What is Jelly Telly?

JellyTelly is an online destination for families, developed in partnership between Focus on the Family and Phil Vischer’s Jellyfish Labs. As a Bible-based alternative to video and gaming sites, JellyTelly provides families with a safe place to learn and play online.

Here’s what Phil has to say about it:

When I started developing the ideas that would become VeggieTales way back in 1990, the new technology sweeping through America’s living rooms was the VHS deck. Times have changed since then. Kids aren’t walking around with VHS cassettes under their arms anymore. They are walking around with iPods and Xbox. They’re online. They’ve got Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel streaming 24 hours a day into their bedrooms. Our kids are consuming more media than ever before, on average more than 5 hours a day – including more than three hours a day of just television!

We need to do something about this. Churches are doing wonderful work with kids – innovative work – but a church will get about an hour with a child on a Sunday morning and then before it sees that child again, that kid on average has watched more than 22 hours of Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel. Is it any wonder that our kids are growing up knowing more about Hannah Montana than about the apostle Paul? That they’re more emotionally engaged in the outcome of American Idol than the gospel of Jesus Christ or the work of the Church around the world? We need to do something about this – half of kids growing up in church in America are walking away from church when they graduate from high school.

We can do something about this by using the same technology that kids are adapting to as they consume media in new ways. JellyTelly is a way to bring the Bible to life for kids on a daily basis, to show them the work of the church around the world and the role they can play in it, to teach them their faith and what it looks like to live it. Every day we can talk to kids – we can take just a half an hour away from what they are consuming from the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon. We think we can make a huge difference in the life of a child. That’s JellyTelly!

Our first mission is to help raise the next generation of Christians so they know what they believe and know how to live it.

Our second mission is to help launch the next generation of Christian storytellers – kids that are coming out of Christian film schools all across the country and looking for a way to start. We can give them their first big break.

We think the combination of a new generation of Christian storytellers and a new generation of Christian kids who know their faith and know what it looks like to live it can change the world.

Welcome to Jelly Telly.