This last year and, more specifically, the
Gatewalkers
pre-production, highlighted for me an extreme deficit in our
effectiveness as filmmakers: we speak the wrong language. Allow me to
explain. Several months ago I had the privilege of pre-screening
October Baby.
Kudos to the Irwin brothers, they made a technically excellent film
that treated a sensitive subject well. What bothered me was a nagging
feeling that, in spite of overcoming the technical obstacles that many
believe keep the world at large away from Christian films, this movie
would still have trouble reaching its target audience. What's worse, I
didn't know why. So I ran an informal exit poll, and the viewers who
were not pastors had the same impression. These were people who loved
the movie and planned to see it again when it came out in theaters, yet
there was a general feeling that we, as Christians, still hadn't quite
yet "made it." Despite all the enthusiasm, something was still lacking in our delivery.
Fast forward several months, and we've begun casting for
Gatewalkers.
The "Best Friends" of the series have met for the first time, and I've
asked them to send me their list of expectations for season 2, sort of
an exercise to see what they see in the story, and also to make sure my
own ideas aren't too wacky. Now, a couple of my actors would be
classified by some as "non-believers," so it was interesting to see the
relationship between where they saw the story going and where my fellow
Christians did. Also the differences, something I did not expect.
Admittedly I should have, since I regularly say that everything we see
is first interpreted by our worldview before we actually perceive it.
Okay, so I actually say, "We see as we are." but that's a tad cryptic.
The vast majority of the points were consistent across the board, but
there were things that were different. It made me realize that, even
when we strive to be "jargon free" and not use words that only church
people understand, we still have a conceptual shorthand all our own. We
see things in such a way that, even when we speak plain English, we're
still not on the same bandwidth.
At some point we need to admit it; we're a sub-culture all our own. We
have our own culture, dialect, and rituals. I don't think being "in the
world, but not of it," even comes close to covering it. It seems more
like, "In our own world, within the world, but not of it." We have
centuries of tradition dividing us from the world we live in, and not in
the good way. How can we ever reach the world if we're so deep in our
own private culture that we may as well be from Mars? There's a local
gentleman who works with troubled kids and their families. One day he
took one of the families to the funeral of their Christian friend.
Afterwards, the preacher was lauded for giving a clear presentation of
the gospel. This man I knew just shook his head and asked the mother
what she heard. The result was the most bewildering literal
interpretation of our "Christianese" jargon. Apparently the sermon
painted the image of someone holding on for dear life to the back of a
plow with money flying everywhere. I'll leave it to you to re-interpret
the original message.
The point is, we speak a language that is utterly foreign to the very
culture in which we live, to the very people we hope to reach! If we
simplify the message, we're now speaking very slowly in Welsh! Still not
very helpful. I propose that we must first learn to speak the language
of the culture we're living in, like any good missionary. Many of our
over-used Christian metaphors were originally exactly that, Jesus or the
apostles speaking the language of the culture they were living in. Talk
of plows and hypocrites and oil and lamps made a lot more sense to the
common man back then. We must deprogram ourselves and learn to speak
plainly, in the language of the world we intend to reach. Because, so
long as we speak Christianese to Americans, we're not going to have much
luck.
