Robert Redford said this about the Sundance Film Festival 2010, "I'm always aware of how we're doing, are we staying out in front of things? Are we sliding back? Are we afraid to take a chance? I felt that we were sliding. We were flat-lining and we needed to get fresh again. I felt the best thing we could do to be new and fresh was to get back to the way we were when we first started."
I'm posing the same thoughts at the American church and those who hung at the the Hollywood Pastor gathering this year at Sundance. Redford has his finger on the pulse of the 32-year-old festival and switching it up made so much sense it caused excitement for the possibilities of new fresh talent to emerge. Meanwhile, the American church keeps swimming in it's merciless masturbatorial stink and in 32 years hasn't showed it's face at Sundance while insisting nothings wrong. Sure, Christian groups have gathered at Sundance. But boorish intellectual film-famed Christian circle jerks and legalist street preachers have never birthed Christ like leaders willing to set the world on fire.
We are flat-lining and desperately need a Bible sized defibrillator and small but polarizing movement to re-create.
No one at Sundance dared question the aging good looking founder of the world's largest independent film gathering. Yet the American church is very willing to kill the Christ in any of us should we step into porn conventions, film festivals, TV stations, Hollywood sets, brothels, streets and any other form of human spiritual need. Score one for the followers of Sundance and shame on the American church.
Like Redford, I too am calling us to re-invention. Not a re-writing of the script, as ours has been written and green-lit a few thousand years ago. Our story, btw, is unquestionably the greatest of love, tragedy and horror stories to ever to grace the world. I want a re-evaluation of priorities. Who are we as a faith? What is it that we do? who are we trying to gather and why do we need each other in this re-invention?
The Hollywood Pastor crew tried something new this year. We re-invented. We tried church. We tried making friends. We tried bringing the local church to an international stage. Some see our virgining outreach as failure, others offended we pissed on local trees, but we get what happened. We watched people come minister with us simply 'cause the world gathered and greater is He that's in us than is in the world.
I am proud we re-invented with Redford, good company as far as I'm concerned. "Nice job Rob, can I call you Rob? BTW... Do you know Jesus?"
Thanks again to the team.... Tim Dahlin, David Johnson and the crew at the Christian Center of Park City, "Kid we don't know," Dallas, Molly, Nathan, the entire Elevation team, Perko and the beer drinking, smoking band, the taxi cab drivers of Park City and one of my dearest friends...Trinity, thanks buddy for pushing an old man!
2011 we need money, places to sleep and your faith to premiere at Sundance.
