High School Movies and God

Every other Sunday this spring we've been holding a movie/discussion night for high school students.  Attendance has been pretty good!  We start by eating a meal, mostly cooked by our high schoolers (good stuff!).  We converse while eating and then sit down to watch a movie together, reflecting on it afterwards.

So far the movies we've watched have been:

• Smoke Signals, the story of two young Native Americans from Coeur d'Alene and their struggle to cope with the death of their parents.
• Forrest Gump, about the way a learning disabled man changes the world through his forthrightness and perseverance.
• Dead Poet's Society, about a group of teenage boys in a boarding school struggling to find their way in life and to cope with difficult circumstances.
• Life Is Beautiful, about an Italian Jewish man during World War II who gives up everything to save his son in a concentration camp.

One of the decisions we had to make early on in the process was whether to focus upon "God movies" that presented faith in an explicit context or whether to try and find God working in stories that weren't directly about him.  We will watch some of the former down the line, but we're concentrating primarily on the latter.  When we started going over the overtly Christian movies we found that some were out to prove a point rather than tell a story, interfering not only with enjoyment but our ability to learn.  Others just weren't great examples of movie-making.  On the other hand we easily came up with a dozen movies which could teach us about God, faith, and coping with life as long as we teased out a little discussion.  These were great films with a faithful message whether they intended to speak about God directly or not.

It's funny how faith works like that.  How many of you have ever been moved by someone coming up to you and saying, "Accept Jesus right now!!!"?  (Moved to do something besides run, that is.)  Sometimes the kind of talk that appears to be about faith is actually about the ego, motives, or choices of the person doing the speaking more than about God.  Hitting people over the head with the Lord seldom does anything but make them go, "Ouch!"  But if you're patient and show the beauty, tenderness, love, and passion of faith at work in your daily life, people will see and respond.  Some of the most godly talks I've ever had have come with people who didn't even realize at the moment that they were talking about God.  Drawing the connections between that daily walk and faith is often the last step in the process, closing the circle, rather than the first.

Keep this in mind next time you want to talk to someone about faith.  What are you leading with?  How will they know you're trustworthy and true?  If the relationship's not right then faith won't follow even if you talk about God until you're blue in the face, just like if the movie's not right then people won't see God in it even if he's mentioned in every second line of the script.

--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)