Mark and Avoid: Orange Kids Church Curriculums

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Hey y’all!

Thanks for stopping by The Wandering Pilgrims. We hope you will find the information here helpful.

Over the past year and a half, we had been looking for a new church home (and we are so thankful to God for helping us find the wonderful church we attend now). One of the things we wanted to check, if possible, when looking at churches to visit was the kids curriculum. It wasn’t always possible but we wanted to see what they were teaching the kids before even setting foot inside. We would do the same to see what music they used during service. We figured these were some good ways to see where a church may fall biblically, theologically and doctrinally to help us in our search.

Now we have always believed in family integrated worship—even before we knew what that was—so you may wonder why we spent time doing this. It comes down to one simple reason really… we wanted to see where the church and the congregation were theologically and what they believed. What is taught is a good indication of this and we wanted to become a part of a church that strove to follow the Lord and Scripture above what was traditional or popular. We wanted to make sure we would be joining a group of fellow believers who we could join with in edification and growth as well as having good godly influences for our daughter.

Many smaller churches have their own lessons they have created and/or maybe didn’t have much on the curriculum being used for the kids. But, of the churches we check out that listed info on their kids programs, one curriculum kept coming up… ORANGE

So here is our take on ORANGE - we DO NOT recommend this curriculum be used by ANYONE or ANY church. Keep reading to see why…

Originally, we kept running into the name of the curriculum 252 kids which is for elementary school aged kids while looking into new churches to possibly visit. It wasn’t the easiest for us to find info on this as we didn’t realize it came from a larger company until a whole lot of digging later.

Once we found the parent organization—ORANGE—we went to digging again. Turns out they have 4 kids curriculums called:

First Look (for preschool age)

252 kids (for elementary school age)

XP3 middle school

XP3 high school

They also offer a curriculum for adult couples called “marriedpeople” which we didn’t dig into too much because by the time we had finished our digging into the kids programs and Orange as a whole, we figured it was going to be a NO from us.

Now this may have changed since our research, but we were originally unable to find any information on who started this company and their values. But through sheer providence we stumbled upon it on amazon of all places. Turns out it was created by a man named Reggie Joiner. He is one of the founding pastors of North Point Community Church. If that sounds familiar it’s because that is Andy Stanley’s church.

*credit: Reggie Joiner Bio from Amazon.com*

Andy Stanley… so many false teachings so little time. And this isn’t the place for us to get side tracked since there is so much to unpack about this curriculum. If you would like to know more about Andy Stanley and why NO ONE SHOULD FOLLOW HIS TEACHINGS click here.

We found on the site that Andy Stanley (of course) endorses these curriculums. But as an added points against it, so does TD Jakes, another person NOT to follow due to false teachings. Read up on those here.

So we already have 2 people who are known to teach falsehoods endorsing these curriculums. Many might be wondering why we even continued down this rabbit hole any further cause that should be enough right? 2 reasons: 1) we tend to dig into things A LOT! and 2) we researched the curriculum before we found the endorsement section 😅 But seriously, We still probably would have continued to dig regardless to see what these curriculums really taught even if we had seen the endorsements first.

So what is in these curriculums you might ask… Well they come very nicely prepackaged for churches to use. Lots of bright colors, activities, and even youtube style skit videos like the So & So show and others (some of the videos you can find on youtube). For our example, we are going to concentrate on the 252 kids curriculum.

We will discuss some different things that we noticed in our review of 252 kids curriculum for 2019-2021. We will discuss the unbiblical nature of some of the things being taught to kids in churches across the US.

*Photo credit: screen shot from Orange kids curriculum website, from digital download of curriculum overview*

This curriculum can only really be described as "moralized” teachings with a dash of Christian, Jesus, and Bible verses added in. And some of the things it teaches are lacking at best. It simply teaches a moral system with some of the Bible attached, not actually biblical teachings or Bible study. So kids won’t be given any foundation or grounding for their faith, and they certainly won’t be able to defend their beliefs against the worldview that many are taught in school. For added measure, let’s pair that with what we know about Andy Stanley and people he associates with and we begin to see a pattern.

We found things while reviewing that reminded of things false teacher Todd White on our “value.” Now, we do have value because of Christ and every person has value because we are all made Imago Dei. But these moralized teachings we found we more the flavor of Todd White’s “Jesus came and heaven went bankrupt because we were so valuable” idea which places way too much value on us and way too little value on Jesus. Now, nothing cited Todd White or taught exactly what he teaches, but it flew so close that that’s immediately were our minds went.

Credit and THANKS to Excharismatics for the quote and correcting it 😊 — *Credit and* ***THANKS*** *to Excharismatics for the quote and correcting it 😊*

There was also a phrase we saw that concerned us: “forever relationship.” This immediately made us think of false churches/teachers from Bethel and Hillsong who use this terminology. Again, nothing cited but that’s immediately where our minds went.

There was, as expected, an emphasis on God’s love, but that was it. No other attributes of God or information about His character to help children learn about God. Again, superficial and moralistic.

The “Bottom Line” in the next section says, “When you don’t forgive, you miss out.” I think Spurgeon could fix this superficial fluff of an explanation woth how he explained needing to forgive others and WHY when he said “Unless you have forgiven others you read your own death warrant when you repeat the Lord’s Prayer.” This is the perfect example of fluff. It makes forgiveness centered on self what you might miss out on, not that Jesus tells us to and that if we don’t we will not be forgiven (Matt. 6:14-15). Nope. Nothing about that.

Another “Bottom Line” says “Following Jesus will turn out greater than you can imagine.” Yes and no. Of course, we look forward to being with Christ for eternity and we are given a peace beyond measure in this life, but when this statement is paired with all of this other worldly superficial stuff and fluff, it certainly makes one think about their life NOW. Which sounds VERY close to prosperity gospel.

