Page 1745 – Christianity Today (2024)

The titular cabin in The Cabin in the Woods seems pretty run-of-the-mill—small, unassuming, common. But when an unseen cellar door opens, the cottage is suddenly much bigger and richer. What was previous seen of the cabin turns out to be merely the tip of the iceberg. There’s more below the surface.

The cabin is a good analogy for this surprising, original, and inventive movie. What if horror films—like the slasher movie Cabin portends to be—are only a small, visible part of something larger? What if this connection, this greater reality, is the reason for all the very common archetypes, plots, and conventions they share?

It’s an avant-garde re-shuffling of tired genre tropes—in other words, classic Joss Whedon, Cabin‘s co-writer (creator of TV shows including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly and director of Serenity and the upcoming The Avengers). In fact, Cabin can be seen as a natural extension of Buffy. Whedon responded to horror movies’ tendency to slaughter the blonde cheerleader by creating one who the monsters had to fear. With Cabin, Whedon and co-writer/first-time director Drew Goddard (a stand-out writer on Buffy, Alias, Lost, and Cloverfield) don’t just play with character conventions but shake up the genre itself, question deep-set traits, poke at our desensitized voyeuristic bloodlust, and mimic the manipulative process of making these movies.

How Whedon and Goddard approach this is best left as a surprise. As New York Magazine wrote, the “very premise is a spoiler.” Suffice it to say, the slasher-movie storyline of college students (an alpha male, a bookworm, a stoner, a virgin, and a vixen) being slaughtered in the woods is only one of two intersecting plotlines. And not even where the film begins.

While Scream pointed out the horror genre’s rules, Cabin in the Woods takes a deeper, more cynical post-modern aim at, it would argue, antiquated moralism behind the rules. While too much detail would be a spoiler, those in the film who dole out punishment for youthful indiscretions are of an older generation and beholden to “remnants of the old world.” The film actively questions and brushes off perceived old thinking about morals. In this way, Cabin actually feels a bit like a modern version of how Victorian Age aesthetes, who in a time of emerging secularism and science, stressed a “seize the day” worldview over that of traditional Victorian literature. Wheaton College’s Leland Ryken wrote that literature of this time “was often laden with philosophic comment and moralizing … [one author even] defined the function of literature as being to tell us how to live.” Sounds a bit like horror flicks where the drug-using or promiscuous teens are first to go, right? Whedon and Goddard even employ an aesthete approach of indirection and suggestion (or maybe just sloppiness?) that forces the viewer to interpret any message. There are so many little strings of commentary (some feel half-baked or incomplete) that individual viewers may pull on different ones. Does the genre itself forbid the concept of free will? Have we been as manipulated as a horror movie character? But an echoing message to me was this: It’s not worth abiding by black-and-white rules when we live in a gray world. And why do we enjoy the punishment of those rule-breakers so much, anyway?

All this talk of avant-garde filmmaking might make Cabin sound heavier or smarter than it is. While Goddard and Whedon have some points to make, it’s clear they aren’t taking it all seriously. First and foremost, this is a blast of a thrill ride. It’s hard to miss the writers’ joy in establishing their world and then flipping it—and you—upside down. The two parallel storylines intersect into a final third that is crazy, fun wall-to-wall mayhem that invokes about every horror movie ever made. In addition, it’s actually a very funny and even charming movie, an odd genre-bending concoction of horror, action and comedy—a big ball of Evil Dead, Scream, Matrix, The Hunger Games, Scooby Doo, Zombieland, and a lot of Whedon’s previous work—especially season 4 of Buffy.

It’s well acted—especially by Richard Jenkins (The Visitor) and Bradley Whitford (The West Wing) who, in spoiler-tastic roles, hilariously steal the movie and provide its center. I could have watched an entire movie of just them riffing. They, and Fran Kranz (Dollhouse) as the stoner teen, have several one liners (like “Everyone knows you can’t trust the Swedes”) that will now be quoted incessantly.

Those well acquainted with scary movies or who enjoy raucous “Don’t open that door” theater experiences will have a blast. Whedon fans will be delighted. While not a traditional horror movie, there are still scares, jumps, and blood and gore galore—but I didn’t find it to be the type of grisly, graphic horror movie that keeps me up at night. The gore was much less affecting than even TV’s The Walking Dead, which often causes me to avert my eyes.

Once the rollercoaster is over, though, the movie can lose some of its shine. There are major plot holes and easy shortcuts that make no sense (Look, that architect has to be fired over his elevator design). Still, it is so clever, so ambitious, so fresh, and so boisterously entertaining, that it will be a huge hit and a fan favorite.

Talk About It

Discussion starters

1. Who is the hero of this movie? Why?
2. Who can or should decide what the greater good is—and how to achieve it?
3. What did you think of the character’s decision when told “You can die with them or you can die for them”? What is the movie saying about self-sacrifice and society with that action?
4. What do you make of all the conversation about the need for people to be punished? Why? Why these people?

The Family Corner

For parents to consider

The Cabin in the Woods is rated R for strong bloody horror violence and gore, language, drug use and some sexuality/nudity. Characters are killed through stabbings and beheadings. There is much gore including much blood splattering and a decapitated head. There is a sequence of dozens of quick scenes reminiscent of various horror movies; images include a woman shooting herself in the head, a man being strangled with a bag, zombies feasting on victims, a man being continually vomited on, etc. Two women are seen in various stages of undress: in panties, unbuttoning shirts, and one is shown topless. A man and woman undress each other; he uses teeth on her panties. A woman performs a drunken sexy dance and makes out with a stuffed wolf head (really). Several instances of frank talk about sex; one woman is implied to have slept with an older professor. Drug use includes a number of scenes of bong use and joint smoking. A bong is used triumphantly as a weapon and it’s revealed that drug use actually helps one hero survive the events of the film. Profanity includes many uses of the F-word and the Lord’s name in vain.

Photos © Lionsgate

© 2012 Christianity Today. All rights reserved. Click for reprint information.

There is something terribly jarring about seeing home movies of babies juxtaposed with footage of the same child much later, after years of bullying. Back then, they appear so joyful, smiley and unrestrained. Now: Quiet, sullen, beaten-down.

It’s devastating.

“I’m starting to think I don’t feel anything anymore,” says 12-year-old Alex, one of those previously carefree infants who now has no friends because he’s “creepy,” “annoying,” “not normal,” and a “fishface.” He’s not alone. Over 13 million American kids will be bullied this year. Twenty years ago, I was one of them. In my volunteer youth ministry, I’ve worked with several more. This problem is real, the effects are terrible. So I am thankful for Bully, a new documentary from Sundance and Emmy-award winning filmmaker Lee Hirsch.

Bully‘s greatest accomplishment is its straightforward and poignant depiction of the victims’ reality. The threats. The isolation. The name-calling. The pain. With Bully, the national crisis is given a face. Several faces, actually. Filmed over the course of the 2009-10 school year, Hirsch features Alex but intersperses his story with those of four other bullied students, giving us various facets of the bullying spectrum. Two families mourn the suicides of their bullied sons, Tyler and Ty. Ja’Meya was arrested for taking a gun to school to scare the bullies. Kelby is a lesbian tempted to move to escape anti-hom*osexual abuse.

It’s amazing the access Hirsch was given, capturing everything from blatant bullying to the little side moments—like one scene where a boy named Cody is asked what it feels like when he’s called a fa*ggot. “It breaks my heart,” he squeaks.

Heart-ripping, emotive moments are frequent. Alex is pushed and slapped on the bus. A boy serves as pallbearer for his 11-year-old friend. A mom breaks down on Mother’s Day; how can she celebrate if she can’t protect her own son?

