Recently, Pure Flix managing partner and God’s Not Dead producer Michael Scott talked about his approach to faith-based films at a summitsponsored by Variety. For films to succeed, the message, he said, must come before the story.
“The engine that drives the train is the
message,” Scott said. “We start with the message and then build the story
around it.”
He went on to describe
how Pure Flix surveyed leaders in their target audience for the messages they
were interested in and then spent months marketing the films. Why?
“We need to let the
consumer know what’s coming,” he said.
By box office
standards, Scott’s approach is working. Yet, this philosophy not only reveals a
key aspect that weakens many Christian films but also cheats us of the power of
story and Scripture.
We live in a
message-driven culture in which story is often seen as a tool to deliver the
message. For example, The Flying Tigers film
was made to encourage support for the Allies during World War II, and last
summer’s Elysium had critics both hailing and lamenting its
health-care agenda.
Pure Flix’s approach
results in Christian movies in the same vein. On his FilmChat blog, film critic
Peter Chattaway notes how audiences for these films are “entertained by
propaganda; they want someone to preach at them, telling them what they already
believe.”
This leaves viewers
and artists unchallenged, says Chattaway — the exact opposite of what art
should do: “draw the artist and the audience out of themselves and into
something other.”
Message-driven stories
are good at rallying the troops, but good stories are so much more. They reveal
something about human experience, challenging us on what we think we know.
Good stories don’t
simply wrap around a message; truth saturates and seeps out of them. “A story
does not say, ‘Let me tell you what is true,’ but ‘Let me tell you what
happened,’ ” says Daniel Taylor in The Skeptical Believer. “That
illumination may simply entertain you, but it may also cause you to change — to
modify your present story or even to abandon it for another.”
And no story can
change us more than the Bible. “Stories are God’s idea,” says Taylor. “The
Bible does not simply contain stories; it reflects God’s choice of the story
configuration as the primary means by which to tell us about himself and how to
be in right relationship with him.” It is this story by which we understand
where we came from, who we are and who we can be.
Yet we often express
faith and Scripture as sets of doctrines or propositions — or messages, if you
will. In The King Jesus Gospel, Scot McKnight notes our tendency
to reduce the gospel to a “Plan of Salvation.” While this plan flows out of the
gospel, we miss out on a more robust and transforming understanding of the
salvation if we don’t submerge it and ourselves in the larger story of the
Bible. Yet habitually we default to propositions, often packaging them in a way
to persuade others.
Films like God’s Not Dead reflect this approach, using story
as a tool in which to package a message designed to affirm or persuade a
salvation decision — a laudable effort, but one which feeds back a limited
understanding of salvation and the gospel.
What can we do to
break out of this message-driven cycle? “To become a gospel culture we’ve got
to begin with becoming people of the Book, says McKnight, “but not just as a
Book but as the story that shapes us.”
Message-driven stories
can entertain, please and even persuade. But a good story? It can change your
life.
This is a slightly longer and linkier version of my column that ran July 21, 2014, at MWR.