Often parents have a great desire and hopes, and aspirations for their kids but they don't have any practical plans of action.
I feel like God has intrusted a lot into me and I don't want to sit on it and be selfish. I want to think long term on how we can help this next generation of Christian filmmakers to make a big impact for God.
With every movie, we will spend a season of prayer just asking God what's on his heart, and we spent about a year, two years, in prayer, trying to figure out the direction for the next film.
We grew up in a praying home [with Alex Kendrick], we saw incredible answers to prayer in our parents' lives, they grew up in praying homes, our father launched a Christian school with nothing, basically he had some people that believed in the project but they had very little resources, and we watched our parents deal with those issues first in prayer, and then when they went out knocking on doors they saw amazing doors answered and resources come in.
Movies are definitely more fun because there are so many different seasons in a movie. It is exciting to be drafting together. Writing a book is very hard, it's like writing 15 college term papers in a row, and you are just like, "when is going to end?" You can communicate so much more when you are writing a book, and you can go so much deeper.
We still had the prayer support of our church. We shot this film [War Room] in Charlotte, North Carolina, and we had about 85 churches rise up and support us across racial and denominational lines, and many of them were praying for us, and we built some prayer teams where we had people on set praying.
By the time we got to Courageous, we were bringing in more outsiders, so any time we would bring in outsiders, we would offer to pay them, and [as for volunteers from] the church, because they were getting the benefit of the income to all the ministries of the church and the mission, the building program and all those things, they knew up-front that they were volunteering and gladly did so.
One of the days we unpack finding out how your kids are wired, what kind of intelligence has God given them, how do they give and receive love, what the passions of their life, how does their birth order and their gender affect them because all of those things are part of the tapestry that God is weaving together to use each of our children for His glory.
Prayer doesn't sound like a cool hot topic that would cause people to rush to the theatre, stand in line, and buy tickets about prayer.
We [me and Alex Kendrick] had our pastor's blessing back in 2013 to launch out, and so we shot [ War Room] last year, in 2014, but we still had the church pray over us , before the movie hit theatres, and the pastor was asking God to bless the film, and so we're very excited about what's happening .
