Churches making mainstream films to attract souls

This is a difficult issue I admit to being torn over. I feel uneasy about Christians aping worldly entertainments to get out the Gospel; on the other hand I know many Christians who have excitedly told me how much the movie Fireproof blessed them and strengthened their marriage and those who testify to coming to Christ after watching The Cross and the Switchblade or the Thief In The Night movies of the 1970s. I’m reluctant to cast stones at a medium God is apparently using. (And as I was writing this paragraph it dawned on me that the Chick tracts I give out themselves ape the worldly entertainment of comic books!)

It’s discouraging to admit, but I think Pastor Catt is correct that in this distracted and visual age many people won’t read the Bible but will watch a movie. Maybe we have to distinguish between movies like Fireproof that show Christians living out faithful lives and movies that attempt to depict biblical events, like King of Kings and The Greatest Story Ever Told. I remember A.W Tozer wrote a piece critical of this kind of movie [URL=http://put_http://www.av1611.org/Passion/menace.htmlurl_here] [/URL]. I first read Tozer’s article in 2004 when Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ came out and Christians sang its praises and promoted its evangelistic value despite the fact it was shot through with the unbiblical visions of Anne Catherine Emmerich, a Catholic nun and mystic. What Tozer feared in the relatively reverent ’60s manifested in the 1970s with the irreverent films Jesus Christ Superstar, Godspell and the nadir of religious films, The Life of Brian.

There is another post along this subject line http://paleoevangelical.blogspot.com/2010/07/on-older-forms-of-christia… here which draws the efforts of BJU’s Unusual Films into the spotlight as well.