It all makes for compelling footage, but Hirsch doesn’t go much further than showing the problem and stirring sympathy. There are no interviews with experts analyzing the problem or offering solutions. But as anyone who has read about or observed bullying there aren’t any easy solutions. It’s a messy issue that no one has figured out how to fix. Fingers are pointed at the schools and police for not acting, at individual teachers and principals who excuse abuse as “kids being kids,” and at parents who are not involved. Some could even question the actual bullied students who do not advocate for themselves. As one victim’s cousin says exasperatingly, “Nobody does nothing about bullying!” (Unfortunately, the only mention of the church is in the story of Kelby, who says she wasn’t welcomed there because of her hom*osexuality.)

But when the film ends, viewers are pointed to a website, thebullyproject.com, that offers all sorts of helpful suggestions for tackling the problem—for students, for parents, for teachers, for advocates. Action steps galore populate the website; viewers don’t have to feel helpless, but instead take a stand.

Of course, with such a documentary, merely stirring the awareness is a great start. Maybe assistant principals—like one featured in the film whose responses to bullying are often ridiculously ineffective—will see that there are better approaches. Maybe fathers like Alex’s will see the role they can play in satisfying their child’s need for attention and acceptance. Maybe it will show children just what they are doing to each other. And maybe enough people will simply say, Enough!

These final hopes were almost squashed by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), which originally gave Bully an R rating because of six F-words. But an R rating would have eliminated much of the intended audience—students, at least without a parent. The distributor, The Weinstein Company, appealed the ruling, and teens spread petitions for a PG-13 rating. Canada gave it a PG rating. Still, the MPAA wouldn’t budge. So Weinstein released the movie as ‘unrated’ in New York and Los Angeles.

Then, just last week, Weinstein agreed to cut three F-bombs, and the MPAA responded by giving Bully a PG-13 rating. (For the record, I reviewed the original, R-rated print.) Not only does this mean that more students can see the film, even without parents, but that it very well could be shown in schools. There is power in these stories. At one point, the abuse toward Alex escalated so much, Hirsch showed his footage to his parents and school. Seeing the footage seriously affected Alex’s parents; unfortunately it may not have had the same effect for his school.

I cannot stress enough the benefits of watching this film as a teen or as a family. Are there easy, spelled-out answers here about what we can do? No. But as we become aware and discuss these kids’ stories, we might become solutions in a small sense—even if it is only for one student.

For me, I was most left with the desire to just let the kids in my life know they are worth it. They are loved. And it gets better. It did for me.

Talk About It

Discussion starters

1. Do you or have you seen the kind of bullying that is shown in this movie? What kid reminded you the most of yourself? Why?
2. How did watching this make you feel?
3. What are practical solutions offered or suggested here? What takeaways do you have from the movie?
4. Does bullying like this occur at Christian schools or churches? What can Christians do to help stop this abuse?
5. Why does Alex continue to hang out with kids who treat him that way?

The Family Corner

For parents to consider

Bully is rated PG-13 for some language. There are three F-words, and various slurs of hom*osexuals and terms about various parts of anatomy. Kids are threatened with violence (including stabbing), hit, and verbally abused. There is frank talk about cutting and suicide.

Photos © The Weinstein Company

© 2012 Christianity Today. All rights reserved. Click for reprint information.

Many of Us Hope So

Wesley Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism and author of A Rat Is a Pig Is a Dog Is a Boy: The Human Cost of the Animal Rights Movement (Encounter, 2010).

We have come a long way since Descartes claimed that animals are mere automatons without the capacity for pleasure or pain. We now know the contrary is true: They experience. They suffer. They grieve. They love.

When it comes to our relationships with pets, we not only take them into our homes: We welcome them deep within our hearts. In fact, some become so attached that they yearn to be with their pets throughout eternity. C. S. Lewis speculated on the eternal fate of animals in The Problem of Pain, suggesting that at least tame animals might enter heaven through their relationship with humans, in the same way that humans do through their relationship with Christ.

But I worry that the question of pets in heaven could distort our understanding of eternal life as described in Scripture and Christian tradition. If we are not careful, we could cross the line into a sentimentality that shrinks our eschatological expectation. Our human idea of heaven might be walking an adored dog in the forest, but there is no indication that is anything like God’s plan. The question of whether our pets go to heaven requires an examination of the natures of animals, of humans, and of God. Animals have their lives in God. In Psalm 104 we read that animals look to God for their food and that when he withdraws his spirit, they return to the dust. God marks the dropping of every sparrow.

But John 3:16 makes no mention of animals. Only humans are made in the divine likeness. Unlike animals, we are moral agents capable of sinning by commission and omission. That makes ours a completely different nature of being.

Here’s an illustration: My late cat once raided a nest and I found her happily batting a helpless, now dying chick around the backyard. She was just being a cat. Had I done that, I would be rightly branded a monster. I also knew my human duty. I put the poor chick out of its misery with a heavy work boot and removed the carcass. Doing the right thing came at a cost: Chloe was so angry I spoiled her fun that she refused to look at me for the rest of the day.

God’s love is unlimited, unconditional, and eternal. When we witness the very face of God and participate through constant worship in his ineffable essence—which we are told is the neverending activity of heaven—it will at the very least include all we yearn for when desiring to be with our pets forever.

So do pets have souls? Do they go to heaven? God knows. For now, “we see through a glass darkly.” Instead of speculating or making strained proof-texts, let us instead give thanks to God for the great gift of joy he has given us in our pets. Let us be confident in the knowledge that whatever his plans for our animal friends, all will be perfection and light.

Via the Covenant

Karen Swallow Prior is a professor at Liberty University and has written on animal welfare for CT’s Her.meneutics blog and other publications.

When I was young and gnostic, I was certain that pets do not go to heaven. I didn’t know I was gnostic, of course. I simply thought that life on earth was about bicycles and ice cream and books and not saying certain words or smoking behind the barn with my cousins.

Heaven was about being with God and angels singing and seeing great-grandma again and not being in hell.

You only got to heaven if you were saved, and I hadn’t seen any animals go to church, let alone go forward during an altar call. In the old days, I was told, a nearby farmer used to ride his horse to church, where he’d hitch her up to the iron rail that still stood outside the one-room country church in Maine where my family worshiped. I never imagined a horse coming inside to get saved.

Yet the Bible teaches that God does save animals. For example, God brought Noah two of each kind of living creature in order to save them from the Flood. God chastised reluctant Jonah about the need to save not only the human inhabitants of Nineveh, but also its many animals. Such salvation is not, of course, quite the kind invited by the altar call. Even so, it should not be overlooked.

God not only saves animals. At times, his covenants include them. God’s covenant with Noah included “every living thing of all flesh” (Gen. 6:18-19, KJV). In Hosea, God proclaimed a covenant “with the beasts of the field, the birds in the sky and the creatures that move along the ground” (2:18, niv).

When God made a covenant with one of his chosen ones, he often marked it by assigning them a particular name: Abraham, Sarah, Israel, Jesus, Paul. God told Adam to name the animals and, in so doing, Adam reflected God’s acts of naming. When we choose to take into our household creatures that share with us the breath of life and bestow them with names, perhaps we enter into a kind of covenantal relationship with them too. To echo C. S. Lewis in The Great Divorce, perhaps when we name animals, they “become themselves” and our salvation “flows over into them.”

I have put away my childish thinking about heaven. Scripture describes eternity not as an ethereal cloud-top existence, but as both spiritual and material, just as our life is now. It is a new heaven and a new earth (2 Pet. 3:13) where “creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God” (Rom. 8:21). As foretold in Isaiah, animals will be there. “The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat … and a little child will lead them” (11:6). Perhaps God will honor my acts of naming the animals by bringing Gracie, Kasey, Myrtle, Peter, Oscar, and so many more there, too.

I Wish We Knew

Ben DeVries is founder and administrator of Not One Sparrow, a Christian voice for animals.

Oddly enough, I was part of the animal advocacy community for several months before I took the question of whether animals have souls seriously. I had even written my seminary capstone paper on a biblical-theological foundation for animal welfare, and didn’t feel compelled to address the subject directly.

