I feel like God has intrusted a lot into me and I don't want to sit on it and be selfish. I want to think long term on how we can help this next generation of Christian filmmakers to make a big impact for God.
Jesus communicated parables to the secular people around him and he used stories that were very relevant to their lives, and He was taking heaven's truth and packaging it in an earthly context.
Too often, parents force their kids into becoming something they want them to become rather than trying unpack the treasure chest God wants them to become.
Movies are definitely more fun because there are so many different seasons in a movie. It is exciting to be drafting together. Writing a book is very hard, it's like writing 15 college term papers in a row, and you are just like, "when is going to end?" You can communicate so much more when you are writing a book, and you can go so much deeper.
One of the days we unpack finding out how your kids are wired, what kind of intelligence has God given them, how do they give and receive love, what the passions of their life, how does their birth order and their gender affect them because all of those things are part of the tapestry that God is weaving together to use each of our children for His glory.
Often parents have a great desire and hopes, and aspirations for their kids but they don't have any practical plans of action.
Well that's basically how we launched Sherwood Pictures, and with our films, we sat down and we had a long list of specific things that we were praying for God to provide, and then we would just deal with all those things in prayer first, and then when we went out and began knocking on doors and calling, it was clear that God was going before us and providing the way and sending the resources.
Sometimes it wasn't even when we were knocking on doors, it would be, the phone would ring and somebody would say, "God told me to do this," and it would be exactly the perfect timing to help us with the next step of the filmmaking.
We grew up in a praying home [with Alex Kendrick], we saw incredible answers to prayer in our parents' lives, they grew up in praying homes, our father launched a Christian school with nothing, basically he had some people that believed in the project but they had very little resources, and we watched our parents deal with those issues first in prayer, and then when they went out knocking on doors they saw amazing doors answered and resources come in.
Prayer doesn't sound like a cool hot topic that would cause people to rush to the theatre, stand in line, and buy tickets about prayer.
In churches, we see that getting people to show up for a prayer meeting is a lot more difficult than a concert or service project or just about anything else. So we were thinking, we're stepping into some unknown territory here that could be as profitable, or it could be a box-office flop, but there was a rightness about it. And so this whole idea of the war room being like a spiritual warfare room, a place of prayer where you get alone with God and you're making your decisions and you're dealing with your issues first in prayer.
With every movie, we will spend a season of prayer just asking God what's on his heart, and we spent about a year, two years, in prayer, trying to figure out the direction for the next film.
By the time we got to Courageous, we were bringing in more outsiders, so any time we would bring in outsiders, we would offer to pay them, and [as for volunteers from] the church, because they were getting the benefit of the income to all the ministries of the church and the mission, the building program and all those things, they knew up-front that they were volunteering and gladly did so.
Alex [Kendrick] and I started out the whole film-making journey as a desire to reach people for Christ and try to impact their lives for him.
With Courageous, it was the first film where we really began to pay our cast. Because the church owned the previous films and we started so small, with such small budgets, people were just volunteering on the cast and crew.
We still had the prayer support of our church. We shot this film [War Room] in Charlotte, North Carolina, and we had about 85 churches rise up and support us across racial and denominational lines, and many of them were praying for us, and we built some prayer teams where we had people on set praying.
We [me and Alex Kendrick] had our pastor's blessing back in 2013 to launch out, and so we shot [ War Room] last year, in 2014, but we still had the church pray over us , before the movie hit theatres, and the pastor was asking God to bless the film, and so we're very excited about what's happening .
Get in God's word every day. God's word equips us for everything we do.
Don't try to tackle a two-hour feature movie as your first project. Cut your teeth on a smaller level and work through the kinks at that level and build your strength as you go.
Excellence means representing the reputation of Christ well. It means doing all things as best as you can...
If I'm doing something as an offering unto the Lord, I want to give God my best.
I'm not trying to force something, but I do enjoy working behind the scenes and I do enjoy bringing all of the ingredients to the kitchen so that we can make the movie.
But after about a year praying, there was just this clear direction. The leadership team believed that God was leading us to focus on fatherhood. If God is leading, then God will provide. So we begin to get storyline ideas that lined up with the subject of fatherhood that we're working on and fitting, and we were thinking, okay this is good. At the same time, as we are studying scriptures and we're on our journey as fathers, we are learning about fatherhood every day.
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