God’s Not Dead: The Movie, and a new friend

It seems clear to me that 2014 is going to go down as the year of the religious movie. There are a lot of Hollywood movies this year that are covering various biblical stories, and I must say I am looking forward to all of them. God’s Not Dead is a movie that I had not heard of until a few minutes ago when I connected for the first time with Rice Broocks thanks to my new favourite web video conferencing program, Zoom.us.  Incidentally, you will most likely be seeing a lot more of Zoom around here, and if you are wondering why, check out my recent video interview with Matt Chandler.  Great audio, great chat, but shame about the video quality, Google.  Hangouts you are so 2013, you are history to me now!

Rice Broocks, by the way, is someone that I can immediately tell is going to become a friend, and who I will learn a lot from. I am always on the look out for helpful voices that I can highlight here on the blog. You might think that Rice is someone I didn’t need to introduce to most of you. After all he is one of the hosts of a TBN show, has written a couple of popular books, pastors a large church, and founded a world wide family of churches called Every Nation.

The thing is, until a few days ago I hadn’t really heard of him myself. So, I figure, if I haven’t heard of him, some of you probably haven’t heard of him either.  Put that straight right now and follow him on Twitter, and get to know him a bit more.  I will be visiting him in Nashville at the end of March, and although I haven’t asked him yet, I hope he will agree to doing a web interview on here before then.

It is wonderful from time to time to learn of amazing things that God is doing around the world that you just didn’t know about. Just like when I recently heard about Eddy Leo, it is humbling, because it makes you realise just how much bigger God is than whatever boxes we try and put him in. It seems Every Nation and the group I am part of, Newfrontiers, are very similar in ethos and beliefs from what I can tell so far. Rice is reformed, and is not just what Ed Stetzer calls an aspirational charismatic, but is all-in, even believing in Ephesians 4 ministries continuing today.  I am sure that many in our two movements would benefit from connecting with each other, so especially my Newfrontiers brothers should definitely check this guy out.

We chatted about so much stuff together, including how being reformed and charismatic should not be as strange as it often is. One memorable comment he said was something like, “My Presbyterian friends say they are fantastic at building a fireplace, but that they don’t know how to light a fire. I told them we charismatics know how to light a fire alright, but we will burn the whole house down.We need each other! We must get both together” 

Anyway, back to the title of this post, one of Rice’s books is called God’s Not Dead and a movie has been made inspired by the book.  Judging by the trailer and the preview videos below you really want to be thinking about taking your youth or student’s group to watch this. It looks not at all cheesey, very professional, and a compelling story. We must pray that the glorious message of the gospel gets out in every possible medium.  There is no such thing as an evil form of media, only evil uses that media gets put to.

I am thrilled that Rice is active on TBN, and I am thrilled that he is one of the driving forces behind this new film.  I hope you enjoy the trailers as much as I do, and if you are based in the USA then take a whole group to see this in a movie theatre. Click here to see where it is showing near you.  You may be making a few such trips this year!

Trailer

15 minute Preview