When I heard others speak confidently of seeing their animal companions again, often “just over the rainbow bridge,” I sympathized with their loss and the natural desire that arose out of it. But the hope of reuniting with our pets seemed more based in wishful thinking and eclectic spirituality than in a confessional hermeneutic. As a result, it seemed to compromise the clear scriptural calling, which does exist, to care for God’s creatures.

Just over two years ago, when one of our own cats died suddenly from an unexpected complication after an otherwise successful surgery, I found myself looking at the question of animal souls in a much more personal light. Bubba had been a constant and beloved companion since we brought him home from an adoption center four years earlier. He was wonderfully affable, as his name suggests, and the perfect pet for our newborn son to grow up with. I took his loss hard, heartbroken as my wife and I said goodbye at the vet’s office, and still sobbing as I buried him in pouring rain later that night. I wrote in my journal: “It’s been a gut-wrenching couple of days …. I miss him everywhere I look in the house …. And I feel such a hole, especially not knowing if God has taken him back to himself for us to meet again or not. I so badly want to know if I’ll see him again.”

It occurred to me from time to time in my grief that if God had made Bubba, and knew and loved him even more than my family did, he could very well have some desire to bring his own treasured creation back to life someday.

The same might go for many other creatures with which God has a relationship as their Creator and Sustainer, whether we humans happened to share in that relationship or not. After all, our Savior said that not even one sparrow is ever forgotten by him.

But even if this is a reasonable conjecture, I have to come back to what the Bible does and does not say on the possibility. We know that death of any kind was never part of God’s original plan, and that animals will certainly be part of the new heaven and earth, where death and tears will be no more. What we don’t know is whether these will be specific animals from the old creation, including those we’ve known and loved.

I wish we knew.

In the meantime, it seems okay to ask God if his grace might extend that far, while doing my best to trust that heaven won’t seem anything but complete regardless.

Copyright © 2012 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Related Elsewhere:

Previous Village Green sections have discussed being secular television shows with moral messages, pro-life and pro-death penalty, sports and violence, virtual fellowship, online dating, Muslim-Christian relations, military drones, terminal illness, marijuana morality, credit card debt, tithing during unemployment, illegal immigrants, giving to street people, the best Christmas stories, laws that ban Islamic veils, the Tea Party, Afghanistan, Bible smuggling, creation care, intelligent design, and preaching.

Previous articles on animals include:

The Problem with Westminster Kennel Club’s View of Pet Adoption | The annual dog show could have served as an imperfect model of the love the Church could offer. (February 15, 2012)

Exotic Animals and Kingdom Ethics| Principles for why we should avoid treating all animals as possessions. (Her.meneutics, October 21, 2011)

Not One Sparrow | We can be ‘speciesists’ and show compassion for animals. (July 13, 2009)

I was as shocked as anyone when I heard about the shooting at Oikos University. It happened in California, near the city where I grew up as a teenage immigrant. But still, my shock didn’t reach its peak until I learned that the school was a Christian institution, and that the shooter was a South Korean, my own countryman.

As I dug through the web, however, going from one news source to the next, I noticed something I hadn’t noticed before. Amidst the usual tension between different political spectrums, I felt the presence of a very old elephant in the room.

In regards to One L. Goh, some seem to be keen on reiterating his social context. MSNBC even found it necessary to dive into the doctrinal statements of the school; list the percentages of Protestants and Catholics in South Korea; and report on the number of missionaries South Korea has sent out worldwide and the number of Korean-American evangelicals in the U.S.—it’s obvious they want to make this a religious, social issue. FoxNews, on the other hand, focused more on the motives of Goh than on his religious affiliations, reporting that he was isolated by his classmates and made fun of for his poor English skills, and that he suffered psychologically as an individual. They don’t seem as interested in the larger social context.

So, is Goh a symptom of a flawed social context, or is he just a bad apple in a healthy bunch? Will there ever be a resolution to this question of society vs. individual?

Surely, both sides need to concede that there is some validity to both perspectives. The emphasis on the social context doesn’t mean that individual problems will go away, and vice versa. The problem seems to be that neither side is taking into account the other’s valid perspective on the problem; they find it incumbent on themselves to pit one view against the other and hope the public will realize just how narrow-minded the other side is. But not only is this kind of methodology guilty of the narrow-mindedness it accuses others of, it blinds us to the real problem and thus the real solution.

My Immigrant Years

I am a South Korean native who grew up as an immigrant for most of my youth, a combined fifteen years in Hong Kong and the U.S. I can empathize (albeit to a relative degree) with the pain caused by racism and rejection—I experienced everything from being looked down on as an ESL student to being nicknamed Jackie Chan. But I found strength and sustenance through the immigrant church community and my relationship with God. I cannot stress enough how important it was for me, when faced with the challenges of assimilation, to have brothers and sisters in Christ who encouraged me and extended their fellowship to me. They reminded me that my ultimate identity is not rooted in my ethnicity, but in Christ.

I spent the last few of my undergraduate years in South Korea. There I was fully accepted and integrated. But to my surprise I wasn’t entirely in my comfort zone. Now that I was in my motherland, I was able to see the racism of the majority against the minority even in myself. I wasn’t a victim this time, but a perpetrator. It’s hard, as part of the majority, to notice the negative influence you could have on the minority. This was new to me, and I felt compelled to struggle against it as an individual. Fortunately, I was encouraged to find a few likeminded friends at church, and together we formed a tight multi-ethnic community. Through mutual encouragement, we faced our individual struggles together as a group.

My experiences taught me that the church is in a unique position to reach out to the immigrant community, to share God’s love with the “sojourners” in our land. The church needs to understand that it’s not enough to see only through the societal lens and say, “It was their society that was problematic.” Neither is it enough to merely see through the individual lens and say, “It was their individual problems that needed attention.” We must see through both lenses, held together by a gospel perspective, and say, “The problems in both the individual and society point to an underlying, universal norm in humanity.” Because it doesn’t really matter whether you’re in an individually satisfying environment or a socially accepting one; the problem remains fixed and rooted in human nature. That is to say, in all of us. The only solution to this is the gospel, and the love it produces. The gospel gives the church reason to proactively put aside the “society vs. individual” debate (which is how the media is trying to portray most domestic issues) and reach out to the rejected and isolated with the gospel on the one hand and service on the other.

Why One Needs the Gospel

One Goh’s community should have shown him the care a struggling immigrant needs, instead of isolating him for his poor English. But Goh also failed as an individual—in a fit of anger he unleashed his worst. One Goh is a perpetrator, but he is also a victim of other “perpetrators.” Can we take from this what we must? Where there is a human being, there are bound to be problems. No one is exempt—liberal or conservative, religious or irreligious, immigrant or native, if you’re breathing you’re probably both the cause and the recipient of some form of human misery at some point in time. Why is this not more disturbing and urgent to us than everything else we see on the news combined?

The Bible, in this sense, is a book about what is urgent and fundamental. It is concerned with the most central problem mankind faces. The gospel comes to us with the premise that we’ve all missed the mark of perfection and gives the most basic human norm a three-letter name: sin. Humans are the cause of their own strife and conflicts; humanity is killing itself, and this has been our situation since the first sin in Genesis. The gospel demands a new order, a new kingdom, where people from every tribe and tongue will rejoice together and delight in a Savior who makes everyone new. It also provides one.

The Scriptures reveal Jesus Christ, the Son of God, as the Savior King who came into our broken world to sympathize with us where we are, to bring a new order not with violent revolution but with radical love, which is demonstrated in his death and resurrection—all this for our liberation and renewal.

I believe One Goh needs a Savior in Jesus Christ, the true One who came to be rejected, ridiculed, and killed. He was an alien to his family, countrymen, and the world. He sympathizes with Goh, and came to die the death he should have died and live the life he should have lived, to make him new and to bring God’s shalom on the earth—for One Goh and for us all.

