By: Alex

The first big summer blockbuster of 2008 is out and is doing far better box office than the $70-80 million predicted by studio execs. By Sunday night, it had made an estimated $104,000,000 domestically and close to $97 million internationally with a combined total over $200,000,000. Thus, the wisdom of Marvel Studios to take charge of their superhero character’s adaptations by financing their production and then licensing their distribution to studios, in Iron Man’s case, Paramount, has paid off in its first attempt.

Iron Man, while not really a second tier Marvel Comics character, was not in Spider-Man’s league either. Peter Parker’s appeal is the challenge of growing in mature manhood, something that boys have always been drawn to and is frankly more mythic in it’s oft-repeated theme of “With great power comes great responsibility.” Tony Stark, in the comics, was already a grown-up, a playboy inventor genius who devised really cool hi-tech armor. As originally created, he had no real internal conflicts that could match Peter’s youthful angst. Eventually Start would sink into alcoholism and see his corporation stolen from him by business rivals but these were after-the-fact developments that kept the character interesting while less than a top-rung Marvel star.

The cinematic Iron Man neatly finesses the character’s simple orgins by adding a strong goal which drives Tony Stark, marvelously realized by Robert Downy Jr., to create his armour–he is on a crusade against the forces that are diverting his company’s munitions for terrorism and conquest. Stark discovers that the guerillas who have captured him are being allowed to purchase his weapons, partly due to his own dissolute lifestyle that has blinded him to his responsibilies. This strengthens Stark’s motivation to use his skills to create his powerful armor while he shuts down his arms manufacturing.

For those who grew up on Iron Man, Marvel’s corporate involvement is gratifying. Rather than risking the treatment of their characters with an overly calculating studio, or oblivious director, Marvel knows that if their best characters are played straight and true, the audience will come. The more you know about the Marvel universe, the more you will enjoy the film’s little touches meant to stroke long-time fans. And the surprise tag scene after the end credits will make true fanboys lose bladder control with joy.

Marvel’s first producing success will allow them to pursue several more characters’ entry into an interelated series of films. This Hollywood Reporter article previews the upcoming slate of films featuring Thor, Captain America and The Avengers. This strategy of allowing characters in various movies to exist in the same cinematic universe, unrestricted by whatever studio produced a given film (which is why the Fantastic Four (produced by Fox) can’t appear in a Spider-Man film (produced by Sony) or vice versa. In fact, the new unified Marvel Cinematic Universe will be on display in this summer’s The Incredible Hulk which features an appearance by Downy as Tony Stark. Amazing and Incredible–I’ve lived to see the four-color, 12-cent obsession of my early youth become the billion dollar cash cow of popular culture.

By: Jim

Some time ago I was behind a car plastered with three bumper stickers: “No Jesus, No Peace. Know Jesus, Know Peace … One Nation Under God … The Power of Pride,” the last one decorated with an American flag.

It took a minute for the mixed message of cheek-turning Christianity, proud nationalism and support for the war on terrorism to sink in, partly because that blend is a common sight around here.

Not so in other parts of the world, not even where the Christian faith used to dominate, according to Dr. Brian Stanley, a church historian and missions specialist at England’s Cambridge University.

“There has been a massive shift since the Second World War,” he said, one that has moved the global weight of Christianity to the south and east – to Africa and Asia – and away from the “old heartlands of Christianity” in Europe and North America.

Almost two-thirds of the world’s Christians – about 65 percent – live in Africa and Asia now. A hundred years ago, at most 10 percent of the world’s Christians lived in those regions.

But since 1945, migration, improved mass communications and waves of independence movements that freed colonies from old European powers helped to alter the world’s religious landscape.

At the same time, Christianity began declining in Europe and in parts of North America. If this is a typical weekend in Western Europe, less than 10 percent of adults will darken the door of a Christian or Jewish place of worship, a percentage closely mirrored in many urban areas on this side of the Atlantic.

The growth of Christianity in Asia and Africa “surprised a lot of people,” said Stanley, who directs the Henry Martyn Centre, an academic institute specializing in the study of Christianity around the world. In the 1950s and ’60s, experts predicted that Christian religion would evaporate after Western colonists pulled out. Just the opposite happened.

“What was once Christian in the North – or West, if you prefer – is not Christian anymore,” Stanley said. Gone are the old distinctions between so-called Christian and heathen nations. No one can easily draw a religion’s territory on a map anymore.