It also neglects to teach what the Bible and Jesus Himself told us: that the world will hate those who follow Christ. It neglects the evidence of this throughout history and does not prepare them for what they will probably be facing in the future.

Lastly, There are monthly “life apps” 🙄 For those who don’t know that cool hip lingo for “life application.” At the top it references God, but that’s the last you will see of Him. God, Jesus, His Word…none of these are directly reference in any of the monthly life application quotes. The 3 that stuck out the most were December/joy, April/humility, June&July/Faith.

December/Joy - states “Finding a way to be happy, even when things don’t go your way.” Nope. Our joy is in Christ! We are never promised worldly happiness, but we are given the fruits of the Spirit and one of those is joy.

April/humility - states “putting others first by giving up what you think you deserve.” 😳 Seriously! We should be humble because we are wretched sinners who without Christ would have no hope! The Lord gives us everything we have and need. It’s all His to be used for His glory! 😤 And I’m not even going to go into how this sounds like certain current political movements.

June&July/Faith - states “trusting in what you can’t see because of what you can see.” 🙄 Word salad. Our faith is in Christ who is spoken of throughout the entire Bible (a physical book you can hold and see) as well as in extra biblical historical material. Creation screams of its Creator. Our Faith is in knowing we belong to a God who keeps His promises which is proven in Scripture. Our faith is in God, His character, His attributes as taught in Scripture. There are so many other ways to explain this than the word salad than used here.

The next years curriculum had just as much superficial stuff and fluff that doesn’t really teach much and we have already added so much info, we just wanted to draw attention to the most concerning thing we saw. There was a section about creativity. It’s tag line stated “God created you so you could be creative.” Some people are gifted with creativity. But everything is for God’s glory, even our talents and gifts. But what was even more interesting when digging into this section was the graphic used… Here it is… See if you can figure it out where else you have seen it.

Have you seen the picture before? Can you place it? The words are different for it to match up with this curriculum but the illustration is the same, and those ain’t cheap… Give up? See below.

Exactly. The. Same. Illustration. Except this is the book for kids by false teacher Louie Giglio of Passion movement who teaches little gods false doctrine and the false teaching of “divine DNA.” If he isn’t officially NAR (New Apostolic Reformation), he is certainly in line with their false teachings.

*Photo credit: Twitter from Passion Conferences account*

It really shouldn’t be any surprise that something related to Louie Giglio showed up in something related to Andy Stanley because they have been doing things with each other for quite a while. 👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼

*Photo credit: screenshot of YouTube search “Andy Stanley Louie Giglio”*

We also reviewed some of the shapes and videos they put out with this curriculum and there was a lot of moralizing, not quite right, and out of context. Admittedly, we only watched a few, because by the time we got to these we were mentally exhausted and they were an extension of the issues we saw with the written curriculum, which wasn’t surprising.

That was a LOT. If you’ve made it this far, thanks for sticking with us through all of that information. To sum up, this program—like many (if nothing most) others like it—is really nothing more than moral lessons for kids with some Scripture sprinkled in. This isn’t helping provide children with a foundation for their faith or helping them learn how to defend what they believe in an increasingly hostile world. It’s bright colors, fun catch phrases, games, and about every other “kids/youth” cliche rolled into one. And that’s all without adding the factor of who endorses this curriculum and who is affiliated with it, but we digress…

Obviously we do not recommend this curriculum. It hurts our hearts to know so many kids are being “taught” from this or another stuff and fluff kids curriculum. It also hurts our hearts that parents don’t know it and that there is such a lack of discernment and such a trust in anything labeled “Christian” that it’s blindly used without being researched.

Honestly, the only curriculum we would recommend is Answers in Genesis. One of the main reasons for this, aside from it being biblical and teaching apologetics, is that it can be taught in a family integrated setting. So everyone could learn together from the same program. No age segregation, just a whole church family learning and growing together, regardless of gender or age. Sounds wonderful… and biblical. But I digress…

We would like to stress, a church that uses this curriculum may NOT be aware of these connections and very probably has just been using curriculums full of colors and fluff for a long time because it looks appealing to the kids. This is not an automatic mark against a church, but it IS something that should be looked into and a question that should be raised when talking with the pastor of a church you visit or the church you attend if this—or any other fluff based childish style curriculum—is used.

Music wasn’t an automatic mark against churches either for us when we were looking. Let us explain… We knew many may not know about all of the things relating to Bethel, Hillsong, Elevation, Passion, etc. So if we checked out a church and heard 1 maybe 2 songs during the ENTIRE service by these groups or their affiliated artists, we noted it and would ask about it because it showed they weren’t all in with these movements. Now, if we checked out a church and they ONLY played these groups or musicians affiliated with them, we would move on with our search.

In conclusion we would like to say these things MATTER. The children’s programs (which we again are not prone to participate in), other programs, and the music teach. So the question becomes, do they teach biblical truth or not? If not, it shows a lack of discernment and potentially other issues. Those CAN be overcome, but only if people are willing to set aside what they are use to or comfortable with and take up the Bible and stand firm on it! We encourage you to test everything! Research. Dig. And then stand firm on biblical teachings. Don’t turn a blind eye because it’s easier or because this is how it’s been done for years. Those are excuses. Stand firm for your children, for your church, and for your Lord!

For additional research on Orange see the links below:

Naomi’s Table - Is the “Orange” curriculum safe for Sunday School?

Berean Research - Parents: If your church is “Turning Orange…”

Mark and Avoid: Orange Kids Church Curriculums

Teacher to Avoid - Lysa Terkeurst

Teacher to Avoid - Steven Furtick, Elevation church, and Elevation Music