On the front lawn of a Nazarene church in Eugene, Oregon, hangs a pearl-white sign between brick columns. It reads: YouTube Community Church. "We're the first church to drop preaching altogether in favor of video clips," Pastor Hodge says. "We're turning on a light for people who see more meaning in video."

Before you choke, this was satire, posted on a blog dedicated to "entirely fabricated versions of events that impact Nazarenes." But why was it there? Because some people speculate that all comedy comes from pain. We wouldn't get the joke otherwise. In some ways, church has become what we once joked about. Fog machines waft during worship.

On Biker Day, Harleys run the aisle where Aunt Millie once trod. And cinema-style sanctuaries welcome seekers to theater seats where they can listen to sermons based on TV series. More than a decade ago, the Nazarene Manual shifted from advising that Nazarenes avoid the theater to encouraging discrimination over movies and other media. The issue so embattled our electorate that John Lepter wrote a 315-page dissertation about it at the University of Kentucky. Laity framed the incident as contest, battle, and sport. One 48-year-old woman said, "It's a whole new ballgame now!" Churches are playing, for sure, but it's a multiple-team event.

On one team are creators of Christian content for worship. Kris Dunlop was Chicago First Church of the Nazarene's first media pastor, and now is technical art director for the 2,200-member Central Christian Church in Beloit, Wisconsin. There he shoots pieces for sermon series, like "Desperate Households," a take-off on ABC's Desperate Housewives. "Our sanctuary has three 20-foot viewing screens," he explains. "The press thinks our church is about a 'show,' but movies are like the stained glass windows of old. They tell stories. It's not about being fancy, but teaching in the way people understand." 

On another team are creators of Christian content for secular audiences, like the leaders who created Facing the Giants, which played on 400 secular screens, grossing $10 million (U.S.) in three months. Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ made $400 million (U.S.) and included guerrilla marketing to pastors to turn out the flock. The third team features those who use secular content for ministry.

A Nazarene church launched in Catania, Italy, by advertising movie nights. A local Presbyterian church sponsors movie nights at a local cinema, followed by discussion groups on the content. A few hundred community members attend.

In the stands, some fans boo and hiss this movie ministry altogether, saying the method loses control of the message and reeks of 'emergent church.' Scot McKnight of North Park Theological Seminary calls this movement 'deliberately provocative,' weak on 'propositional truth,' and marked by 'funky worship.' Others cheer it as a creative, relevant way to engage culture. Which is it? Ask John Wesley, the man who strongly influenced the faith of Nazarenes. He and a cadre of contemporaries have suggested some things you'd expect, and some you wouldn't.

A Theology of Film: What Movies Can Do
Of course, the game is played in a different time than Wesley's. We are what author Bonnie Marranca calls a 'post-literate' society. Visual suspense trumps text because it slows down mental input enough for us to focus attention and find deeper meaning. No wonder a compelling story in panoramic splendor is surreal, perspective-shifting, almost religious.

That may be why Jesus narrated truth in parables, not treatises, and why Dallas Willard's famous work, Hearing God, uses illustrations from Stepford Wives and Gandhi. "Both art and religious faith have a common intention," says Nathan Scott in The Rediscovery of Story in Recent Theology. "They summon us into the presence of what is transcendent to the human mind, and in this they provide each other with a kind of mutual confirmation." It's a concept theologians of the Eastern Orthodox Church have emphasized for millennia.

A cross, communion cup, stained glass—each is a means through which the Spirit communicates. Images are as sacramental as baptism, the visual enactment of death and resurrection. That may be why in 1522 Luther published his first New Testament with 22 woodcarving illustrations. Some even say secular works, produced by non-believers, constitute a 'general revelation' of God's basic laws.

This residue of God's image, this collective unconscious, is accessible to non-believers not only by observing creation (Romans 1:18-20) or human nature (Romans 2:12-15), but the arts (Ephesians 5:19). Their proof is secular story archetypes, embedded narrative themes that mirror the gospel. For example, the Star Wars movie epic—what Forbes magazine calls one of the most successful franchises of all time, topping $20 billion (U.S.)—features an evil villain (Darth Vader), the embattled hero (Luke Skywalker), supernatural power (The Force), a wise advisor (Obi-Wan Kenobi), and a circumstance of brinkmanship or apocalypse (War/Empire).

The Christian is even benefited by dark-themed movies, according to Brian Godawa in Hollywood Worldviews, because light is known by contrasted darkness. He says the call to noble meditation in Philippians 4:8 is not a 'hear no evil, see no evil' proposition. If it's profitable to know Lot was spared, it's also useful to see Sodom destroyed for sin. "If we ignore the truth's darker side, we are focusing on half-truths," Godawa says. Along this line, film is not limited to illustrating theology, but may also form it.

According to Robert Johnston in Reel Spirituality, the church need not avoid movies or be wary of their influence, but appropriate them for ministry. Movies can even be a source of divine encounter, imbuing almost any message with eternal significance. "Movies recapture the meaning and power of our story—shaped gospel," he says, sometimes providing "deeper access to the hidden heart of Paul's theology than mainstream theologies have been able to penetrate."

What Movies Can't Do
But Wesley would disagree on almost every point. First, for the Western Church, images aren't sacramental, but potentially distracting. Our pilgrimage is through Scripture and the Spirit, not image. Though Protestant theology has not yet developed a good theology of image, the goal was never faith by seeing, but by hearing the Word, says Stephen Franklin, president emeritus of Tokyo Christian University. Faith by seeing would 'paganize' Christianity. Second, secular story archetypes are not a method of God's 'general revelation.'

Rebekah Miles, theology professor at Texas Christian University, says Wesley rejected that God "stamped an idea of himself on every human soul." Wesley himself said, "The little which we do know of God, we do not gather from an inward impression, but gradually from without."

