| Birmingham -- The Mountaintop Church in Vestavia Hills bought all the tickets to two Saturday matinees of "The Passion of the Christ". 
It offered free tickets to each parishioner who would bring a non-churchgoer to see the movie.
"This is an opportunity for us to kind of say, come experience this, this is something they might go to rather than coming to church."
Bill Elder is the senior pastor at Mountaintop. He says the church is geared toward people who have fallen away from the faith and Gibson’s movie is a great way to reach them. One church member, a short teenager with blonde hair, who didn't want to give her name, brought a friend to see the movie.
"I told her that I had tickets to it and she asked me to go. It was amazing, indescribable."
"I thought it was really good, it was really hard to watch, that's all. I mean it's a really touching story."
The friend, a taller girl with short brown hair, says she is a Christian, but doesn't go to church. And she says the movie DIDN'T make her want to go.
"I mean I like Jesus. I mean I follow, I try to follow the teachings of Jesus but I don't agree with them, some things that the church teaches and that movie kinda shows what..."
She stops herself before finishing the thought, almost as if she's afraid she'll hurt her friend's feelings if she comes clean that what was meant to be a marketing tool didn't work on her.
Loyola marketing professor Kimball Marshall has always been interested in the idea of marketing faith. He says there's a danger in using anything with strong emotional appeal to sell religion. He says while "The Passion" may resonate with traditional Christians, its violence may actually push some folks away.
"That group may find themselves a bit alienated as a result of the graphic depiction. Because the shorts that we've seen, the advanced clips that we've seen are clearly showing an extreme form of violence."
Churches all over the country are taking that gamble, hoping to see their congregations swell after moviegoers see the film. They're even getting some help from Gibson's production company and the Christian marketing website, Outreach dot com ... which offers poster, pamphlets and study guides to help churches better use the film. The idea of marketing religion with the help of Christ's passion isn't a new one.
In the 1990's the Campus Crusade for Christ produced its own version of the passion, a video that went straight to 20 million American mailboxes. More than 1 million of those found their way to Alabama homes. But Marshall says mass mailings like these are NEVER a good idea, especially when they concern matters of faith.
"Keeping in mind that most people in the United States have already been exposed to passion plays, they're already familiar with the life of Christ and they're familiar with the passion of Christ. So, I think that largely was probably not a very effective approach."
Marshall says, more likely than not, the videos find their way to the garbage can, not the VCR.
"They're often perceived as junk mail and so forth and sending out movies as a passion play likely will not produce much more reaction than that."
But Campus Crusade doesn't agree. The mass mailings are part of what it calls "saturation evangelism". The idea is to create a "buzz" on the streets, so that all anyone is talking about is the "Jesus video". The group wants every American household to have a copy of the movie ... and just last month began mailing them out again ... this time on DVD.
Melissa Feilen was on the receiving end of a religious mass mailing not too long ago. She got a flyer from a local church trying to recruit new members. Feilen says the message didn't bother her as much as the images on the flyer, all taken from the Gibson film.
"I couldn't believe they were sending me something about a movie in order to get me to come to church. I've received invitational postcards from churches all the time, but I think the fact they were using a movie to do so this time, it kind of bothered me, I was really uncomfortable with it."
Feilen says she feels like some churches are trivializing their religion by using a big Hollywood movie to market their faith. Marshall says this "in your face" approach may actually backfire. He says some people who see "The Passion of the Christ" may just want to SEE the movie and not have to deal with proselytizing.
"They have the right to choose what kind of experience they want to have going into the theater and coming out of the theater and they might not, some may react with a sense of hostility and feel their privacy is just being invaded."
Some would argue that ANY advertising is an invasion of privacy and the only reason people are making a big deal about it is the fact that this time people are marketing religion, always a divisive issue. But for Felien religion is something that can't, and SHOULDN'T, be sold.
"Faith in general is not something that can be advertised or sold and I'm very uncomfortable with the fact that they're using something, you know, produced by Mel Gibson to get people to believe something that they believe. That's not how people should come into their beliefs. They should come into in their own time and their own thoughts and belief systems."
No doubt, there will be those who DO start attending church after seeing the movie. Marshall says ministers will have to make a special effort to reach out to these newcomers.
"The emotional reaction to the horrific suffering depicted in the movie, if they can bring people into the church then the next step is to engage them with their fellow church members in acts of fellowship and community fellowship that makes them feel part of the community and reinforces the Christian belief system."
Mountaintop Pastor Bill Elder says he hopes the movie will help pack the pews, but he knows its not enough to keep the newly churched in their seats.
"I think if people are drawn to the church to try to figure this out then hopefully they're gonna experience the presence of god right there, it becomes a heart continuation, there's a commitment that needs to be there. So the emotion doesn't really go away, it's sustained if it's a real thing and we believe it is, the spirit of Christ is trying to communicate and then as people get it, they stay with it."
Regardless of whether the movie is a success in creating a renaissance of church attendance, one thing's for sure, it's a box office success. Some experts think it'll break the 300-million dollar mark in the next week or so.
Rosemary Pennington, March 11, 2004
| The Passion of the Christ (NEWMARKET FILMS)
| Jesus Video (Campus Crusade for Christ)
| Outreach, Inc.
