This 4-day plan weaves Scripture together with Mister Rogers’s own words to show how the redemptive work of Christ led Rogers to embrace his own vocation as a means of redeeming television. As we will see modeled in the life of Rogers, the gospel changes everything about our work, from our motivations for work, to what we create, to how we work each day.Jordan Raynor
Day 1
Scripture: Romans 12:1-2
Guided Drift
Long before he zipped up a cardigan sweater and became Mister Rogers, Fred Rogers was a young man who loved Jesus and was eager to discern his calling. Throughout his childhood and adolescence, Rogers had many interests and talents, including music, puppetry, and children’s education. The question in Rogers’s mind was how he could combine these different gifts in a single opportunity to best serve others.
Dr. Junlei Li, the former co-director of The Fred Rogers Center, explains that “Fred was guided by a deep sense of service, of wanting to be useful to the world. He was driven by service even if in his mind it was vague for years as to how to best leverage his considerable talents in service of others.” Fred Rogers embodied Romans 12:1, deeply understanding that as Christians, the gospel of Jesus’s selfless sacrifice should compel us to view our whole lives as service to others.
When it comes to our work, the proper response to the redemptive work of Christ is not to seek out the work that will earn us the most fame and fortune. The goal should be to find the work we can do most exceptionally well in service to God and His agenda to redeem every square inch of creation. In the words of Rogers himself, “You don’t set out to be rich and famous; you set out to be helpful.” As Rogers’s biographer points out, this “relentless sense of service to God drove every moment of Fred Rogers’s life,” especially in how he thought about his work.
But how would he serve? Where was Rogers being called to put his gifts to work for the glory of God and the good of others? These were the questions Rogers grappled with for many years.
Rogers had a term he loved to use when referring to discerning one’s calling. He called it “guided drift.” The idea was that, while it is good and wise to make plans, “one needed to live a life that was open to change,” led by the Holy Spirit. As Rogers was wrapping up college in the spring of 1951, he was planning a career in pastoral ministry, as this was how he thought he could be of utmost service to others. But just before starting seminary, Rogers saw television for the first time. As we’ll see tomorrow, this seminal moment produced a major jolt to Rogers’s guided drift, setting him down a path to creating one of the most influential pieces of culture of the 20th Century—a TV show that would make Christian values attractive to millions of children.
Day 2
Scriptures: Genesis 1:26-31, Romans 8:20-23
Choosing His Pulpit
Just before graduating college, Fred Rogers turned on a television for the first time, and what he saw totally appalled him. “I saw people dressed in some kind of costumes, literally throwing pies in each other’s faces,” Rogers later recalled. “I was astounded at that.”
Rogers’s first impression of TV was that it was gimmicky and even demeaning—especially to children. But while Rogers “hated” what he saw in that first show, he was also intrigued by a vision he had for how the medium of television could be redeemed and used for good, particularly in demonstrating Christ-like character to children. Not only that, but in television, Rogers saw an opportunity to channel all of his varied gifts in a single direction. “And so I said to my parents, ‘You know, I don’t think I’ll go to seminary right away; I think maybe I’ll go into television,’” Rogers said.
Eventually, Rogers did both, attending seminary classes on his lunch break while producing his show. But upon graduation from Western Theological Seminary, Rogers knew he had to choose between TV and pastoral ministry. For Rogers, the decision to commit to a career in television was a relatively easy one, as he felt that’s where he could be of the utmost service to his “neighbors.” In the mind of Fred Rogers, there was no divide between the sacred and the secular. He understood that man’s first calling in the Garden was to emulate the Creator Father by creating new things (Genesis 1:28) and that the path to having the greatest cultural impact for the gospel is often found in embracing the call to create.
While Rogers didn’t want to pastor a church, he did desire to be ordained by the Presbyterian Church with an explicit call to ministry through television. But the Presbytery had its reservations. At a meeting in which the local Presbytery was debating the issue, Reverend Bill Barker addressed the elders on Rogers’s behalf, saying, “Here’s an individual who has his pulpit proudly in front of a TV camera. His congregation are little people from the ages of about two or three on up to about seven or eight….This is a man who has been authentically called by the Lord as much as any of you guys sitting out there.”
The Presbytery eventually did ordain Rogers, but this action only served to formalize what Rogers already knew to be true: that he was called to create a television show as a means of influencing culture with the Christian values he held so dear. Later in his career, Rogers said, “No matter what our particular job, especially in our world today, we all are called to be ‘tikkun olam’—repairers of creation.” As we will see over the next two days, that deep sense of calling to “repair creation” with the gospel message impacted what Rogers produced on Neighborhood and how he produced the show, giving us a model to follow as we seek to influence our world for Christ.