If I see One L. Goh through this biblical lens, I cannot see him primarily as a disturbed Korean immigrant stuck in a broken system. He is primarily a broken man living among broken people who desperately need the gospel, people such as you and me.

Sungyak “John” Kim is currently studying for his M.A. in theological studies at Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, FL. He writes at http://sungyak.tumblr.com.

“Speaking Out” is Christianity Today‘s guest opinion column and (unlike an editorial) does not necessarily represent the opinion of the magazine.

Copyright © 2012 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Related Elsewhere:

Previous articles on school shootings include:

Owning Redemptive Grief after the Ohio School Shooting | Instead of speculating on why T. J. Lane killed three of his classmates, we are better off asking how to grieve the tragedy rightly. (March 1, 2012)

Amish Grace and the Rest of Us | The Amish response to the Nickel Mines shootings wasn’t just plain Christianity. (September 17, 2007)

Where Is God When It Hurts? | A sermon given on the Virginia Tech campus two weeks after the shootings. Philip Yancey (June 6, 2007)

After a season of abusing booze and steroids, Brian Presley had a choice: Clean up. Or die.

God has a way of getting your attention like that. And for Presley, who’d grown up a Christian and had the best of intentions when he took on Hollywood as a young, ambitious actor, hitting rock bottom might have been the only way he’d finally sit up and listen.

Funny how life imitates art, then, because Presley’s new movie—Touchback, opening in about 50 theaters this week—is essentially his life story. Handsome, talented guy, with the world at his fingertips, starts making bad decisions, blows it all. Gets depressed, considers (and maybe attempts) suicide, then gets the divine wake-up call. For the real-life Presley, it’s the story of an actor and the CEO of an indie production company, Freedom Films. For his character in Touchback, it’s a football star. Same guy, different uniforms.

Presley, now sober for a year and a half, considers himself still “in recovery,” but says his relationship with God and his family have never been better. We talked to him about the new movie, produced by his own and his up-and-down-and-up-again journey.

Touchback is kind of biographical for you, right?

Yes. I grew up in church and was very involved in Fellowship of Christian Athletes. When I got to Hollywood, I started my [production] company after being on a TV show, and I felt called to make movies like Touchback that reached a family audience. Eventually I lost sight of what God had called me to do and began to pick films that I thought were good business deals, but not the films I wanted my mom and grammy to go watch. Well, we had a big film coming out, and we had the unimaginable happen: the studio decided not to release the movie, and we were launched into a legal nightmare. I had to take out home equity loans to fight lawsuits. At the same time, I was having my first child. I began to drink heavily to cope with the stress of it all. There were times where I was in this hole and I didn’t know how to get out of it; I even thought it was a hole too deep for God to get me out of. I spiraled into depression, and there were times I thought about taking my own life.

What did rock bottom kind of look like for you?

James Cameron made a little submarine that went seven miles to the bottom of the ocean floor. On the way down, he saw all kinds of life. But at the bottom, it literally looked like the moon. There was zero life, just dust. When my wife and I watched a special on this, she turned to me and said, “Isn’t it ironic that at the bottom of the ocean floor there’s no life?”

It’s an empty place—that was my rock bottom. There’s nothing glamorous or pretty about it. The only way back to the surface is through Jesus pulling you back up. I’m thankful that God spared my life. I feel similar to my character at the end of the movie, when he’s able to see his kids and wife with a different set of eyes. I truly see my two kids with a different set of eyes. I appreciate those moments of reading bedtime stories. I appreciate being able to sit and have dinner with my wife. Because thank God, I didn’t take my life and I stopped the alcohol and other things I was putting into my body.

A lot of people have gone through this. After one screening of Touchback, one guy said that he was my character and that he had his life insurance policy. He drove himself off the side of a mountain to end his life without his seatbelt on and woke up and had a scratch on his arm and that was it. I think there’s a bunch of those types of situations, where people think suicide is the only way out. That’s how powerful the Devil is.

What prompted your turnaround?

One Saturday morning, my daughter had a seizure, and we rushed her to the hospital in an ambulance. It was a rainy day, and I was falling behind. I sobbed the whole way. I broke down and said, “God, I’m the one who deserves to suffer.” I felt God telling me, Lawsuits, money, whatever, none of that’s important. This is what’s important. I don’t care if you have a cardboard box. Your family is what’s most important.

Around the same time, I’d gotten a role as an underground fighter in a film with Ed Harris. I saw it as a way to earn some money to pay back the investors and fight the legal stuff. But to get physically right for the role, I took different forms of steroids—and that was like pouring gasoline on an already burning fire. Shortly after my daughter’s seizure, I was in a hospital bed with doctors telling me my kidneys and liver were starting to shut down. They said if I didn’t get off what I was on, I’d end up on dialysis or dead. All this happened within a few months. I felt it was God showing me, it’s either lose my life and my family, or change my life for myself and my family.

During this time, I also got the Touchback screenplay sent to me. I got chills and saw a parallel situation; I was reading about my own life. I felt called to make this movie and use it as a platform to share my story. It’s been therapeutic to play my character.

How long have you been sober?

I’ve been in recovery for a year and a half. My wife has been awesome through this, and now we’ll be able to teach our kids about what addiction is. And I hope to help other people who are struggling with the same thing.

Are you attending rehab?

I go to weekly AA meetings with a group of awesome, godly men from my church—they have a lot of wisdom, and have been great influences. With God and with the program, I’m able to take it one day at a time, to really put myself in right situations and surround myself with the right people, and to have a personal relationship with Jesus, because Satan’s around that next corner wanting to trip us all up.

Addiction is powerful, and I’m in an industry where a lot of people struggle with it. It’s killing people.

How has your relationship with God changed through all this?

It’s been taken to a whole different level. I have hope. Today, by the grace of God, that period of time turned out to be a blessing. I’ve been able to come to terms with my addictions and things I struggle with. Whatever issues we’re facing, we can turn it over completely over to Jesus and know that we’re in his hands. Before, I wasn’t doing that; I was trying to tackle it myself. Lesson learned. You can’t conquer life without Jesus.

How do you see your ministry in Hollywood?

I meet a lot of people in Hollywood who are Christians, a lot of people who are searching, and some people who when you mention Jesus, they cringe and think you’re about to beat them on the head with a Bible. But I tell them, don’t not seek something that can change your life.

I’m in an industry where there’s darkness all around. Our calling is not necessarily to make movies that are heavy-handed preaching movies. Our goal is to get the people who need a recovery program, or are living a life of sin—we want them to see our movies and think, There’s something different about that movie and that company. If we can just offer an ounce of hope, and people can start pulling back the curtain, looking through the studies and resources on the film’s website, I think God will deal with them in his time, and hopefully they’ll want to keep searching. That’s where my wife and I are headed with our ministry, and the movies just happen to be the vehicle.

Ashley Moore is the editorial coordinator for Kyria.com and Discipleship Resources for Christianity Today. She writes and rants about God and life on her blog.

© 2012 Christianity Today. All rights reserved. Click for reprint information.

I had been in church ministry for over 10 years when I was asked for the first time to be part of an exorcism.

Even now, I'm not quite sure that's the right word to describe what took place. Certainly it didn't look anything like what you see in movies. Nobody's head rotated 360 degrees; there were no freakishly low voices or unusual physical phenomena.

Just a man who used to be a missionary who found himself emotionally and relationally headed down paths he never thought he would pursue, unable to find solid ground to stand on. He felt somehow that his inner battle was not merely psychological. Through mutual friends I was asked to be one of those who gathered to pray for his deliverance.

I wasn't quite sure how to be present. I am from a Midwestern church background that certainly believed in the devil (I remember getting a stack of cards with Scripture verses to be used against certain temptations that was called an Anti-Satan Kit.) We would sometimes hear extraordinary stories of occult activity from guest speakers who served as missionaries or lived in cities like San Francisco. But in our tradition the casting out of demons did not play a common role. I pictured in my mind dramatic confrontations and bold prayer, but this event was not that way.

