Drive Thru History® nights at our house these past few months have been highly anticipated. Once everyone was settled with a bowl of popcorn and a blanket, each one from age five up to age forty-one thoroughly enjoyed traveling through Biblical history with Dave Stotts and Drive Thru History® “Acts to Revelation” episodes.
What You Get
Drive Thru History® “Acts to Revelation” came with 3 DVDs with a total of eighteen 30-minute episodes. A study guide booklet is included in the DVD case. We used the study guide as a recap for the first few episodes, then decided we preferred to simply enjoy the episode without turning it into a quiz time at the end. Although, hubby and I were still able to engage our teens with some relevant questions and conversations about the episode, especially since our pastor (their dad!) has been preaching through I Corinthians on Sundays.
The study guide is an excellent component to this resource, especially if you want to show this to a youth group or teen class. Here’s what the included study guide provides:
- Summary of each episode
- 5 Discussion Question
- Scripture passages for further reading
- “Side Road” summaries of interesting places or people related to the episode
- Beautiful full-spread photographs of a key place visited in each episode
This series takes viewers through the entire story of the New Testament from the start of the book of Acts until John’s visions at Patmos, which were written down in the book of Revelation. The videography in this series is breathtaking, with amazing aerial footage of ancient ruins. Dave Stotts is an engaging and interesting host as he travels the entire Mediterranean world, following the storyline of the New Testament. He brings viewers along and shows how the culture and history of a city affected the response to the gospel. The episodes also juxtapose the ancient setting with how the modern place looks today. It’s a fascinating look at how history and archaeology confirm the veracity of the Scripture. My teens, who are sometimes hard to please with biblical/historical movies, had five star reviews for this series!
The 18 episodes in Drive Thru History® “Acts to Revelation” take you through these New Testament places:
- Jerusalem
- the Road to Damascus
- The Island of Cyprus
- Pamphylia, Galatia & Asia Minor
- Philippi & Thessalonica
- Athens
- Corinth
- Ephesus
- Caesarea
- The Island of Malta
- Rome
- The Island of Patmos
- The Seven Churches of Revelation
What We Loved
As a former classroom history teacher, I know that many kids approach history with a bored outlook because they’ve never been captivated by an interesting teacher/storyteller and they’ve never come to see the human side of history. Instead of boring us with dates and places, Dave Stotts gives fascinating stories about the culture, the time period, and the actual people from the pages of Scripture. Everything comes alive in this series and we learned to appreciate the real events that jumped off the Biblical pages in these episodes.
Drive Thru History® “Acts to Revelation” provides an amazing synthesis of ancient history with biblical history. Instead of studying one without the other, this series shows that they were necessarily interconnected. Without resources like these DVDs, I’m afraid some of our churched kids grow up thinking about Bible events in a vacuum. But this series presented the best of both, and our kids came away with more confidence in the biblical record than before, as Dave Stotts showed how archaeological discoveries actually verify the biblical accounts.
While our five year old watched this series with us most nights, this is definitely aimed at an older crowd. With three teenagers in our house, this series was at the perfect level of depth for them, but it wasn’t over the head of our fifth grader either.
And the forty-somethings in the house loved it too!
We would recommend Drive Thru History® “Acts to Revelation” to any family who wants their kids to have a Biblical worldview and see how Biblical history fits in with the archaeological account. This would be excellent for youth groups to watch and discuss together while reading through the books of the New Testament.
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