If the geography of Christianity has changed, so has the environment in which it operates. It is a minority religion in most cultures, just one among many faiths.

“What is emerging in the South (hemisphere) is a very different form of Christianity,” said Stanley, who lectured at Emmanuel School of Religion in Johnson City, Tenn., in 2004. “Very few nation-states have governments that are explicitly Christian. The majority are Islamic or secular, such as India because it is so religiously diverse.”

That kind of atmosphere is “cutting away at a lot of deadwood,” Stanley said. “People are Christians because they choose to be, sometimes at considerable cost.”

In Iraq, for example, Paulos Faraj Rahho, the Chaldean archbishop of Mosul, was kidnapped and killed in March, but his high-profile death came after a series of abductions, murders and church bombings aimed at Iraq’s Christian communities.

In most places, Christianity is starting to resemble the church in its earliest days, according to Stanley, when “people were more at the margins of power rather than at the center of power, and often challenging the powers that be.”

This global shift will test Christians in the United States and other Western nations, even in the so-called Bible belt. Bumper-sticker slogans won’t work well.

“Christian identity and Western or American identity are going to pull further and further apart,” Stanley said. “More and more Christians will not be in free, democratic societies. That will challenge our view of Christianity in its connection with our national identity.”

In other words, Western Christians should expect to wrestle with political and economic policies that pressure fellow believers in other countries. Christians in Palestine, for example, are baffled and angry at the strong support that American church leaders such as John Hagee give to Israeli policies, even when Palestinian church communities are destroyed as a result.

American Christians are entering unfamiliar territory, where national interests collide with spiritual kinships.

“That will challenge Christians,” says Stanley. “Where is your ultimate loyalty?”

First published in the Johnson City (Tenn.) Press, 3 May 2008.

By: Jim

Last fall Sen. Charles Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, started poking his Iowan nose into the finances of six media-based ministries. Citing allegations of possible abuses – extravagant housing allowances, excessive compensation, personal use of assets such as private jets, lax board governance, unreported income – he wanted an accounting, literally, of how much money these ministries receive and how it gets used.

The targeted ministry leaders cried foul at first, saying the Senate was tearing down the wall separating church and state, but four of them have since started cooperating. Only Kenneth Copeland and Creflo Dollar continue to resist. Life may get complicated for them.

Grassley said he simply wants to protect donors.

“Tax-exempt organizations rely on the generosity and good will of their contributors to help fill food pantries, clothe the needy and serve the underprivileged,” he stated. “Donors of modest means pinch pennies and make sacrifices so others less fortunate may benefit from their collective contributions. … Considering tax-exempt media-based ministries today are a billion-dollar industry with minimal transparency, it would be irresponsible not to examine this tax-exempt part of our economy.”

The Senate committee action might be necessary, but it’s unfortunate. Government intervention wouldn’t be necessary if donors were doing their job, which involves more than writing a check. They should also be asking questions.

“Ministries are responsive to donor enquiries,” according to Kenneth Behr, president of the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability, a voluntary accreditation agency for Christian nonprofit organizations. “Donors should understand they have a long-term relationship (with ministries). Healthy dialogues are always good. Self-regulation is better than government oversight.”

His organization, like a Christian Better Business Bureau, offers suggestions for wise giving (“know your charity … understand what your gift will accomplish … focus on the mission”). The bottom line: Donors should be both generous and informed. The Internet, Behr points out, makes active, educated giving easier than ever.

Concerns about mixing money and ministry are as old as the church itself — not surprising, considering the Bible’s general skepticism about wealth. Jesus said it is “easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (Mark 10:25), a verse not quoted much by the Rev. Dollar. Jesus sent his followers out to preach with necessities, not with some first-century equivalent of a Rolls Royce.

The apostle Paul wrote that “workers deserve their wages,” and that good teachers and leaders should be treated generously. But a few lines later, he warned that “those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and hurtful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction, for the love of money is the root of all evils” (1 Timothy 6: 9, 10).

Money itself is not evil, but perhaps dollar bills should be printed with warning labels: “Money can be hazardous to spiritual health.”

By the early second century, just a generation after Paul, church leaders were concerned enough about potential financial abuses that a Christian instruction manual, “The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles” (known in Greek as the Didache), addressed the issue.