When the few of us gathered around this man, we asked him questions—what did he find troubling, what steps toward help had he already attempted, what help from God did he desire? We read Scripture together. We prayed, and asked God to deliver him from whatever kind of spiritual oppression or opposition that he was facing. I did not have any internal clarity about the exact nature of his problem or to what extent some kind of demonic presence was at work.

At the same time, it was clear that this was a human being troubled by forces beyond his ability to control, and the reality of every human condition—that God alone is our only hope—had become terribly clear in this moment of his life.

The ending of our prayer time was as non-dramatic as its beginning. We hugged him, planned for next steps and next meetings, and went home.

I ran into him recently at a ministry conference. Parts of his life have been healed; in some areas he carries wounds that may always remain. He feels free from the oppression that haunted him two decades ago. But what took place remains as mysterious now as it was then.

Charting Spiritual Reality

Medieval theologians used to say we have two ways to speak about God: the via negative (what God is not: not limited in space, not limited in knowledge, not limited in power), and the via analogia (what God is like: like a fortress, like a father, like a rock, like a lover).

The way of analogy is perhaps the most important way we have to speak of spiritual life. Often these analogies involve growth ("I am the vine, you are the branches"; "the fruit of the Spirit is …"). Others cluster around the notion that the church is like a body or a family.

But perhaps the most intriguing and controversial images cluster around the notion of the life of the soul as spiritual warfare. Why was this picture of spiritual reality invoked by the writers of Scripture, and what does it mean for the way we do ministry?

Perhaps the place to begin is here: the biblical writers lived in a world where the reality of the spiritual was taken for granted; we live in a world where that belief erodes a little more each day.

The greatest book on spiritual warfare in the twentieth century was written by an Anglican intellectual who, I think, never himself used the phrase "spiritual warfare" and may well never have heard it used. C.S. Lewis's little book The Screwtape Letters is a classic because it shows the stakes at play over the fate of a single soul.

Lewis notes how difficult it has become for human beings to take seriously the reality of the spiritual as a fundamental dimension of the universe. Uncle Screwtape (a senior devil) writes, "Thanks to processes which we set at work in them centuries ago, [human beings] find it all but impossible to believe in the unfamiliar while the familiar is before their eyes."

Sometimes, an inability to believe in Satan reflects a larger inability to believe in a spiritual plane at all. Our culture is relentlessly materialistic. This is, as Lewis points out, part of what makes prayer difficult for modern people.

People often speak of feeling frustrated that their prayers never make it past the ceiling. Of course, if the Spirit of God is present right here right now, they don't have to make it past the ceiling—God is already on this side of the ceiling.

In what may be the most important Bible passage using the warfare image—Ephesians 6—Paul ties the need for spiritual armor to qualities related to the development of character—the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, the gospel of peace, the shield of faith. The New Testament has much more to say about the discernment of right character than it does about mapping which demons are where.

Paul's primary point, which we forget to our peril, is to take seriously the God-powered development of our character, because we are spiritual beings destined for a ceaseless existence in spiritual reality.

Where Evil Resides

Because we live in a largely therapeutic culture, evil is a slowly disappearing concept. But every once in a while we are shaken by a holocaust, a genocide, or the destruction of a World Trade Center, and we remember why we need that word. The Bible reminds us that we battle "evil in the heavenly places."

Psychiatrist Scott Peck wrote of meeting with a depressed 15-year-old named Bobby, who was increasingly troubled after his 16-year-old brother killed himself with a .22 rifle.

Peck tried to probe Bobby's mind, but got nowhere. Searching for ways to establish a bond, he asked what Bobby had received from his parents for Christmas. "A gun," Bobby said. Peck was stunned. "What kind?"

"A .22."

More stunned. "How did it make you feel, getting the same kind of gun your brother killed himself with?"

"It wasn't the same kind of gun." Peck felt better.

"It was the same gun."

Bobby had been given, as a Christmas present, by his parents, the gun his brother used to kill himself.

When Peck met with the parents, what was most striking was their deliberate refusal to acknowledge any wrongdoing on their part. They would not tolerate any concern for their son, or any attempt to look at moral reality.

Two decades later and after his conversion to Christianity, Peck wrote about this encounter: "One thing has changed in twenty years. I now know Bobby's parents were evil. I did not know it then. I felt their evil but had no vocabulary for it. My supervisors were not able to help me name what I was facing. The name did not exist in our professional vocabulary. As scientists rather than priests, we were not supposed to think in such terms."

Interestingly enough, although Peck often worked with convicted prisoners, he rarely found evil there. Evil, he finally decided, is not primarily indicated simply by sinful acts. Rather, it is the refusal to tolerate one's sense of sinfulness: "The central defect of evil is not the sin but the refusal to acknowledge it." This definition is reflective of Jesus' far greater severity in dealing with religious leaders than with prostitutes and tax collectors.

I also find it frightening as a religious leader.

Evil exists. Evil is real. One of the hallmarks of evil is that it seeks to convince its victims that it exists "out there." Alexander Solzhe-nitsyn wrote that it was while he was in prison that "Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains a small corner of evil."

One of the worst features of some popular Christian fictional treatments of spiritual warfare is that they encourage our tendency to think of "us" as good and "them" as bad. They misplace Solzhenitsyn's line as though it divides us from other people rather than dividing us from our best selves.

I'm not sure ministry can ever have the urgency it requires if it is not aware of evil, both externally and internally. We are seeing a wonderful growth of interest in the church's commitment to justice. But the pursuit of justice cannot be carried out by purely human means. Theologians like Walter Wink have suggested that when Paul says we wrestle "not against flesh and blood but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world," those powers may well include economic systems and political systems that remain stubbornly resistant to righteousness and justice.

The first time I went to Ethiopia I saw children who had been maimed or blinded by their parents because their only economic hope for survival was a child desperate enough to evoke pity in people like me who had money. Attempts to "do justice" will always founder unless we're able to remember that the ultimate enemy of humanity is not simply poverty or illiteracy or ill health; it is much worse than that and as apt to strike healthy, well-read, rich people as anyone.

This doesn't mean we need to pay more attention to the demonic. We must not give to the evil one too much attention, nor too little. In some stories—Star Wars and Les Mis come to mind—the good guy and the bad buy get almost equal screen time.

Not in the Bible. There are dozens of references to God in the Scriptures for every one to the figure of Satan. This reflects a sometimes forgotten theological truth that the devil is by no means God's counterpart. He is a creature, not the Creator. If anything, his divine counterpart would be the archangel Michael.

Spiritual, Emotional, or Physical?

Boundaries between spiritual, emotional, and physical health are both overlapping and murky.

Sometimes, God brings deliverance to a human being in a single dramatic moment. Ninety-five year old Louie Zamperini was at our church recently, and spoke of how God used all the suffering of his life for good in ways he could not have predicted. (When asked by a Japanese official a few years ago whether any good had come out of his brutal suffering as a POW in WWII, Louie said "Yes, it prepared me for 53 years of married life.") After the war, Louie's life spiraled down in a vortex of rage, fear, and alcoholism that he could not control. When he surrendered his life to Christ at a Billy Graham crusade, he was delivered from these in an instant. No more nightmares. No more temptation to drink. Rage was replaced by forgiveness.

But God does not always deliver in this way.

Sometimes people in our churches may be drawn to an explanation for their problems that could provide them with an instant solution that removes the need for hard, difficult inner work on their part. If my problem is an external force, then I may indulge the illusion that I will not have to spend disciplined energy with God's help on the cultivation of new habits.

The attempt to diminish human responsibility by blaming supernatural evil is as old as the garden: "what is this that you have done?"

If my problem is an external spiritual force, I may be let off the hook instead of having to face my own responsibility. The attempt to diminish human responsibility by blaming supernatural evil is as old as the garden: "What is this that you have done?"

