Filmmaker Anthony Parisi makes some good points in his overly negative review of the movie, Courageous. He writes:

Films like this reinforce the unfortunate impulse that anything we create must be explicitly “Christianized” or evangelistic. Churches are to spread the kingdom not by some sort of cultural revival but by the unglamorous life of local ministry God has founded on Word and sacrament. Making movies falls far outside the bounds of what the church has been called to do.

I sympathize with that first sentence. I chafe at the notion of seeing every cultural good in terms its value for evangelism. But I can’t agree with his next two sentences. Perhaps he means the institutional church should not make movies, and he’s probably right, but the church, as in the whole body of Christ or all Christians, should make movies if they have the skills and talent to do so. That’s what Mr. Parisi does himself or a variation of it.

Andy Crouch argues in his book, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling, that the only way to change culture is to make culture. Criticizing and boycotting the cultural goods others have made doesn’t go far enough, because we aren’t making anything to take the place of what we don’t like. With Sherwood Pictures, we have a group of people making movies (and movie tie-in material), and I wonder if they haven’t climbed up to a level where the Chesterton maxim applies: Anything that’s worth doing is worth doing badly.

Movies are not teaching illustrations. I felt that strain while watching Fireproof. Clearly, Mr. Parisi would make different movies, perhaps even better ones. Showing more of what Christ did for us and less of our moral lifestyle, as he says, would improve the story, but I think Courageous is a respectable story in its own right. It isn’t a bad film. I don’t say anything worth doing is worthy doing badly to say Courageous is a terrible movie. I mean it’s good movie which could be a lot better, if the producers had pushed toward the things Mr. Parisi describes. “The gospel,” he observes, “pulls us out of our fragile self-worth built on performance and centers our identity on God’s love for us in Christ.” If one of the Courageous movie characters had been shown blowing it repeated and asking his wife and children’s forgiveness, pointing to the grace of Christ in his life despite his sin, that would have been powerful. Perhaps something like that can make it into the next film. I wish them the best on it.

Speaking of movie tie-in material, I encourage you to look into this four-week study on fatherhood issues produced as a follow-up to the movie.