of 2018, her family went to a Bible camp in northern Canada to share about their coming move to the mission field of Thailand. She says, “Our kids were super excited about the weekend, to get to go camping, and get to spend the weekend on the lake. We had three sessions that we were invited to share. We were the guest speakers for the weekend.”

When they arrived on Friday their kids quickly discovered an uninvited guest right outside their cabin. She says, “I think it was my older son who was like, ‘Mom, Mom, there's a bear out here.’ And so we ran out there and, yeah, there was a bear, and it was kind of going in and out of – from like under our cabin.” They took the kids safely into the cabin and eventually the bear wandered back into the wilderness. Casadi remembers, “They were alarmed that he wasn't scared off easily. They really had to chase him down and throw rocks at him, be very aggressive towards him.”

The next night, the camp pastor felt an urgency to pray for Casadi and her family. “’I sense that we need to pray for you. And you're going into enemy territory, and we need to pray for protection for you.’ In that moment we just received prayer, and everybody got into small groups and just prayed for our safety.”

They would need that protection sooner than they expected. The next morning Casadi’s son woke to the bear trying to get into the cabin. “And he's like, ‘Mom, the bear is outside.’ And so I opened up the curtain, and, sure enough, the bear was – had been pushing on the front door. Then he went to the side of the – the other side of the cabin and crawled up the side of the cabin. And proceeded to swipe away the screen,” she says.

Fearing for the safety of tent campers, Casadi went out to warn others the bear back was on camp property. She found him trying to enter the mess hall window.
She remembers, “He just right away backed up from the window and started slowly sauntering towards me. I slowly back away, I start making noise. I never thought that he would ever attack me. I just – bears just typically don't attack people. They're scared of people.”

But this bear wasn’t afraid. He charged Casadi suddenly and attacked. Casadi says, “I just remember all of a sudden he was in front of me. I remember is he had knocked me down and he was just tearing into my legs. And the just biting in and then just ripping. He was just way stronger than I ever thought. And the way he was tearing into my legs, I just thought if he went for my neck, it – this could be it.”

Desperate for help and knowing she might die, Casadi prayed, “It was a moment of surprising clarity. And I think it wasn't till that point in my life where I actually felt like, I am ready. And I really didn't have a lot of thoughts about my family, I just thought, okay, like just, God'll take care of them, and I'm going home. And I'm ready.”

At that moment, her husband brad ran to the scene of the attack and fought the bear until it released Casadi. Brad says, “Just started engaging the bear and kicking and hitting. I have one stark memory of connecting with the bear with my fist and just thinking this thing is really solid. Eventually, she was able to get free and I yelled at her to run and so she took off running to the closest cabin which wasn’t our cabin but another cabin.”

Casadi says, “And I just started pounding on the door and saying, ‘Let me in, let me in, a bear is eating me.’ at that point the bear had caught up to me again and took me down and started tearing into my legs again.”

Brad engaged the bear again. As he fought the bear Casadi says she was somehow lifted by her legs into the cabin as if by an angel. She says, “I do honestly feel like God was protecting me. And so I wouldn't be surprised if that was just another miracle that I was just being released by the bear and lifted into the cabin.”

Brad made it into the cabin and the bear eventually left. Casadi was taken to a hospital and treated for her wounds. She says, “It was quite painful. Like I was just black and blue because this bear had – was just so strong. He just tore me to shreds.”

Amazingly Casadi suffered no life-threatening injuries. “First thing the doctor said to me was like, ‘This is – this is actually like, I know this feels bad, but this is the best-case scenario.’ Because he said, ‘If that bear would have got you anywhere from the waist up’ – And I honestly, hardly had a scratch above the waist. He said, "Anywhere from the waist up, you're looking at, you know, possibly fatal injuries.’

And they just stapled like all the holes together and I walked out of the – the room by myself. Just like a couple of hours later. Nobody helped me. I just got up and left.”

Her physical wounds healed, but for a time, Casadi says she was wounded emotionally and questioned God’s plan for her. “Why, if He's so powerful, why would this happen to me? He gave me a picture of Him holding my upper body up and away from the bear. And for me, that was a powerful picture because I really believe he was protecting me from worse injury and possibly something fatal. And I just felt like He asked me, ‘Will you trust me? Will you trust me even though you don't understand it all? Will you trust me even though you're in pain?’  And will you trust me when you don't have answers? I felt like, yeah, I-I have no place else to go. You are it. And so, of course, I trust you.”

She says the following months brought her overflowing thankfulness for her life, health, and the prayers of people who stand with them now, and in their coming mission. “I actually had a lot of joy, which is surprising. Just so thankful that I could hug my kids and do simple things, and enjoy people. We just – had so many people praying for us, and there's no doubt in my mind that it was a miracle that the bear didn't get my upper body. There's no doubt in my mind that it was a miracle that I could walk out of the hospital room a few hours after a bear attack. Like what? God showed up, and He worked miracles. And He is working miracles all around us. And we just, yeah. To remember and to open up our eyes and to have faith.”