Day 3
Scriptures: Mark 12:28-31, Mark 10:13-16
Making Goodness Attractive
Fred Rogers had a vision for a children’s television show that would “make goodness attractive.” But not just any “goodness.” Rogers was convinced that he could make the goodness of Christ and the gospel winsome to the world.
Due to the public funding of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, Rogers couldn’t be explicit with the gospel message on-air. But he was convinced that wasn’t necessary. Instead of preaching the gospel explicitly from his television pulpit, Rogers created a show that consistently modeled Christ-like character and, most prominently, loved every neighbor as himself. As his friend, Reverend George Wirth, said, “Fred’s theology was love your neighbor as you love yourself.” And this was the ultimate theme that came through in the thirty-plus year run of Neighborhood.
The name of the show itself and Rogers’s daily “Hello neighbor” greeting to his television audience served to set the stage for what he hoped to communicate in his entire television ministry. Throughout the show, there were countless examples of Rogers displaying what at the time seemed like radical displays of Christ-like love to the overlooked and the marginalized. In one episode in 1969, during the heat of racial tensions across America, Rogers and a black man washed their feet together on screen. In another episode, Rogers took a significant amount of time to patiently sing a song with a disabled boy in a wheelchair. And of course, in each of the show’s 912 episodes, Rogers showed children their inherent God-given dignity, treating them as important and valued as adults. To Fred Rogers, the idea that everyone has inherent dignity was obvious; if you said otherwise, for him, “you might as well go against the fundamentals of Christianity.”
By loving every neighbor in the Neighborhood as himself and treating everyone with the utmost dignity, Fred Rogers modeled stories of redemption to millions of children every day, and in so doing, created one of the most beloved cultural goods of the twentieth century. In Rogers, we find an example to follow in our own efforts to influence culture for the sake of the gospel. While it may not always be possible to preach the gospel explicitly through our work, all of us are called to demonstrate Christ-like character and make the goodness of Jesus attractive to those around us. This truth significantly influenced what Rogers created on-air; and as we will see tomorrow, the redemptive work of Christ also impacted how Rogers went about his work.
Day 4
Scripture: 1 Corinthians 10:31, Colossians 3:23, 2 Corinthians 4:18
Excelling at the Essential
Believing that Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was his way of “repairing” or redeeming creation, Fred Rogers was intensely serious about his work. As we’ve seen, that sense of calling heavily influenced Rogers’s motives for his work as well as what he produced on-air. But his faith also influenced how he went about his work in three prominent ways.
First, before Rogers left for work each morning, he committed himself to the reading of Scripture. Without daily reminding himself of the gospel, Rogers would have been unable to effectively demonstrate the love of Christ on television. As one of Rogers’s former staffers once said, “I think [Fred] had very Christlike qualities, and that is part of what drew children. Children know a fraud more than anyone. . . . He was one of the most authentic and Christlike people that I have ever known.”
Second, once Rogers arrived at the studio each day, he would pray over his work and that of his team’s. As Rogers once said, “I’m so convinced that the space between the television set and the viewer is holy ground. And what we put on the television can, by the Holy Spirit, be translated into what this person needs to hear and see, and without that translation it’s all dross as far as I’m concerned. When I walk in that studio door each day, I say, ‘Dear God, let some word that is heard be Yours.’” So, while Rogers worked hard at communicating the gospel through his work, he ultimately relied on the Holy Spirit to work in the lives of his audience.
Finally, Rogers’s faith compelled him to work with an “iron insistence upon meeting the highest standards without qualification.” But Fred Rogers’s definition of excellence was quite different from other children’s television producers at the time who focused on elaborate sets, flashy special effects, and the highest “production value.” None of these things were “essential” in Rogers’s eyes. As a quote on his desk constantly reminded him, “What is essential is invisible to the eye.” Fred Rogers’s exacting standards applied to how he and his staff loved people on and off-air and how well the show communicated difficult concepts to children. Rogers was known for scripting out every single word of Neighborhood and rewriting scripts in the middle of production to ensure they were speaking in the clearest and most loving terms to the show’s television neighbors. Fred Rogers believed that because we are called to do our work for the glory of God and the good of others, only our most excellent work will do.
Whether you’re called to create a TV show, a book, a business, or a new process at work, the fact is that all of us have been called to be “repairers of creation”—influencing culture winsomely by demonstrating the redemptive themes of gospel. Let us all learn from Fred Rogers’s example and allow that God-given calling to change the way we think about why we work, what we create, and how we live out our vocations.