"The serpent deceived me, and I ate." It did not work then, or thereafter in Scripture. Spiritual warfare is spoken of in a way that heightens human vulnerability, but it does not diminish human responsibility.

The relationship between spiritual warfare and emotional health becomes particularly important in the area of pastoral care. One of the first responsibilities of a good clinician is assessment and diagnosis. One of the gifts the Spirit has given to the church is the "discernment of spirits"; the ability to distinguish between God's spirit and other, alien spirits. Outside the New Testament, thinkers like Ignatius have written with great wisdom that has lasted for centuries. In particular, Ignatius insisted that the most basic rule of discernment is whether the movements of a spirit incline toward the fruit of the spirit (love, joy, peace, and so on) or away from them.

Because my doctoral program in clinical psychology was housed in a seminary, the diagnosis issue was unusually prominent. There were disagreements over when a diagnosis of demonic involvement was appropriate. The potential for harm in someone's life—particularly a child—if a "discerner" mistakenly intuits the presence of a demon is very real. A team of theologians and clinicians developed a series of guidelines around the discernment of spirits that may be helpful for churches:

-Since discernment does not confer infallibility, it ought to be subject to the wise, informed, and responsible members of the Christian community.

-No one should ever be subject to exorcism without informed consent.

-Because mental illness often involves a preoccupation with sex and religion (think of mania and messianic complexes), no exorcism should be performed unless the person has been assessed and diagnosed by skilled clinicians. A friend of mine had a father who suffered for years from bi-polar disorder. It often involved bizarre behavior with religious overtones; he was often told he needed deliverance from demonic possession. When the effectiveness of lithium to treat bipolar disorder was discovered, he was restored to mental health. But his faith had taken a beating because of years of spiritual misdiagnosis.

-For a Christian clinician to seek to help in human healing without relying on prayer is a form of malpractice. "Healing" is just as much a metaphor when it comes to human behavior as warfare is. Sin requires forgiveness, not catharsis. Jesus warned about a person being delivered from one spirit only to have seven more re-occupy. The human heart will ultimately be governed by a power greater than a human heart.

Deliver Us From Evil

Even though what we call "the Lord's prayer" is familiar to Christians, there are parts of it we rarely dwell on. For instance, what it really means when Jesus says, "Deliver us from the evil one." New Testament scholar Dale Bruner notes that Jesus uses an almost violent verb translated "deliver." It means to snatch; it's what a hand does when it seizes an object in considerable danger. The idea here is that the devil is constantly luring us into pits, snares of moral destruction, and being saved from them is beyond mere human willpower. Only God's watching and snatching and saving can rescue us. Deliverance indeed.

Occasionally I'll have folks say to me that, since I'm a pastor, the devil must be particularly after me. I'm not so sure. I don't think God reckons greatness in his kingdom in ways that always sync up with human religious titles or institutions. And it always seems to me to be just a little narcissistic about anyone putting themselves in a category so spiritually powerful that they warrant special diabolical attention.

And yet …

I have known times of intense spiritual ministry to be immediately and strangely followed by intense temptation.

I have known times when it seems like great spiritual work is being done, to be almost intertwined when problems and opposition seem to intensify.

I believe that there is great resistance to the good work of God, and that resistance can come from both within and without.

I know that any time someone says to me "I pray for you every day," I feel something beyond gratitude.

One thing is clear: Jesus pairs deliverance from the evil one with "Lead us not into temptation." The primary path of deliverance involves loving and knowing God.

"The human heart will ultimately be governed by a power greater than the human heart."

In the old days when money used to grow on trees (or at least get printed on paper that came from trees), people who were experts at spotting counterfeit bills didn't spend their time studying counterfeit bills; they spent their time studying the real thing so closely that the imposter became obvious. The evil one is called an "angel of light" because of the ease with which we will rationalize giving in to temptation. Our safety lies, not primarily in knowing the enemy better, but in knowing our Father better.

One final weapon

For all the seriousness of this topic, there is a strange thread of something like joy that runs in great writings about it. Thomas More said that the devil, "that prowde spirite," cannot endure to be mocked.

Luther wrote that the best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn. G. K. Chesterton said that one law of hell is that no one can laugh at themselves; the devil fell because of gravity.

It is perhaps the inversion of one of the great observations of ancient Israel: the joy of the Lord is our strength. Those of us in church leadership read or hear with sad frequency of one of our sisters or brothers ending up in a moral ditch. A mentor of mine noted once that when that happens, as a general rule, the person has been living without a deep sense of soul satisfaction for a long time, which is what made them vulnerable. I asked him how often someone who does live with a deep sense of soul satisfaction in God and their life ends up in a moral ditch.

Never, he said.

Always it is the unsatisfied soul that finds sin to look good. It is the pastor who feels that God cannot be trusted to make him happy in his actual life situation who will feel it necessary to do that which promises some fulfillment.

Oddly enough, unspiritual as it sounds, when we are happy in our work, joyful in our homes, content in our marriages, satisfied in our play, loved in our relationships, grateful to God in and during our daily routine, in ways we may not even understand, the Father is answering our prayer. We are being delivered from the evil one.

To go deeper, see our recommended resources on spiritual warfare.

John Ortberg is editor at large of Leadership Journal and pastor of Menlo Park Presbyterian Church in Northern California.

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

There are very few absolutes in this life. What kind of school our children attend is not one of them.

Home schools, private schools of kinds, public schools, each in their different ways are places where good parents hope for a good education, knowing that at the end of the day they are responsible for teaching their children to love God and his world. We have chosen all three along the way, raising our five children, and each one has blessings and curses. None is a tragic choice, but none are perfect choices either.

Almost 25 years ago, we were involved in the beginning of a private school called Rivendell. Eventually all of our children went there, and graduated at eighth grade. Born of an entrepreneurial hope for a different kind of education, the little community of parents who brought it into being worked very hard for many years to create an educational culture that prized a creative, responsible learning. A literature-based curriculum focused on thematic study was its heart, along with a requirement that parents actively involve themselves in the week-by-week life of the school.

Committed to teaching our children to “learn about God’s world and to discover their place in it,” we were a family, with all the good and bad stories of families everywhere. But when all was said and done, we wanted our children to learn to learn, and to love learning.

When our children finished at Rivendell, we searched the city of Washington for something similar, and found nothing that satisfied. Eventually, intrigued by the more personal pedagogy of private schools, we entered into the life of St. Stephen’s and St. Agnes School, an Episcopal day school in Alexandria.

From our first conversations with the headmaster we knew that the school was sympathetic to transcendence, but did not believe in truth. A hard judgment, perhaps, but knowing that to be true kept us from expecting the school to be something other than what it was. What it was was its own gift to our children. A small school with small classes, it offered them an opportunity to know their teachers as they were learning within the disciplines of a demanding curriculum. That is never small.

A wonderful grace for our children in those years was FOCUS, a ministry to students in the private and independent school world along the Eastern seaboard principally. A bit playfully, I have described it as “John Stott and Francis Schaeffer meeting on Martha’s Vineyard, imagining together a ministry to high-school students.” For over 50 years, it has served the schools that no else has served, viz. the private, independent schools, and has done so with great grace. Its presence at St. Stephen’s and St. Agnes was a lifeline for our children, nurturing them in visions of honest faith as they were learning to learn in a pluralizing, secularizing world.

And all of our children eventually must live in that kind of world. It cannot and will not be different than that. So where they go to school is not finally the most important decision; how they learn and who they become with what they learn is more critical. As I long argued at Rivendell—remembering the moral vision of Tolkien himself—it is not only important that our children learn their duty to love God and his world, but that they learn to desire that. The one is easier than the other. But duty and desire together are the best hope of a good education, and a good life, for children everywhere.

Steven Garber is married to Meg, and they are parents of five children. Long members of The Falls Church, he is the principal and founder of The Washington Institute for Faith, Vocation and Culture.

