Miracle Movie Churches -- Lilies of the Field (1963)

The problem with talking about Movie Churches with miracles is it's hard to get people to agree on the definition of a "miracle." Does a miracle need to break the laws of nature? Or can a miracle just be an answer to prayer? How can you tell the difference between a miracle and a coincidence?

"Lilies of the Field" is a movie about a church built through a series of miracles -- or a series of coincidences. The Mother Superior of a small convent in the desert prays for someone to build a chapel. In their community, there is no church building. There is a priest that travels about in a camper performing mass. The priest, Father Murphy, also prayed in seminary for a beautiful sanctuary to serve, and was disappointed in his situation.

Sidney Poitier (in an Oscar winning performance) plays Homer Smith, an itinerant handyman who believes he is stopping at the house where the nuns live for water for his overheated car. The Mother Superior believes he has stopped to build a chapel; that he is sent by God. He knows that this is not the case because he is not planning on staying and that he's a Baptist.

He's willing to work for pay. But the nuns really don't have money to pay him for all the work that must be done, and they certainly don't have the finances to pay for the supplies to build the chapel. So the Mother Superior prays for the supplies as well. God answers those prayers when a local construction business supplies bricks out of guilt. Certainly, there seems to be nothing strictly supernatural in the arrival of a worker and supplies, but the Mother Superior has no doubt that it is God's work.

Evaluating this movie church, I should take a moment to discuss the clergy. Father Murphy does not have the best reputation among some in the community. The owner of the local diner believes the Father loves his wine too much. The Father himself believes he's unworthy of his position. He believes his seminary prayers showed disqualifying pride. But the beauty of the new chapel reminds Father Murphy that God's grace overwhelms our sins, and it seems he will be a good priest in it.

Homer doesn't only bring his architectural skills to the new church, he also brings his guitar. He teaches the nuns a gospel song, "Amen," which tells a theologically sound life of Christ. In fact, most of the theology in the film I found fairly sound. I did have a problem with one thing the Mother Superior said in the film. She says about Homer, "He is not of our faith, but he was brought to us by God; the God of all faiths." I have no problem with her saying that about Catholics or Baptists. But when you say all faiths, you're including those that had faiths that asked for infant sacrifices to Baal. I'm just not comfortable with that. (And I'll save my rant on Scientology inspired by the very good HBO film "Going Clear" for another week.)

Psalm 127 says, "Unless the Lord builds the house, they that labor, labor in vain."  The movie church in "Lilies of the Field" seems to be built by God. By definition then, that's not for nothing.

-- Dean

[Business detail: as of June 1, Movie Churches will have its own blog. More exciting details to come soon!]

Or maybe going to church was a glorious success

As we complete our blogging project of visiting a church a week, it seems time to evaluate.  We started the blog long after blogs stopped being wildly profitable. During any week of our year-long trip, we spent far more than we've made from Cheers and Amen, the book about that trip. In my heart of hearts, I hoped millions would stumble upon our profundity, and we’d change the national conversation. Last week I concluded that -- from a purely mercenary perspective -- the project was a failure.

This week I'm looking at our project from a different perspective, and I can see it was a grand success.

For instance, if you just look at the fun factor, the project worked big time. Just looking at our church visits, we were welcomed warmly in an African American church in Birmingham. It was fun to sing new songs in different parts of the country -- and to sing songs that I haven’t sung in church since I was a teenager. We were able to worship with friends we haven’t seen for years, sometimes decades. And then there was all the fun we had traveling the whole country and exploring the nooks and crannies of the places we were living.

If we just look at what we learned, the project was a success. One thing that spurred us to visit churches was people who said, “The church in America is dying, like the church in Europe.” We think God is still working in Europe, but we had the chance to see for ourselves what God is doing in His church in America -- and we found that He is doing great things.

Some say, “Young people aren’t going to church anymore.” But we went to a variety of cities; Kansas City, Atlanta, Nashville, Minneapolis, where we saw hundreds (making a total of thousands) of millennials and whatever the group is younger than millennials gathering together to praise God in word and song.

