Everyone loves a good story.  From the time we were all kids and remember our parents reading us bedtime stories, to remembering the first time we saw Star Wars, stories have shaped our view of the world and made an impact on us in one way or another.  Jesus knew the power of story. He was a master storyteller.  Jesus shared stories through parables. Stories such as “A farmer went out to plant seed…” or “A man goes on a journey and fell into the hands of robbers …” or “A woman has ten coins and loses one.”  When Jesus talked about spiritual truths He used modern day stories to bring those truths to life.  Such stories helped eliminate the gap between spiritual truth and understanding for the average hearer.

This Sunday we kicked off a new series entitled “At The Movies.”  The idea behind this series is that movies are like modern day parables… and we are using these modern day stories to help us understand spiritual truths.

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MOVIES are like modern day PARABLES

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For our first week we covered the movie “Saving Private Ryan,” which was timely considering we started this series on Memorial Day weekend.  In Saving Private Ryan we see eight soldiers that are given the mission of finding one man that had lost three brothers in battle leaving him to be the last surviving son.  We used this story as a backdrop to explaining the calling of Saul – later known as The Apostle Paul.

As a bumper, we simply used the trailer as seen here (minus a couple of curse words):

And at the end of the message, we used the final scene from the movie as seen here:

For the most part, we kept the service simple allowing the clips to be our primary creative element. However, in the lobby, we created a photo booth with an “At The Movies” theme that included a poster of the movie, a director’s chair, pop corn machine, and old school movie lighting (which we also pulled on stage behind our speaker as props).

Worship Set List:

Open Up The Heavens

He is Faithful

Good Good Father

Trust it All