Institute in Basic Youth Conflicts

As I discuss in the book, Pam and I first attended a "Bill Gothard" seminar, as many called the Institute in Basic Youth Conflicts, in Dallas. After returning to Detroit we attended several other years, often taking youth or our own children when they got into their teens. 

Some saw his style of practical Christianity as prescriptive and legalistic, and indeed some applied his stuff that way. Pam and I took to moderate road, and where we saw his ideas as Biblical we tried to adopt them.

But, for me, there was a second learning, and that had to do with the power of the narrative to hold an audience's attention. This first and second set of images are quit ironic. It's hard to image  a quiet spoken man with black and white overhead project holding an arena fill with 10,000 people captive for even an hour. Gothard did it for 30 hours, over a 6-day span.  I later took serious note of how it worked and hot it applies to the critical storytelling habits of Hollywood filmmakers.  Bill just didn't have the visuals, sound effects, chase scenes, or big name stars. It was simple storytelling...with a message. 

Bill Gothard and his singular prop—and overhead projector.

Top and above pictures taken at Detroit, Cobo Hall Arena (circa 1980).

Seminar Notebooks and Character Sketches Book (on animals, not humans ????)

The above side-by-side images represent a sampling of the materials one collected over the years. The red, 2"-binder was from our first seminar in Dallas. Thereafter we were handed perfect bound books, with far fewer pages.  The golden ring-binder was for the IBYC Advanced Leadership Seminar I attended in Detroit. And on the bottom of the lefthand image was one of many publication we'd received (for free) over the years on developing strong moral character traits in the lives of our children.  Excellently published, but boring to read. Of the dozens of books, and encouragements we received from IBYC they mostly lacked the magic of the live seminar—human interest, well-told narratives.