I remember three things about the afternoon my parents dragged a 13-year-old me to a famous and local golf tournament: 1.) being bored out of my mind, 2.) having to keep very quiet and 3.) learning what exclusive meant in country club speak.

I’m not sure how it came up, but when it did, when my dad explained that at this club exclusive meant Blacks, Jews, Hispanics and women were not welcome, I was appalled. I wanted to leave immediately. But my parents insisted we stay. We were merely spectators, they explained. Not members. We weren’t complicit in the bigotry. I disagreed (still do). But at least that day I learned something valuable: that wicked things weren’t always ugly and charred. That they can be lush and manicured and that Christians sometimes stood around and applauded them.

So when I read the story of Augusta National Golf Club holding firm to its ridiculous and misogynist membership rules and refusing to offer IBM’s new CEO, Ginni Rometty, the same membership they extended to her male predecessors as sponsors of The Master’s tournament, I expected a familiar furor to bubble up, to boil over. But it didn’t.

Instead something like weariness ran through me.

I suppose I’m just tired of this being an issue. Weary of Old Boys Clubs and “No Girls Allowed” signs. Weary of uber-accomplished women being told they are still not up to snuff—or up to par, I guess—because they are not men. I’m weary of companies proclaiming their misogyny by sponsoring these sexist events. Weary of people buying their products—making bigotry good for business. I’m weary of tradition and fear of change being guiding principles in clubs, in business and—if I’m being honest here—in the church.

But while I can defend Augusta’s—or any club’s—right to exclusivity till the cows come home, the Church can’t be defended for the same. We aren’t allowed to hang up “No Anyone Allowed” signs—not if we want to be like Jesus, at least. And yet we put those signs up. Again and again and again.

Before some of you tense up in defensiveness or get red-faced in your fury, allow me to explain: I’m not necessarily talking about “complementarian” versus “egalitarian” or “progressive” versus “conservative” here. I don’t care which “camp” you’re in, each camp has at least one rickety clubhouse built high off the ground, with a crookedly painted, dangling sign that declares who is and who is not allowed. The Body of Christ is notoriously divisive. Even as Christ himself was notoriously inclusive.

Of course, we all have our reasons. Just as those who support Augusta National’s exclusiveness have all sorts of justifications (there’s good old tradition—along with men needing a place of their own and having to put in women’s tees—and presumably bathrooms! Oh, the expense!), so do we church-folk justify our actions.

Some of us cite Scripture. Some of us cite biology and sexuality. Some of us cite comfort and practicality. We can come up with long lists of reasons why more women aren’t in pulpits or on finance committees and why more men aren’t rocking babies or running VBS.

while there’s always a rhyme or reason, I often wonder, is it ever very Jesusy? Sure, Jesus chose 12 men to be his disciples. But didn’t exclude women from his ministry. He stepped right over some Old Testament laws to allow women to learn at his feet. He definitely thumbed his nose at tradition and overcame biology to kick up the scandal he did to chat theology with a woman of ill-repute.

I’m pretty sure if we look to Jesus for tips on when to include and when to exclude, we see that there may be a time and a place for taping up our “No Girls Allowed” and “Boys: Stay Out!” signs (good news: since this is a blog by women writers and co-founded a writers group for women). But we need to be careful.

In Are Women Human? Dorothy Sayers writes, “We are much too much inclined in these days to divide people into permanent categories, forgetting that a category exists for its special purpose and must be forgotten as soon as that purpose is served.”

Sayers wrote that 65 years ago. And it’s still true today. Once upon a time, I’m sure prohibiting women served a “special purpose” at Augusta National (though, honestly, I’m afraid to think of what that special purpose was). But it seems to me, since the times have a’changed quite a bit, their special purpose today may leave room for women. At least, I hope it does.

Same with our church ministries or events or committees (or blogs or writers guilds!). There are special purposes—appropriate times and places—for men- or women-only in the life of the Church. But if we want to live out Jesus’ command to love God and love our neighbors, we can’t be content to live with segregation as much as do. We can’t allow fear of change or a cling to tradition to keep us from moving or worshiping or serving together as the Holy Spirit might be prompting us.

We certainly can’t be content to claim spectator status and stand behind the ropes and clap when we exclude—when we should be welcoming—one another.

Caryn Rivadeneira is the author of Grumble Hallelujah: Learning to Love Your Life Even When It Lets You Down (Tyndale, 2011), co-founder of Redbud Writers Guild and a regular contributor to Her.meneutics. Visit Caryn at http://www.carynrivadeneira.com.

While filming Blue Like Jazz (see our review on page 80), Marshall Allman—who plays the Donald Miller character at the center of the story—was to ride an unsteady “tall bike” across Portland, Oregon’s Hawthorne Bridge. Director Steve Taylor, concerned that Allman might “plunge over the rail” into the Willamette River, considered a stunt double, but Allman declined. Says Taylor, “For Marshall, it’s all just part of the work, and he approaches it with both a singular intensity and a great sense of play.”

Allman, 28, has received thumbs-up for his acting—for Blue Like Jazz as well as recurring roles in TV’s Prison Break and True Blood. He recently finished filming Jayne Mansfield’s Car, a 1960s-era drama starring Robert Duvall, John Hurt, Kevin Bacon, and Billy Bob Thornton. Taylor believes Allman can go a long way: “He takes the craft of acting very seriously, and he wants to get the role right.”

Allman was a soccer star and award- winning art student in high school, but ultimately pursued acting instead because of a knee injury and the likelihood of earning a steadier income in acting than as an artist. “When I discovered the art of acting, and that it combined the physicality of soccer with the craftsmanship of art, I thought, Why paint when I can be the painting? For me that was enough.”

Question & Answer

How did you get this role?

I got an e-mail from Steve Taylor saying I was on his shortlist. I hadn’t read the book, but I was really excited when I read the script. I e-mailed Steve and said that I was 1,000 percent in. He responded that he loved my enthusiasm but it wasn’t an offer yet—he wanted to meet in person. We met for lunch a week later, and he told me I had the part.

What did you like about the script?

It was funny and moving at the same time, which is rare. And though it dealt with issues of faith, it wasn’t trying to force any beliefs on anyone. It just happened to be a story about a kid wrestling with his beliefs and his identity. That’s a story anyone can identify with.

How did you capture Don’s personality?

It wasn’t a literal interpretation of Don’s book or the actual person; I wanted to capture the spirit of both. I watched videos of Don and read all his books; I basically stalked him. Eventually, I got to know him and found those two to be consistent. The main qualities that struck me about Don are his pursuit of adventure and a razor-sharp sense of humor.

Did you “become” Don for the role?

That’s what makes acting sort of like magic. If people believe I am Don, then I’ve done a great job. As an actor, I strive to be no more than a vessel for the story. Here to serve you, the audience.

How would you describe the film?

A Southern Baptist kid is set to go to seminary, but gets burned by the very church that raised him. He instead attends Reed College in an attempt to run as far away from his upbringing and God as he can. And it’s funny too.

More: BlueLikeJazzTheMovie.com

For a more in-depth interview with Allman, click here.

Copyright © 2012 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Related Elsewhere:

Learn more about Marshall Allman and the film Blue Like Jazz at their respective websites.

Previous “Who’s Next” sections featured Michael Patton, Bethany Hoang, Bobby Gruenewald, Julie Bell, DeVon Franklin, Shannon Sedgwick Davis, Jon Tyson, Jonathan Golden, Paul Louis Metzger, Amena Brown, David Cunningham, Timothy Dalrymple, John Sowers, Alissa Wilkinson, Jamie Tworkowski, Bryan Jennings, L. L. Barkat, Robert Gelinas, Nicole Baker Fulgham, and Gideon Strauss.