Third, what is the role of experience? For Wesley, the purpose of divine encounter is to convict of sin or assure salvation, not formulate doctrine. No experience, no matter how profound—compelling everything from compassion to new commitments—is a trustworthy framer of theology. Ever since the Fall, our reason has been subject to deceit. "The obvious question," says Randy Maddox in Wesley and the Quadrilateral, "is whether my perspective corresponds in any way to how things truly are."

Only Scripture is the standard for Christian life.

It's the difference between an advertisement and the product. The ad might cultivate interest, just as a movie might be a tool of God's prevenient grace. The ad might affirm a truth known about the product, as film often does for Scripture. But the ad can't generate its own claims about the product any more than a film originates theology.

If you put personal experience and Scripture on an equal level, according to William Abraham, you arrange a 'hastily contrived shotgun wedding,' a marriage never meant to be. We are to work from theology to film, not vice versa. For example, filmmakers often take shortcuts that shape wrong theology, according to Bryan Stone, author of Faith and Film and theology professor at Boston University. "Violence is often portrayed as revenge rather than being redemptive, like in Narnia. And since the poor were so important to Wesley, he would have the church ask how film falsely portrays 'the good life' as the 'wealthy life.' "

Would Wesley Use Film Today?
However, "we should affirm film as a powerful, useful, good tool," says Franklin. "When film denies Scripture, we must reject its message. But when film neither affirms nor denies Scripture, it is an area to explore. It's good." We infer from Wesley's habits that he would use film in ministry: Christian 'shorts' and secular snippets that illustrate theology, but not content that glorifies sin. First, his interest in the mass distribution of an accessible message reflects the medium's strengths.

In 1750, England had the highest literacy rate in the world, so Wesley distributed cheap print products'everything from evangelistic tracts to sermons. Without pretense, he sought the average person in his style. "I write as I speak, ad populum (to the bulk of mankind)," he said. "I design plain truth for plain people." This habit made Wesley a folk theologian. United Methodist Bishop William Cannon says, "His audience would have been the television audience, if there had been television in the 18th century."

Second, Wesley's value of testimony would be well advanced by the medium. He frequently gathered and published spiritual biographies, often citing them in sermons. "He assumed," says Maddox, "that gathering and sharing this type of experience was a central task of theology."

It's a short leap to assume Wesley would use film—society's most compelling story-telling medium—to demonstrate God's impact on lives. Third, Wesley frequently used non-biblical sources for biblical work. Though movies rarely feature explicitly Christian themes, they often foster theological reflection. Similarly, Wesley used his multi-volume Survey of the Wisdom of God in Creation to summarize the findings of science to cultivate faith, along with Greek, Roman, and European literature. "Five paragraphs after calling himself a man of only one book, Wesley quotes Homer's Iliad, in the Greek no less!" says United Methodist Bishop Scott Jones. In another case, "There were 50 quotations from secular sources, both contemporary and classical, 30 of these from 17th and 18th century English authors such as Milton and Pope and 20 from classical writers such as Virgil, Horace, and Plato."

Paul modeled this strategy in Acts 17, as he appealed to the Athenians with words from their own philosophers. Godawa says this models a redemptive interaction with culture. "In some ways, television, music, and the movies are the modern arena of ideas." But Wesley wouldn't neglect boundaries with film. What some do in the name of relevance is reckless. His call to holiness would banish movie content that glorifies sin and any content ill fitted to a viewer's spiritual maturity.

As his mother Susannah famously instructed, "Whatever weakens your reason, impairs the tenderness of your conscience, obscures your sense of God or takes off the relish of spiritual things, that thing is sin to you, however innocent it may be in itself."

Not Whether, But How: A Wesleyan Movie Ministry Makeover
Tom Nothstine, Nazarene career missionary to the Africa Region, believes Wesley would've used the JESUS film to cultivate Christian community as much as conversion. His ministry teams in Antananarivo, capital of Madagascar, did what all other JESUS film groups did: rapidly screened it 100 times each year for three years. Eventually, approximately 1 million saw it, but only 1 percent of respondents were retained. "It was a lot of work for such a low yield," he said. In the fourth year, they shifted strategy. If you can't lead with someone else's strategy, then duplicate it. That's one of the weaknesses of the church growth model.

Begin with Scripture and theology, who you are, and then exegete (critically interpret) the people. Develop strategy for that area." He cut back the screening schedule by 30 percent, sent advance teams to do home studies a month before events, and afterward folded all converts and seekers into 20 new house churches, preaching points, and branch Sunday Schools. "Without the preparation and follow up, they were being 'Christianized' without being Christian," he said. "Nothstine is right on," says Stone.

While there may not be a "definitely different Wesleyan way" of screening films, "when holiness is your goal, you do evangelism differently. For Wesley, conversion was an entry point to something else."

And that's why Laura Heinrichs landed at New Link Media in Los Angeles after completing TV production and biblical studies degrees at Olivet Nazarene University. She produces the first on-line daily video devotional at www.realfusion.com. "There's this impression that better films have an altar call at the end," she said. "But there are lots of ways to use film. Plato presented things as they ought to be. Aristotle presented the world as it is." And that's the tension, isn't it? Wesley resolved this in part by charging young pastors to "set yourself afire so people will come to watch you burn." An impassioned Christian reflects both the world as it is and as it can be. Now 250 years later, it's still good advice, unless a YouTube generation prefers to watch the blaze from home, in surround sound, via satellite or DVD.

Gregg Chenoweth is dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Olivet Nazarene University, journalism professor, and an ordained elder in the Church of the Nazarene.

Holiness Today, January/February 2008

Please note: This article was originally published in 2008. All facts, figures, and titles were accurate to the best of our knowledge at that time but may have since changed.