Who are they?
Hopefully, we are all striving to be in this audience because these are the people who are actively trying to live out their faith. Faith in Jesus Christ has moved them to action – and not just occasionally, after a great weekend retreat, but every day. They are past seeking answers. They are seeking holiness.
What is a reasonable Christian theme?
Traditional narrative film is not what this audience generally wants. In fact, this crowd often avoids traditional media, even if it does contain strong Christian themes. They simply aren’t interested. Our job, then, is not to entertain them but to help them live out their faith, to motivate and inspire them to be faithful witnesses of the Gospel message.
Why is this reasonable?
Many Faithful view media as trivial, and they are often right (often, but not always – this is a debate for another post, though). Pure entertainment seems empty and artificial to them. Their hearts and minds are thirsty for Christ, and they usually don’t find that in media. So they don’t even bother.
On the occasion that they do desire a little entertainment to wind down and relax, they probably want the same thing that the other three groups want – to laugh, to cry, to be scared, thrilled, moved, but NOT to be preached to. If anything, the preachy movies are even worse for this crowd than the others because these people can – and will – spot the theological inconsistencies and watered-down doctrines.
For the most part, this crowd just wants to be encouraged and reenergized in their journey toward holiness.
How do we reach our goal?
If there were few examples for the Active Seekers, there are even fewer for the Faithful. Worse yet, many of the media targeted to this audience are not designed to inspire them but rather to inflame them. Listen to many of these programs, and you’ll begin to understand why Christians sometimes come across as a hate group to those who happen to hear this material. Again, I don’t want to turn my nose up at EWTN and others who are providing content that often resonates with this crowd, but I think more – and maybe even a different form of media that no one’s even thought of yet – is needed.
One area, I think, has particular potential for this crowd. Yes, they love learning more about their faith, and yes, they love praying the rosary with the folks on EWTN. But what isn’t out there yet (at least not to my knowledge) is an evangelization tool. I don’t know about you, but “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations” (Matt 28:19) can seem like an awfully daunting task. I’m tempted to raise my hand and say, “Excuse me, Lord, but how… exactly?” I do realize that there are apologetics resources out there, but that’s not precisely what I’m talking about here. How can media that we create aid the Faithful in their mission to evangelize the whole world?
In the Gospels, Jesus has two different approaches to the “faithful.” There were those who were faithful to the Mosaic Law – the Pharisees. And there were those who were faithful to Jesus – his disciples. Both groups knew and firmly believed what their faith taught. And both, I think it’s fair to say, were trying to live their faith in a tangible way. The difference between the two (besides the fact that the Pharisees wanted to kill Jesus) is that the Pharisees – at least most of the ones we hear about in the Gospels – were motivated by vanity and pride while the disciples were motivated by love for Jesus.
Now, it’s certainly not my place to judge anyone’s motivations: “Not as man sees does God see, because man sees the appearance but the Lord looks into the heart” (1 Sam 16:7). But I think Jesus’ two different approaches offers us two ways to reach the Faithful – whatever their motivation is.
Throughout all four Gospels, we read time and again about confrontations between Jesus and the Pharisees. His approach to teaching them is best summed up in Matthew 23:13-39, where he says “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees” seven times in a row. He calls them “hypocrites,” “blind guides,” “blind fools,” “serpents,” and a “brood of vipers.”
Yikes.
That’s not to say that we should go around name-calling. But we should not be afraid to tell things like they are. And we should be holding our Faithful brothers and sisters up to a standard. I get so tired of people complaining about how Christians are portrayed in media when 9 times out of 10 we are portrayed poorly because that is how other people have experienced Christianity. Instead of asking ourselves why people perceive Christianity that way, we simply blame Hollywood.
We don’t have to call anybody out personally or publicly, by any means – as I said, man can’t see what God sees in the heart, so we should never ever detract or defame. What we can do is hold up a mirror and ask: Is this you? Are you being a hypocrite and a blind guide? Are you really living out your faith, or just putting on a show for the other parishioners?
Jesus approaches his disciples in an entirely different way. The way he teaches them is tender and intimate. Take, for example, the parable of the sower and the seed (Mark 4:1-20). He tells the parable to a multitude, but his closest followers beg to understand the meaning of it. He takes them aside and explains the parable to them, offering it as insight into what it means to be a faithful follower: those who are truly Faithful “hear the word and accept it and bear fruit thirty and sixty and a hundredfold.”
The Faithful need encouragement. They need to be reassured from time to time that following Jesus will bear much fruit. We can remind them what – and Who – they’re living for, aching for, thirsting for, fighting for, dying for. We can offer compelling examples of what it looks like to live for Christ, and, with God’s grace, they just might be inspired to go out and make disciples of all nations.
Next week: Why does any of this matter?
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