A New York Times News Service piece on VeggieTales founder Phil Vischer tells the tale of how his zeal to build a world-beating Christian media company overwhelmed both his connection to God and his management skills. “I had made the work more important than my relationship with Him,” he says. “It’s a common evangelical mistake.”
Six years ago, Vischer had to sell VT parent Big Idea Productions to keep it solvent—he wrote the current VeggieTales movie “Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything” as a hired gun for the current owners, British media giant Entertainment Rights. But Vischer, dedicated to keeping his focus on his own faith, has opened a new outlet for his fevered, God-fearing mind: Jellyfish Labs. “A jellyfish can’t locomote,” says Vischer. “It’s carried by the current. I realized I have to stay in the current of God’s will.”