While filming Blue Like Jazz, which opens Friday in limited release, Marshall Allman—who plays the Donald Miller character at the center of the story—was to ride an unsteady “tall bike” across Portland’s Hawthorne Bridge. Director Steve Taylor, concerned that Allman might “plunge over the rail” into the Willamette River, considered a stunt double, but Allman declined. Says Taylor, “For Marshall, it’s all just part of the work, and he approaches it with both a singular intensity and a great sense of play.”

Allman, 28, has received thumbs-up for his acting—for Blue Like Jazz as well as recurring roles in TV’s Prison Break and True Blood. He recently finished filming Jayne Mansfield’s Car, a 1960s-era drama starring Robert DuVall, John Hurt, Kevin Bacon, and Billy Bob Thornton. Taylor believes Allman can go a long way: “He takes the craft of acting very seriously, and he wants to get the role right.”

Allman wanted to get Miller’s character just right: “So many people are just like Don,” he says. “They were raised Christian and go off to college, only to abandon their beliefs in order to fit in. Or they were burned by the church and live the rest of their life resenting anything Christian.” Miller—in real life and in the movie—ultimately returns to his faith, and Allman hopes audiences are inspired by the journey.

A huge fan of Brad Bird and Pixar films, Allman lives in Los Angeles with wife and fellow actress Jamie Anne Allman (AMC’s The Killing). We recently interviewed him via e-mail about Blue Like Jazz and more.

You tweeted that The Artist was your favorite movie of 2011, and that you’d run into (Best Actor) Jean Dujardin, and that he thought you were Justin Bieber. Seriously?

That’s the first time, since I’ve been an actor, that I actually really wanted to take my picture with another actor. I have so much respect for performers from old Hollywood—they could do it all, sing, dance and entertain—and Jean sort of embodied that, so yeah, I’m a fan. And yes, he did ask me, tongue in cheek, if I was Justin Bieber. But was just poking fun at my haircut. I’ve been rocking that haircut since ’98 so, whether it’s called the Biebster or the Zefron or whatever, for me it’s called the “I’m too lazy to get a haircut and that’s how my hair grows” cut!

How did you end up with the gig for Blue Like Jazz?

I got an email from a friend if he could pass on my contact info to some friends. Later I got an e-mail from Steve Taylor saying I was one of a few actors on their shortlist to play the part of Don. He hoped I could read the script and let them know if I had any interest.

Had you read the book?

No, but I had heard great things about it from a friend. And 10 pages into the script, I turned to my wife and said, “It’s really good.” About an hour later, I wrote back to Steve informing him that he had found the lead of his film, that I was 1,000 percent in, and thank you for the offer. He hesitantly responded that he loved my enthusiasm but that it wasn’t an offer yet, and he couldn’t promise anything except that he wouldn’t offer it to anybody else before we met in person. We met for lunch a week later and when we sat down at the table he told me I had the part—which was nice because it made it easier for me to eat.

Blue Like Jazz, the book, isn’t a linear story, but just a memoir of Don’s random musings. Do you think they pulled it off, turning it into a movie script?

Yes. They did a fantastic job of turning a series of essays into a compelling narrative, which is not easy to do, even with Don allowing some of the details of his true life to be construed to make it a better story. I thought the script was funny and moving at the same time, which is rare. I also loved that though it dealt with issues of faith, the film wasn’t trying to force any beliefs on anyone. It just happened to be a story about a kid wrestling with his beliefs and ultimately his own identity. It’s a story that anyone could identify with.

I thought you did a nice job capturing the vibe of Don’s character and his story.

Thank you. I took careful consideration with the character because it wasn’t a literal interpretation of the book nor Donald Miller the actual person, but I definitely wanted to try and capture the spirit of both. I watched every video I could find of Donald Miller and read the all of his books. I basically stalked him! As I got to know him, I was pleasantly surprised to find those two to be consistent—that who you think he is from his public persona and his writing is very much who he is in person. The main qualities that stuck out to me about Don are his unquenchable pursuit of adventure and a razor sharp sense of humor.

How much of Don’s personal story can you relate to—especially his journey of having faith, then sort of losing it, then circling back around to having faith again? How much of that story is yours too?

That’s what makes acting sort of like magic. If people believe I am Don, then I’ve done a great job. My job as an actor is to then convince you that the person on screen couldn’t possibly be acting, that he is just that way. I strive to be no more than a vessel for the story, here to serve you, the audience. And please don’t forget to tip your waiter.

How would you describe the movie’s synopsis in a nutshell?

A kid raised Southern Baptist who is set to go to seminary in order to become a pastor gets burned by the very church that raised him. He instead attends Reed College in an attempt to run as far away from his upbringing and God as he can. And it’s funny too.

I’ve heard that the making of this movie was a pretty fun experience for everyone.

I had a blast, one of the best times I’ve ever had on a film. We had no money, but the team was still very organized and professional, which is rare. Not to mention how excited everyone was to be working on this film. It was clearly a project of passion to everyone. There were often explosions of applause after “cut” was called on set, which is unprecedented.

Any funny stories?

In one scene, Don is having a beer with an old friend. I told them it wasn’t necessary to replace the beer in the bottle for water, thinking I was hardly going to drink out of it during the scene, since I’m personally not a big drinker. Well a few hours in, my words began to slur and Steve Taylor turned to someone and said, “Is Marshall supposed to be drunk in this scene?” They got me water as quickly as possible and I learned a valuable lesson. I am sure Steve was seriously praying during that one!

Who is the “target audience”? Christians, mainstream, or whom?

To me, Blue Like Jazz is a quintessential American story. So many people are just like Don—raised Christian and go off to college only to abandon their beliefs in order to fit in or be accepted. Or like Don, they get burned by the church and live the rest of their life out of resentment toward anything Christian. I was surprised that this story had not yet been told on film, since it’s such a pervasive one in our culture.

When people go out for a cup of coffee after Blue Like Jazz, what do you hope they’ll be talking about?

That if you claim to be friends with a God who created reality, you should be one of the most real and authentic human beings on the planet. That it’s possible to have relationships outside of your faith that are not just an excuse in order to convert someone.

One of the most relevant themes of the film comes in a scene where Don confesses, “Yeah, I am a Christian, and by the way I am sorry for the last two thousand years cause there have been some times that we have really screwed up.” Not that he is ashamed of his faith, but that he is grounded enough to know that as a Christian being called to represent God, there are going to be times that he is going to screw up and that’s OK. Owning up to it with integrity becomes necessary to furthering the cause.

With the political volatility of our culture today, the conversation between the religious community and the rest of culture has effectively ceased. So that kind of humility becomes necessary to disarm the hate-slinging from both camps, religious and non-religious, in order to open the door to understanding so we can co-exist without reducing one another to labels. As citizens of the same nation, it’s sort of like a marriage, and the only way a marriage can work at all is with communication and understanding. Sometimes an apology is necessary for a conversation to begin again.

Your next movie is called Jayne Mansfield’s Car. What’s that about?

It’s a culture clash film set in the late ’60s between a Southern patriarch’s family (Robert Duvall) and his estranged wife’s new British husband (John Hurt) and his family. They are brought together on account of her passing, and it’s time to bury the hatchet between the two. The cast was astounding; it was an honor to get to act with such talented, proven people. For me, the more talented the actor is that I’m working with, the easier my job is because the circ*mstances of a scene are easier to believe when the people around you are in the moment just as much as you are. In fact it becomes so easy to act, you forget you are working and it starts to feel kind of like floating, almost like you are hyper-alive.

Interestingly, your last major role, in True Blood, was also about the supernatural. Vampires are hot right now, even among Christians. Why do you think that is?

To me, the most interesting part of True Blood is that the entire crux of the show is based on identity and finding your true identity. I think the supernatural aspect is just an extension of everyone deeply hoping that there is something special or “supernatural” about themselves deep down. Like Sookie in True Blood, Don is also on a journey, being forced to face himself in order to discover who he truly is. We love watching people come to grips with that, for better or for worse. Facing yourself is the hardest thing to do in life, and we like entertainment that makes it fun (or at least engaging) for us to do it.

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