“Let every apostle (messenger) who comes to you be received as the Lord,” the Didache instructed. “But he shall not remain more than one day; or two days, if there’s a need. But if he remains three days, he is a false prophet. And when the apostle goes away, let him take nothing but bread until he lodges. If he asks for money, he is a false prophet. … Not every one who speaks in the Spirit is a prophet; but only if he holds the ways of the Lord.”

It’s impossible to say for sure what early Christians would think of a TV preacher who cries for cash and promises riches in return, but it’s obvious that their tests were more practical than mystical: If some teacher outstayed his welcome or scrounged for wealth, then he wasn’t to be trusted.

With 1,900-year-old wisdom like that, maybe Sen. Grassley wouldn’t need to protect donors from dodgy televangelists or, for that matter, from themselves.

First published in the Johnson City (Tenn.) Press, 26 April 2008. This was the second of two columns on financial accountability; the first appeared on April 5.
Image from www.biblepicturegallery.com.

By: Alex

Mike Nelson, one of the Best Brains behind the classic Mystery Science Theater 3000 continues his skewering of bad movies, this time via the Internet. The cable program, better known as MST3K, ran from 1989-1999 on cable and is now available on DVD (rent some episodes from Netflix and after a few minutes of acclimation, you’ll start to laugh and laugh, and laugh some more). The premise turned on a guy being shot into outer space by mad scientists to test the limits of his sanity as he is subjected to forced screenings of really bad movies, but some homemade robots, particularly Crow T Robot and Tom Servo, join him in the titular theater and their collective mocking of the movies save the captive subject, played by Mike Nelson starting in the fifth season. Nelson was also the head writer of the joke-crammed episodes and two years ago came up with a new way to keep on riffing, this time on mainstream releases that MST3K could never have obtained the rights to.

Rifftrax’s (click on the top image to see the full size logo) innovation was to offer audio files of satiric commentary of any film on DVD; the customer downloads the track, syncs it to the opening of the film and laughs through flawed flicks. The site now offers its Rifftrax Player which automatically syncs the commentary to a DVD allowing for breaks in the running of the movie without getting out of sync. We finally tried out a Rifftrack last week when we downloaded our first commentary, on Spider-Man 3. Those who read my review last summer know that I had real problems with the sequel to beloved Spider-Man 2, although my wife had decried my criticisms. Well, after I got everything ready, my 14-year old son, and the wife and I gathered around the computer monitor and began laughing. Guest co-writer and riffer, James Lileks, one of my favorite funny writers, make the commentary even more hilarious. And my wife admitted, that seeing Spider-Man 3 again, all its flaws were now evident and thus riffworthy. I intend to download more tracks although it won’t be those that I consider good to great films like The Fellowship of the Ring or Jurassic Park that Nelson’s site offers tracks of, but the Star Wars prequels? Yup. Star Trek V, uh huh. Mike Nelson and friends continue redeem movie dreck, spinning cinematic dross into comedic gold.

By: Jim

If he had a few minutes with Pope Benedict XVI (pictured here, arriving in the U.S.), the Rev. Gerard Finucane would urge the pontiff to mandate an hour of contemplation each day for every believer.

“If it’s five minutes or an hour – so be it,” said the pastor of St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church in Johnson City. “We’re bombarded by so many voices, it’s hard to hear what the spirit of God is saying to each of us. We need some isolation, to get away from cell phones and TVs and clear out the clutter. It’s something our age needs.”

Unfortunately, Finucane didn’t have a chance for that conversation this week, when Benedict visited Washington, D.C., and New York City. It was the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s first visit to the United States since he was chosen to lead the Roman Catholic Church in 2005.

Besides, the pontiff, who turned 81 on Wednesday, needed to discuss other issues.

On Thursday, the first full day of a five-day visit, Benedict led mass for 45,000 people gathered in Washington’s new baseball stadium. After that event, it was striking how many people who attended described the “warmth” and enthusiasm they felt, sometimes in surprise since as cardinal he was known as “God’s bulldog” for his doctrinal rigidity. Many talked about their renewed sense of “hope.”

Hope is an important word. It’s no accident that for his visit Benedict selected a simple theme: “Christ our hope.” That was also the subject of an encyclical, a major letter to the church, which he issued last fall.

But now he was coming into a situation that could be read as hopeless or at least discouraged. The Catholic Church in the U.S. has been losing members and facing financial crisis. St. Mary’s, which has doubled in membership in the past decade, is an exception. Catholic colleges and universities struggle with tensions between accepted doctrine and academic freedom.

