The silver screen and outreach: who's exploiting whom?

We should reflect on what happened with films like The Passion and Narnia. Loads of churches invested money and time in using them ostensibly as outreach. But, is that what happened? Not according to Barna's research. In fact, reading this article, I suspect that the churches have collectively fallend for the next phase of the film industry's exploitation of religion for marketting. The first phase was to leak hints of allegedly blasphemous or moral panic-inducing scripts and rely on 'righteous' indignation to produce free advertising [all publicity is good publicity, even -perhaps especially- protests and pickets]. But lately that tactic has not been so good. Perhaps Christians have collectively realised that high profile protest just encourages them by adding money to the project whereas letting bad films sink into obscurity achieves their aims more effectively in the longer term.
So what's a film company to do? Here's a clue:

Paul Lauer, president of Motive Marketing, says his company's primary mission isn't marketing movies, but rather “providing congregations with tools to further their goals.” Given that The Passion and Narnia have collectively earned nearly one billion dollars, while the church’s goal hasn’t measurably advanced at all, maybe Mr. Lauer needs to reassess his company’s mission.

Yep: if you can't offend them into boosting your sales, tell them it'll help them grow their membership and then let them do the work of driving people into cinema seats. Cheap ready made sales staff using their own money to sell your tickets. A marketting plan to die for!

Am I truly such a cynic now? No, don't answer that, I might find the answer hard to deal with!

Leadership Blog: Out of Ur: The Passion Reloaded: is the silver screen really an outreach silver bullet?:
Filed in: Christian, mission, evangelism, film, culture