Mass medium

The concept seems cooked up by a Hollywood studio exec looking to goose box-office numbers: Blockbuster Faith, a weekly preaching series of the year-old nondenominational Destination Church, employs current cinema to discuss the Bible. Sermons have examined Sex and the City 2 (lesson: “finding intimacy”), Toy Story 3 (“overcoming rejection”) and The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (“fostering friendship”). Matt Sweetman, the church’s founder and pastor, sums up its goal: “We want to build bridges between pop culture and the gospel of Jesus Christ.”

On a recent Sunday, Sweetman stood in front of his casually dressed flock of about 30 twenty- and thirtysomethings in the gaudy game show–meets–locker room environs of Lakeview’s ComedySportz Theatre, home of such shows as Impress These Apes. Sweetman drew parallels between The A-Team and Christian proselytizing.

“They’re this elite force of rangers and they always have to do some impossible mission with limited resources,” says Sweetman, 30, who has a shaved head and likes to wear T-shirts with slogans such as EVERYTHING TASTES BETTER WITH BACON. “To fulfill their mission, they have to be incredibly creative with limited resources. That theme for us as a church is incredibly applicable. Christians have a huge world mission that we’re on: to take the gospel to every nation so that they all hear about Jesus. We have limited resources: We’re a small church, not many people know about us, but we’re trying to get the word out.”

On Sunday 25, Sweetman will use Christopher Nolan’s cerebral thriller Inception, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, to sermonize on “developing successful thinking.”

“People are like, ‘You’re a church and you meet in a comedy theater and you’re doing this movie thing? What the heck? Who are you?’” Sweetman says that was a common reaction among curious drunks who approached his booth at the Raven Festival in mid-June. But he insists Blockbuster Faith is not to be taken lightly.

A North Center resident and native of Brighton, England, Sweetman took a year of church-planting training in St. Louis with his wife, Heather, before “being called by God” to Chicago to spread the word with his own church. He isn’t a cinephile. He’s a casual movie lover awed by the medium’s power to communicate with a mass audience.

“The reason people flock to the movies—people just don’t go for the special effects or because there’s hype—it’s because the stories and the characters tell us something about ourselves. And there’s nothing more powerful than a story. Stories move us emotionally, they move us spiritually, they move us intellectually.

“Jesus used story in a similar way that Hollywood uses story,” Sweetman continues. “His main teaching method was parables. These stories cut to people’s hearts. People realized the principle that Jesus was trying to teach them. So we want to look at these movies and ask, ‘What themes are they addressing that are relevant to us? How do we address them from a Christian perspective? Like Sex and the City 2—fidelity was a big theme. Facing sexual temptation, what do you do?”

Ask Sweetman about his favorite films, and you’ll get titles and an explanation of a gospel message that can be gleaned. “No. 1 movie of all time: The Goonies. I’m a total Goonies freak,” he says. “Jesus went to the most extreme lengths to purchase eternal security for us. In this movie, these guys are under extreme duress trying to save this whole town from being torn down and turned into a golf course.”

In Sweetman’s view, if Jesus were around today, he might choose to be a film director instead of a carpenter.

Destination Church meets Sundays at 10am at ComedySportz Theatre (929 W Belmont Ave, 773-549-8080).

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