Let me get this out first.  I have not seen, Facing the Giants.  I have read mixed reviews but on the whole think the concept is terrific….a church raising funds to enter mainstream art to communicate the gospel.

The Internet Monk did not like the movie all that much, and thinks we can expect to see more movies like this because Evangelicals are "easy targets."

From the piece:

The goal of Facing the Giants, I’m sure, is to share the Gospel with unbelievers. Like many other Christian evangelistic movies- I grew up on the Billy Graham films- it partakes of all the pros and cons of using films for direct evangelism. Or to put it another way, if your evangelism is basically sales and entertainment, movies are probably a good way to do it. If you want to relate to people, explain the nuances of faith, avoid emotional manipulation and listen to questions, then it’s probably a terrible way to do evangelism. Oh well.

What Facing the Giants did very well, however, is demonstrate that a paying, movie-going, evangelical Christian audience exists for movies with poor acting, bad scripts and amateurish technology….IF the movie pushes the buttons that the niche-market evangelicalism of our day is begging to have pushed by Hollywood. (If you haven’t heard Matt Crouch go on and on and on over the importance of Christians using Hollywood to reach the masses, you need to go hang out at TBN until you get it…and then watch Megiddo to see what he means.)

Facing the Giants angers an advocate of serious films of faith like Barbara Nicolosi, but those of us who live in the Bible belt can easily see why eight weeks out it is still on almost 300 screens, will probably pass $9 million in the theaters and make huge DVD sales. Facing the Giants is the kind of story the average evangelical Christian in the largest evangelical areas wants to see; it’s the kind of story that fills Christian bookstore shelves and pastors’ sermons. It’s a story that says “God is real; we’re right; it works.” It’s reassuring.

It’s also a story told by a gutsy and creative local church (with an ex-wrestler for a pastor) and evangelicals are hungry to see churches doing something that “makes a difference” in the culture, at least as they see it. Putting out a successful movie is significant to many evangelicals, and I have no doubt that there is a lot of first time and repeat business strictly to support a church getting out there and trying to make a difference in the media wasteland. (Profits from the movie are building a youth center for the church and community. Amen.)

Check it out: http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/riffs-112006-why-bad-christian-movies-succeed-and-better-movies-never-will

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