Rachel Boehm Van Harmelen
March 2006
When Rev. Phil Reinders and six colleagues—most of them from the Calgary, Alberta, area—started preaching sermons on popular movies like The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers, something amazing happened. Not only did numerous new—many of them unchurched—people start showing up for Sunday worship, so did the media. In fact, Reinders found a reporter waiting for him in the foyer after the morning service, wanting an interview. Local television news broadcasts featured the story.
Reinders says the media attention was an unexpected bonus in that it helped achieve the important objective of bringing new people into the pews. But the real motivation for the series was mission-based. “The whole venture is missionally rooted,” says Reinders. “We saw the need to more effectively communicate the gospel to our culture,” he says, part of which involves listening to and understanding their culture better.
Reinders compares what he and his colleagues have done to Paul’s missionary approach. “Paul came into a city, walked around and observed, taking not of its values and cultural artifacts. Only then, after listening and understanding the culture, did he communicate the good news of Jesus.”
Reinders and his colleagues meet regularly to, like Paul, “listen and understand their culture better.” They are part of a peer learning group called The Cultural Exegetes: Preachers in a Post Modern Culture, which received a start-up grant from the Christian Reformed Church’s Sustaining Pastoral Excellence (SPE) project.
The pastors originally began meeting for mutual prayer and support, meetings that nurtured a shared interest in preaching and culture. That’s when the group decided to go to the movies, per se. “Movies are the stories that our culture tells,” Reinders says. “Movies illustrate the cultural condition we live in, the values that are important to our world. It pictures for us the world in which we need to communicate the gospel.”
Reinders is quick to point out that not everyone understands what he and his colleagues are doing. Some members of his own church, for instance, have questioned the validity of bringing the movies into church. Reinders says it’s important to understand that he and the other preachers aren’t using movies to illustrate biblical truths. Rather, the movies demonstrate the presence of God in the world and point to the longing that each human has to know God personally.
Reinders says that taking this approach to preaching couldn’t get more Reformed. “This is a way to live out the core belief that ‘our world belongs to God,’ to live out the Belgic Confession (Article 2)—that God speaks through the books of Scripture and creation,” he says. According to Reinders, it’s all about learning to see God in the world around us, something that people in his church are doing now more than ever before. “They’re starting to see God all over the place!” he says.
The Cultural Exegetes aren’t finished yet, either. They’d like to publish a book on the topic and to see a “culture-positive” atmosphere continue to grow in their churches. They’ve also done messages on music, sports, science, and business.
“We’ve been so pleased with the resonance of this approach in our culture,” Reinders says. “Working from the stories and cultural artifacts that are known to our society, we’ve been able to point to God at work in culture and name the longing for God that is so widely present in our world.”