Most troubling of all, the American church is still reeling from a decade-long scandal of priests who sexually abused children, sometimes over the course of years and sometimes as their American leaders turned a blind eye. More than 5,000 U.S. priests have been accused of abusing about 12,000 children since 1950, according to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The church has spent about $2 billion on legal claims.

Despite efforts to hold clergy accountable, thousands of members felt betrayed and vulnerable in their own churches. Grassroots groups that offer support for victims also call for a housecleaning in the church. Some brush off any suggestion that substantial changes have occurred.

So it was significant that as Pope Benedict began a major trip with hope as its theme, he addressed the sexual abuse scandal first and in direct terms. He talked about the “shame” he felt and promised that priests who committed pedophilia would be removed. He publicly spoke about the scandal three times in the next day. (The sex-abuse troubles briefly brushed the Diocese of Knoxville, of which St. Mary’s parish is part, with an accusation made years ago against the founding bishop. No problems have ever been reported from St. Mary’s.)

After Thursday’s mass, the pope unexpectedly met and prayed in private with a small group of victims. He had requested the meeting, and it was the first time the pope had met face to face with victims. They came away with both wait-and-see skepticism and – that word again – hope.

Benedict addressed other topics this week – immigration, war, the dangers of relativism, relationships between people of different faiths. For each one, it’s worth noting that Benedict tried to communicate hope by addressing difficult issues, often in blunt terms.

“The thing is that healing takes time,” Finucane observed. “We want to reach out and offer the care and healing we can. But obviously trust has been broken, so when the church reaches out, there’s some doubt about sincerity. We need time to rebuild the trust.”

But Finucane is, of course, hopeful.

“As the shepherd of this flock, (the pope) has the responsibility to speak out forcefully and to give direction,” Finucane said. “But the fact that he chose as his theme ‘Christ our hope’ tells me he chose not to adopt a negative tone, especially in the Easter season. If we follow Christ as the good shepherd, we have that hope to make changes in our lives and move forward.”

First published in the Johnson City (Tenn.) Press, 19 April 2008.

By: Jim

If televangelist Benny Hinn wants to say that Adam traveled to the moon, the law can’t touch him. Hinn has every right to teach wild stuff.

The same goes for Kenneth Copeland and Creflo Dollar. If they can find a way to twist an obscure verse in Psalms to justify a fleet of Rolls Royces, there’s no earthly law to stop them.

And if Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa is launching a doctrinal witch hunt from the Senate, then I would stand with unorthodox televangelists, a copy of the First Amendment in one hand and a bottle of Pepto Bismol in the other, to defend their right to be wrong.

But if preachers are using the First Amendment to hide fraud or evade taxes, then somebody should hold them accountable. If churches or donors won’t do it, then maybe it’s up to the government.

Last November, Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Finance Committee, wrote to six ministries, asking dozens of questions about their expenses, treatment of donations, business practices, oversight and compensation for leaders.

The ministries under the microscope include Benny Hinn Ministries, based in Grapevine, Texas; Joyce Meyer Ministries, Fenton, Mo.; Kenneth Copeland Ministries, Newark, Texas; New Birth Missionary Baptist Church/Eddie L. Long Ministries, Lithonia, Ga.; Without Walls International Church/Paula White Ministries, Tampa, Fla.; and World Changers Church International/Creflo Dollar Ministries, College Park, Ga.

Why these ministries? Grassley (pictured here) said he received information from watchdog groups and local news investigations that made him wonder if the organizations were hiding something, and so he began an inquiry. He gave the ministries a March 31 deadline to respond.

Predictably, some ministry leaders and supporters cried foul, saying the committee breached the First Amendment’s separation of church and state. But Meyer’s ministry answered the questions almost immediately, and three others later indicated a willingness to comply.

By Monday’s deadline, only Copeland and Dollar still refused to cooperate. They claim the committee singled out so-called Word of Faith ministries, which teach that faithful living – and giving – will yield financial riches now, not just spiritual riches in the hereafter.

Grassley, a Baptist, has been called a hypocrite, a persecutor of the church, a Judas. He said he’s just doing his job.

“I have an obligation to protect the integrity of U.S. tax laws,” he stated last fall. “If tax-exempt organizations, including media-based ministries, thumb their noses at the laws governing their preferential tax treatment, the American public, their contributors and the Internal Revenue Service have a right to know.”

