Not Just a Movie: The Church Arts Up
PART 8 IN AN 8-PART SERIES
"You’re gonna need a bigger boat."
—Martin Brody, in Jaws
The church, some say, is shrinking.
They’re not talking about the capitalized Church, mind you. Christianity continues to grow worldwide. But the lowercase church—the physical place Christians have traditionally gone to worship God—may in fact be in trouble. According to Gallup, just a little over 60% of Americans belong to a church or synagogue these days, compared to around 70% in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s. Just over 40% of folks say they attend church weekly—though, frankly, some pollsters believe such numbers are inflated by respondents with guilty consciences. Also, congregations are aging: The younger you are—as long as you’re on your own—the less likely you’ll be a regular church attendee. According to The Barna Group, 58% of "churched" high schoolers stop going sometime in their 20s.
Alarming? Sure. But dig a little deeper, and you find other factors at work.
While church attendance has dipped, most Americans still treasure their faith: More than 80% of us identify ourselves as Christian, according to Gallup—the same number of respondents who say religion is either "very" or "somewhat" important in their lives. That number holds true for twentysomethings, too, according to Barna: About 75% of folks in their 20s have prayed to God in the past week.
It seems that, as adherence to church services has dipped in recent years, adherence to Christianity remains strong.
So just where are these unchurched or underchurched Christians going for spiritual growth? Where do they go to grapple with faith and theology?
Sometimes, it seems, they go to the movies.
Avenues for Conversation
Many films—from artsy Oscar bait to summer tent-pole blockbusters—plow into some serious issues: right and wrong, good and evil, life and death. In an age where fewer people want to cast judgments over other people’s actions, films often deal with morality (though it sometimes runs counter to Christian morality), and dabble in ideas of heroism and greater purpose. Outside of church, where else can we go to discuss such things so openly?
Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that overtly faith-oriented films have undergone a mini-boom in recent years. Many industry insiders credit The Passion of the Christ—largely because of the $370 million it took in at North American theaters—for changing the way Hollywood looks at spiritual cinema. Since then, Christians have seen faith-oriented films trickle into theaters, and a couple have even wound up writing their own happy endings. Last year, Fireproof—an unabashedly Christian film made for a pittance by a Georgia church—earned north of $33 million, more than 2008 Academy Award Best Picture nominees Frost/Nixon, Milk or The Reader. In 2005-06, it was The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, based on the Christian allegory by C.S. Lewis. It pocketed a massive $745 million worldwide.
But it’s not just films that come bearing God’s primary message. Christian ministries are making efforts to glean spiritual lessons from secular films, too.
Fuller Theological Seminary’s Reel Spirituality Institute offers Christian study guides on movies ranging from The Curious Case of Benjamin Button to The Exorcism of Emily Rose. Movieministry.com offers Bible and outreach studies, too, along with "FilmTalk Cards" designed to (according to the website) "stimulate after-film discussions." Plugged In itself has long offered what we call "Movie Nights" to parents—film-based Bible studies that parents walk through with their kids and teens.
Everybody in the Pool!
And then, of course, there are the reviews. The year is almost over now, and in it I’ve reviewed nearly 70 movies. On average, Plugged In writers review close to four films a week, and our cumulative total is 1,800. We’d like to think that our reviews not only warn people of a movie’s content, but for many movies, give them something to really think about, too.
When Jeffrey Overstreet, a Christian movie reviewer, first launched his "Film Forum" column for Christianity Today about 10 years ago, a big part of his job was to read reviews from other Christian reviewers. At the time, it was easy work: About eight reviewers were online. Now, he says, there are hundreds. The growth, Overstreet says, does more than just illustrate the growing importance of film in contemporary Christianity:
"It also shows a deeper and deeper understanding of incarnation, the idea that when you give shape to a story you are not just delivering a lesson, you are raising all kinds of questions. It feels to me like we are rediscovering, little by little, the power of art."
In many ways, Christianity’s new fascination with media only makes sense. While many folks might be reluctant to launch into a theological discussion with someone cold turkey, some might find they can touch on theological issues through movies—a medium that, according to Barna, two-thirds of us talk about quite a bit.
Indeed, films have become such a viable vehicle for faith that many churches are moving in on movies’ traditional territory—literally.
Moving the Pulpit in Front of Moving Pictures
"Movie theater screens are postmodern stained glass," pastor Mark Batterson of Washington, D.C.’s National Community Church told Christianity Today. "We’re using moving pictures to tell the gospel to a post-literate culture. … We have to live with the tension of being biblically true and culturally relevant."
According to a 2007 Christian Post story, about 250 churches were meeting in U.S. movie theaters. One such church, Blessed Hope Community Church in Rochester, N.Y., trumpeted on its website many of the natural advantages theaters offer congregants: "Very comfortable seating! Air conditioning! The smell of popcorn!"
But such churches value the theater’s big screen for other reasons, too. A growing number of churches—even in traditional venues—are incorporating movie clips into their sermons, so much so that at least one business (wingclips.com) exists solely to provide pastors with the Sunday-morning videos they need, arranging potential clips by theme. A quick scan for the theme "arrogance" finds clips from The Bucket List, Napoleon Dynamite, Elizabeth: The Golden Age and others.
At least one pastor—Rob Seagears at Christ Chapel Mountaintop in Manassas, Va.—goes one step further. Profiled in The Washington Post, Seagears often pegs his messages to the week’s most popular movie, and he sometimes dresses up as movie characters—from Indiana Jones to the Joker—in order to attract non-churchgoers.
He admits that his strategy sometimes forces him to see films he’d rather not—including R-rated films with loads of content. He plucked one of his sermons from Tropic Thunder—a film that, according to our review, contains "upwards of 100 f-words and 50 s-words." "It’s kind of risky to be watching to see what the No. 1 movie is going to be and figuring out how to flip this thing for God," he admitted to the Post.
Closing Credits
Christians actually have a long history of attempting to redeem bits of the secular world around them. The dates of most Christian holidays piggyback pagan predecessors. The melodies of many of our best-loved hymns—"Amazing Grace," for one—started out as drinking ditties.
At this point, of course, I’m compelled to come back, full-circle, to a final word of caution. There should be limits to how much Christianity can and should redeem some of Hollywood’s harsher products.
Yes, God can use all things for His purposes. But that doesn’t mean we should indiscriminately absorb the world around us. From what I see, Christians right now are conforming to the world more than they’re transforming it, and I think there’s something to be said for transforming the world through what we decide to watch. The more we see movies like Saw, the more movies like Saw we’ll see—regardless of the micro-messages we might be able to yank from them.
I’ll end this series of articles where I began: Movies are stories, and all stories—like us—contain both a seed of God’s glory and the taint of corruption. And, as such, movies must be taken seriously. They are sources of profound inspiration and insipid sleaze, of life-altering lessons and all-too-tempting vice.
If and when you step into a darkened theater, you must remember that you’re walking into a powerful classroom, into a nearly sacred spot, where images and ideals compete for space in your mind, your heart and your soul.
Just a movie? Puleeze.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8