A New Language

Movies

Over the last four years I’ve discovered a new language. It’s acquired through watching movies. Developing relationships with my step-daughters (18, 21, 23), we communicate in a far deeper way when I take time to watch a movie with them. They screen the movie for their dad (he doesn’t like anything with violence or sad endings), but for me, they know we have an opportunity to connect. Moulin Rouge is a favorite of all three of them. When our class closed with Christian and Satine’s duet, the message became clear – I need to continue to connect through this medium with them.

As I develop what Adult Ministry looks like at our church, this language of movies is needed for more than my step-daughters and me. Movies elicit more emotions in one to two hours than a normal week’s worth of ministry. The platform of this type of communication about what we like, dislike, agree, disagree provides the kind of honest dialogue that most bible studies do not.

But my obstacle in ministering to adults pertains to the phrase used over and over again in the book, moving from the “sacred to the profane.” Can an audience, an evangelical Christian one at that, ever consider movies that cross the lines of the R-rated arena? Would condemnation happen before the dialogue even started? I believe it would.

But I still have hope. We have a theatre relatively close to our community, popular with a number of folks. The Grand Cinema in Tacoma shows independent films – I love the people who go there. They are “cool” in the definition of professor Craig Detweiler. They come in all kinds of shapes, ages and sizes – old and young, geeks and well-dressed. The answer probably doesn’t start in the church. I think I start at the Grand Cinema first. And I watch my daughters, realizing that “[i]t is more likely that the next generation of filmgoers will be forced to educate the previous generation of filmgoers on how to watch a film.” P.181