What makes Grassley’s actions unusual is that it involves churches, according to Kenneth Behr, president of the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability, a voluntary accreditation agency for Christian nonprofit organizations. But he doesn’t believe any First Amendment issues are currently at stake.

“At the heart of the questions are IRS tax issues,” he explained. “It’s not so much how much is paid, but if they’re accountable to anyone else.”

He has encouraged the ministries to cooperate with Grassley’s inquiry. (None of them is among the 2,000 ECFA members.)

“Accountability and financial disclosure are key ingredients to integrity,” Behr said, “and as a pragmatic issue, we should ask what’s the best course, with the least amount of damage. It’s easier to comply and then worry about legislation coming out of it, than to tempt fate by frustrating the process.”

With the deadline passed, Behr thinks the Finance Committee will now increase the pressure on Copeland and Dollar, launching a formal investigation. That’s “a whole new ball game,” Behr said, which could lead from subpoenas to new laws governing nonprofit ministries.

He would rather see churches and ministries regulate themselves. But, he points out, accountability among American religious groups is difficult. Compared to other nations, more American churches operate under local leadership, which is both a source of vitality and of potential problems.

“The U.S. has a tremendous number of congregational churches, which function with a democratic process, with members who give money and elect leaders for oversight,” Behr said. “At the same time, we have many personality-driven churches, many of them megachurches today. There’s Mr. and Mrs. Pastor who start a ministry because of their personality and charisma, their calling.”

While most such ministries work fine, many succumb to the dark side of independence and operate without any accountability.

“Every church in the U.S., regardless of ecclesiastical structure, should understand they need to be accountable,” Behr said. “It’s very biblical.”

First published in the Johnson City (Tenn.) Press. 5 April 2008.

By: Alex

A recent article in USA Today features puzzling comments by George Lucas on his next production, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull that seem designed to lower the bar on what to expect. The key quote:

“When you do a movie like this, a sequel that’s very, very anticipated, people anticipate ultimately that it’s going to be the Second Coming,” Lucas says. “And it’s not. It’s just a movie. Just like the other movies. You probably have fond memories of the other movies. But if you went back and looked at them, they might not hold up the same way your memory holds up.”

Mmmmm. George, the fans are excited not because they misremember how much they loved the Indiana Jones trilogy–they can watch it anytime they wish on DVD, and confirm their fond memories–why are you dissing your own classic films and splashing cold water on your audience’s hopes?

The answer lies further down in the article:

Lucas says he learned his lesson about unrealistic expectations when he revived the Star Wars franchise in 1999. “When people approach the new (Indiana Jones), much like they did with Phantom Menace, they have a tendency to be a little harder on it,” he says. “You’re not going to get a lot of accolades doing a movie like this. All you can do is lose.”

Well, you can lose if critics and many fans are less than impressed by the inferior scripts that characterized the three Star Wars prequels–they sensed the later films fell far short of the original Star Wars features, and they were right. Lucas still doesn’t understand why so many fans and critics felt the films were only digitized spectacles with terrible plotting and painful dialog useful for Lucas to experiment on his innovative special effects. If the new Indy film has a great story, and action and the familiar characters seem true to themselves, rather than the flat Jedi mannequins of Episodes I-III, then the films will be lovingly received. Don’t blame the fans for not embracing your bad movies, George. Just make good ones.

By: Cher Smith

Those in the know had predicted that the movie 10,000 B.C. would beat the box office record for a March opening. The March record is held by 300, which garnered a staggering $70 million. The record still stands. 10,000 B.C. earned only half of that, demonstrating once again that those in the know don’t necessarily know.

Predicting box office totals is a difficult business. There are a lot of things to take into consideration. Demographics, genre, rating all play a part in predicting box office. Then there are the smaller predictions that take place, such as daily totals or per theater averages.

It’s a difficult business. And now you can pretend you’re a movie mogul. Like fantasy football, Fantasy Moguls allows you to make movie predictions. You sign up as a studio and are given a budget of $100 to buy up to eight films. Your score is based on box office, how long your movie remains in the top five, per theater average and what the IMDb average rating is. You can join a league and compete with other studios.

Give it a shot and have some fun with it.

