Thankfully, these are just one type of voice in the possible future of Christian cinema . . . even if they are the loudest. Over the past decade or so, Christianity has become frequent fodder for documentarians. Some documentary filmmakers expose more troublesome sides to Christianity, like Jesus Camp (2006), for example, while others are happy to highlight the positive influence that religion can have in the world, as in the film Renewal (2008). Other filmmakers are showing that documentary filmmaking can be used for more intimate purposes.
Filmmaker Macky Alston advocates filmmaking as spiritual practice. There are almost limitless opportunities for how churches can employ such practices, and, with the increasingly easy forms of distribution and exhibition referenced earlier, who knows what kind of impact these films could have on larger audiences?
One thing is for certain: Christian feature filmmaking demands new, more progressive voices. Though there is a wealth of African American religious cinema, I have yet to fully examine it in the course of my research. However, works by Tyler Perry and productions available through sites like www.blackchristianmovies.com demand analysis as well. On the whole, the genre begs new vision that looks keenly at the margins of society, rather than solely at the comfortable middle- to upper-middle class, and how God and communities of faith are at work there. Furthermore, while there is nothing implicitly wrong with wanting to share the Gospel message in film, it's high time that progressive Christians take up the camera and more creatively tell our version of it. While more mainstream filmmakers and Christians who work in the industry might cringe at my suggestion that Sherwood Pictures represents any kind of filmmaking future, their business and practice of filmmaking on a small scale does serve as a model for other communities of faith to imitate, if they will only look and see.
J. Ryan Parker is the creator, editor and main contributor to Pop Theology. A fourth-year Ph.D. student in Religion and the Arts (with a focus on film) at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, his research interests include contemporary religious cinema after The Passion of the Christ, the history of religious cinema, and the ways in which films affect, and are affected by, religious consciousness. He has also served as a media consultant on documentary film projects.
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