If people are concerned that churches in America aren’t being innovative, we saw cause for hope. We saw churches meeting in gyms and trucker’s rest stops and bars. We saw churches that throw birthday parties for poor children, feed hikers on the Appalachian Trail, give parenting classes in jails, and hand out clean underwear and socks to the homeless. We worshiped with people of many ethnicities, ages, and social status. We worshiped in congregations in the very poorest and most wealthy parts of the country. We worshiped with congregations that would probably identify themselves as politically blue and those who would identify as politically red. And in all this great variety of places, the name of Jesus was praised.

Yes, we occasionally went to churches that seemed pretty dead and we wondered why the congregants even bothered. There were times we went to churches and we were ignored. There were times when the preaching was dull, times it was heretical. But we looked for warm places where the Word of God was proclaimed, and that’s usually what we found.

But the main reason we consider the project a success is because we believe we did what God called us to do. We gave the project a lot of thought and prayer. We asked God to show us if it was really what He wanted us to do.

Especially in 2016, when we were traveling to a church and a bar in every state, at times we wondered whether the whole thing was just an idiotic idea -- particularly when I was worrying about money. But then God reminded us that He was there and He was with us. He would put just the right people in place at just the right times to provide the encouragement we needed. And sometimes He showed Himself by putting us where people needed us.

On a Sunday afternoon, while we were at a church in Washington D.C., I went for a walk. I saw an elderly woman doing a very ineffectual job weeding the patch in front of her apartment. I asked her if she needed help. She said that various members of her family had promised to come and help her, but had all backed out or just didn’t show up. She said she’d been praying for someone to help her, so I knelt down and pulled some weeds. I sometimes wonder if God planned the whole project to answer one woman’s prayer on that one afternoon. If so, we were doing God’s will and the project was a success.

This is the final post for Dean and Mindy Go to Church. Eventually, all these posts will migrate to DeanandMindy.com. We’d like to thank all of you for reading and -- even more -- thank you to all of you who welcomed us in our travels. You made it a wonderful experience. And if you haven’t read our book  you might want to consider buying it at Amazon.)

Why going to church was a failure

A little over four years ago, Mindy and I committed ourselves to visit a new church every week. This past Sunday we went to Centro Familiar Cristiano in White Center, near Seattle. That was our last “mandatory” church visit.

When I look back over the past four years, and what we accomplished compared to what we dreamed of accomplishing, I can’t help thinking of the enterprise as a failure.

A little over four years ago, when we started www.DeanandMindygotochurch.blogspot.com, the boom of blogs was beginning to fade. We read a variety of blogs on a variety of topics (movies, food, politics, personal experience, and much more), and we thought we had something unique to offer, especially during 2016, when we visited a church in a different state each week. Over the years, we saw fascinating ministries, including congregations that met in a shopping mall, a truck stop, a fitness center, and a bar. We hoped that some of these posts would capture the public's imagination. We pictured our posts going viral. As it turned out, though some posts were seen by hundreds (in a few cases, thousands) of people, none took off that way.

Some people read our blog regularly (shout out to the Woodards' small group in West Lafayette, Indiana), but the blog never took off in a way that could bring advertisers begging for space on the back of our minivan. If our dream was a blog that would take the country by storm -- FAIL!

(Deep down, I think we both hoped that the Travel Channel would let us create a series about visiting churches and bars. Didn’t happen. FAIL!)

While we were on the road, people asked again and again, “Are you going to write a book about this? I’d love to read it!” We always intended to write about our adventure. We thought visiting not just churches but also bars provided us with a unique and interesting perspective. The 2016 campaign season made it clear that we were traveling a deeply divided nation, and we were interested in bringing people with different interests and perspectives together. I even talked to other writers and agents who thought we had something that would appeal to people.

But when the book was done, we sent the proposal to an agent who told us that she didn’t think publishers would be interested in a book about bars and churches because readers would be interested in one or the other, but not both. Another agent also declined to represent the book. Having had books published by traditional publishers and having self-published books, I can tell you that having a publisher (with editors, designers, printers, and publicists) is more fun than doing everything yourself. Still, self-published the book was… and it hasn't sold very well. Our dream of a best selling book -- FAIL!

We had one other hope. We thought, perhaps, during our travels we’d find a ministry we’d like to be part of. There was a glimmer of hope that we’d find a place we’d love to live and a church we could serve. That didn’t happen either -- FAIL!

Maybe, though, from a different perspective, Dean and Mindy Go To Church wasn’t a complete failure. Next week I’ll take a look at how we might even call it a success.