By: Alex

Last week saw the DVD release of one of the Walt Disney studio’s biggest hit in years that wasn’t a Pixar production. Enchanted (reviewed earlier here) demonstrated how effective the mega-media corporation’s return to its uniquely family-friendly sensibility has been. We visited all the Disney World theme parks last year and seeing Enchanted’s delightful tweaking of its fairy tale conventions brought into the “real world” of live action was the capper on my renewed appreciation on what Walt had wrought when he took his two-dimensional characters and stories and created an actual place where that world came alive for happy visitors to Disneyworld, the first of his revolutionary theme parks.

I wrote about Disney’s resurgence in January in World magazine (subscription required–but it’s a really good newsmagazine with evangelical perspective that’s worth a trial subscription). And I finally finished the biography, Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, by Neal Gabler, which is likely to be the standard text on the great American dreamer for years to come. Walt Disney was a mercurial creator who saw things no one else did and made them come to pass with a quality that insured their endurance over the generations. The neat thing is that with Pixar creative visionary John Lasseter, now in charge of the creative efforts at Disney, and possessing Walt’s sense of wonder and storytelling, the company seems set on a new era of surpassing entertainment.

By: Jim

Mentally track back four years, to the release of a certified blockbuster, Mel Gibson’s “Passion of the Christ.” Remember the buzz surrounding that stunning and disturbing re-creation of Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion, with its Aramaic and Latin script and bloody torture scene.

The film’s success was fueled partly by churches that sponsored mass viewings (sometimes renting entire theaters) or scheduled sermons or programs to tap into the movie’s prominence. Here was a top-flight movie with Jesus at its center, seeming to beat Hollywood at its own game.

“Can you think of a movie that contained more explicitly Christian content?” asked film critic Frederica Mathewes-Green during a visit to Milligan College this week. “And yet, what has been its lasting impact on the culture?”

Not a lot. Scattered stories of individuals inspired by the movie to investigate the Christian faith or regain their devotion were no doubt valuable, but it didn’t create any cultural earthquakes.

The lesson, as Mathewes-Green told an audience on Wednesday night, is that, for all their power, we cannot count on movies to change the world.

Mathewes-Green – author of eight books and hundreds of articles, public speaker, wife of an Eastern Orthodox priest and, full disclosure here, a longtime friend – displays a gift of connecting ancient Christian spiritual teaching and the modern world. One minute this self-described former hippy will quote St. Jerome or some other Christian hermit who lived 1,500 years ago. The next, she’s talking about “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” complimenting its pro-virginity message camouflaged in teenage humor.

As a friendly voice for Christianity, particularly the Eastern Orthodoxy to which she and her husband converted 15 years ago, Mathewes-Green has spoken on National Public Radio, CNN and a gaggle of other media outlets. If anyone understands the power and the limitations of mass media, she does.

That’s one reason she warns against expecting too much – such as the notion that a big media event can change culture.

Phrasing that idea so starkly, it seems odd that anyone would ever believe such a thing. Yet, some Christians think that if enough believers make movies or TV shows or pop albums, or if enough films and programs contain Christian-friendly content, or if enough believers take the reins of power at media organizations (or maybe just work on the set of a sit com), then they can usher in a new era that will redeem American culture and lead people to faith in Jesus.

But if this sounds outlandish, these notions aren’t much different from those wonderful dreamers who want to shake up society by creating the Great American novel/ movie/ album/ TV show.

Walking through a list of common reasons believers offer for trying to use mass media to shape culture, Mathewes-Green said such efforts are useful and praiseworthy – mostly – but they would not, could not have long-lasting effect. Culture is too big, like the ocean a fish swims in, and is in constant flux. Trying to “change culture” with a movie or a good job placement would be like trying to steer an oil tanker with a spoon.

“You can’t confront the culture” like that, Mathewes-Green said. “It’s a spontaneous collaboration, as spontaneous as a storm cloud rolling over the landscape. Being heard is not the same as having influence.”

And as she rightly pointed out, early Christians, living under a hostile Roman Empire, did not change the world by producing art or making movies.

“The only thing they did in the public square was die,” she said.

But they did that well, singing and praising God as they walked to their executions, believing they were following in the footsteps of Jesus. Many onlookers found their joy and serenity so moving and courageous that they joined the Christians there and then. Those early persecutions propelled the growth of the church, which eventually took over the empire.
Cloaked in that sobering thought is good news for modern Christians.

“The personal level is most important,” Mathewes-Green said. “Our highest obligation is to love our neighbor. If we lived that way, people would notice it. Be the light for five or six people around you, and you can change the world.”

First published in the Johnson City (Tenn.) Press, 22 March 2008.