Perhaps this little clip from back in my megachurch days best
explains why a minister has a movie blog...
In a few days I'll be celebrating 45 years in ministry, and throughout all of that time I have always used movie and TV references to make my sermon points, because I really believe that cinema provides us with our modern-day parables.
In the same way that Jesus utilized verbal imagery about seedtime and harvest and other agricultural concepts to explain the things of God to His first-century audience, I've always unapologetically relied on my audience's familiarity with the movies to explain spiritual truths to them in the 20th and 21st centuries.
The people who listen to me aren't farmers like they were in Jesus' day, so I talk about things to which they can relate. The +Star Wars saga, for example, is rich with teaching tools about how faith works, and about how good triumphs over evil. In +THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK , when Yoda says to Luke Skywalker, “Do. Or do not. There is no try”, before he attempts to raise his fighter from the swamp, the character provides us with a quote that everyone immediately recognizes, which also reminds us to focus on the present, and the power of committing oneself to something completely, win or lose. Even when he tells Luke that if he could levitate rocks, he could also levitate his ship, and that the difference between the two was all in his mind, he gives us a powerful confirmation to Jesus' teaching about faith the size of a mustard seed that can move mountains!
I really do love the movies (hence the name of the blog), and the video above is a humorous example of how I've used memorized dialogue from +The Color Purple, one of my favorites, to get my preaching points across and keep it interesting!
Thanks so much for your comments here!
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