As I continue to read on family worship for our next curriculum series, I often run across books that are particularly good. Merle d’Aubigne’s sermon on family worship is a case in point: clear, simple, and practical, it outlines the reasons behind spending time doing it, then provides direct steps to implementing it. His sermon is filled with honest advice that makes as much sense today as in the 19th century: “Public worship is often too vague and general for children and does not sufficiently interest them. As to the worship of the closet, they do not yet understand it. A lesson learned by rote if unaccompanied by anything else may lead them to look upon religion as a study like those of foreign languages or history…. If they observe that no worship is paid to that God of whom they hear, the very best instruction will prove useless. But by means of Family Worship these young plants will grow ‘like a tree planted by the rivers of water that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither.’” His small booklet on family worship can be read via Google books or in HTML. It’s a quick but encouraging little read.
I recently finished a draft of a screenplay for a short film on the roles of men and women in marriage. (We’re doing it for a family ministry to use in a new curriculum they’re developing.) One of their ideas was to use dancing as a metaphor for roles in marriage. I thought it was a good idea, so I tried to build the entire story around it. I set it in a ballroom dancing class for adults, and the more I pushed the metaphor, the better it seemed to work. By the end, it had become a multi-dimensional (if simple) exploration of the roles of men and women in relationships, including some of the ups and downs that go with them. What I did wasn’t anything new – it’s a method as old as literature – but I think it could be a useful approach to dimensionalizing complex and potentially abstract ideas in film. In literary terms, it’s called a conceit. [click to continue…]
It’s a question I’ve heard a lot Christians ask. And it’s a legitimate question. I recently saw a blog post from Dallas Jenkins, producer of Hometown Legend and director of Midnight Clear, where he tries to answer it. He brings up some good points, but I think it’s a complex issue, one that has a lot of different historical forces playing into it. One of the things he doesn’t mention – which I personally think is an unrecognized culprit – is the general divorce between theology and practice that, in the artistic world, has given us a simplistic and disconnected aesthetic. Most Christians today (including evangelicals) dimly comprehend the theological structure to the world, and instead interpret reality through the grid of gnostic modern culture. I think this is one of the main reasons that Christian films have become “message” films: there is not an honest, theologically-driven aesthetic that seeks to explore Christianity through the filmic medium. Instead, Christian films often show us a simplistic, inaccurate view of life that somehow lacks the hard knock of truth. (Secular media does the same thing, just with bigger budgets, veteran writers, and higher production values.) If we can begin to explore the theological aesthetic, then try to apply it to film, perhaps Christian filmmaking can move in a healthier direction.
That’s what Voddie Baucham quotes in the introduction to his book Family Driven Faith. It’s a sobering thought. 7 out of 10 kids who are now in church won’t be there in the future (he’s not talking about unchurched kids; he’s talking about kids whose parents assume they’re Christians until one day they reject their faith). I thought about my children’s Sunday School classes and all the little kids running around – according to this, 70% won’t make it past college. Wow. One of the reasons I’m reading Baucham’s book is that we’re developing a new curriculum on family worship, and it reminds me that the only way to change these numbers is at a grassroots level, one family at a time. If you’ve got children yourself, I recommend getting Baucham’s book – it’s a good reminder of what’s really at stake for parents, as well as what can be done to build up the little ones in our care.
