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The Spiritual Muscle of Movies


theJESUSfilm.jpgI just visited Campus Crusade for Christ’s website, searching for statistics on the effectiveness of their JESUS film. I knew the movie was released in 1979, and I’ve long heard that more than 200 million people have made a commitment Christ after watching the film.

What I didn’t know (until I saw the website) was this:

Every eight seconds, somewhere in the world, another person indicates a decision to follow Christ after watching the "JESUS" film.

Every eight seconds… that's 10,800 people per day, 324,000 per month and more than 3.8 million per year! That's like the population of the entire city of Pittsburgh, PA coming to Christ every 28 ¼ days.

Although I’m sometimes accused of being anti-entertainment, it simply isn’t true. How could any follower of Christ be against a medium that has the power to bring to Christ a population the size of Pittsburgh in less than an average month?

But of course, there’s another side of this coin. Nothing has pointed this out more clearly than watching the dreadful violence taking place at the hands of Muslim extremists over the last few weeks because of the outrage they feel over 15 minutes of amateuristic video posted on YouTube.

I watched that piece of video myself, and I can see why Muslims are infuriated (although there’s no excuse for the violence!). It’s cheap-looking, poorly acted, anti-Islam, anti-Muhammad and very inflammatory. I think Time magazine nailed it when it reported, “The film is effective if you assume its sole purpose is to stir up trouble, and it’s hard to imagine another one.” I disagree with Time on just one point—referring to the video as a “film.” That seems to give it too much credit. Anyone with an iPhone could do better.

But the point here is not to discuss quality, but to underscore the muscle of entertainment: the power to bring millions to Christ and that same power to incite riots around the globe. How do we begin to see more of the former and less (Read: zero) of the latter? Is this even remotely possible? Will there not always be some knucklebrain out there who uses YouTube (and other channels) profanely, foolishly and stupidly? What do you think?