This Little Life Of Mine - Chapter 46 - Family Film Nite Thomas M Parsons

46. Family Film Nite

Films had always held a fascination for me, even though Christians of the era, particularly Baptist Christians, had rejected films because of their often anti-Christian bias and portrayal of the darker side of humanity. But it was not the content of the films that fascinated me. It was the way a film could tell a story that gripped my attention.

This interest in film as a story-telling medium led me to establish a somewhat successful feature at First Baptist Church that happened three or four times a year. First, I had to convince the board to purchase a 16mm sound film projector.

They seemed dubious at first, but nevertheless consented to satisfy the whims of their slightly oddball pastor. Soon a new projector arrived at the church.

I began to look through Christian film catalogs for films to show at church. There were many that caught my attention. In those days, the 1970s, there were no videos. Films were shown on film projectors, complete with chattering sounds as the sprocket holes collided with the sprockets they were carried along by.

Out of this was born Family Film Nite. We held this on a Saturday night, usually in the spring and in the fall, and once or twice in the summer. I rented films from a distributor in Chicago. They mailed the films to me several days in advance of the showing, and I mailed them back on Monday after the showing.

The church had a small room at the back of the auditorium. It had been built primarily as nursery complete with a wall of windows that overlooked the auditorium. We were not using it as a nursery at the time. We had put the nursery downstairs because the noise of unhappy babies came through the glass windows of the upstairs room.

It was a perfect setup. I placed the projector behind the glass window in the small room, aimed at the large screen I had also convinced the board to purchase. This was set up in the front of the church. I ran speaker wire from a small amplifier I connected to the projector, and hooked up large speakers placed on either side of the screen up front. The result was excellent sound for the showings because the good speakers produced better sound than the little built in speaker on the projector, and because any chattering of film sprocket holes and sprockets was confined to the room behind the windows.

I did not treat the film showings as a regular service. There was no special music, no ushers taking offerings, no prayer nor Bible reading. How could I not do those things? Easy. My purpose was not to hold another service — we had plenty of those on Sunday. My purpose was to try to give people a movie experience. I wanted the films to edify my people, and I wanted my people to feel free to invite their friends to see a movie that really was a movie, and not just a movie shown at a church service. And all the movies we showed had the gospel embedded in them, and people were encouraged to invite their friends, neighbors and relatives to the showings. Often, they did.

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To pay for the film rentals, I put an “offering box” in the back of the auditorium and announced via 35mm slides which I projected between the parts of the movie (I had to change reels for most of the films). No one was pressured to give.

Over time, those slides grew. I put them to taped music and narration giving announcements about things happening at church while I changed the movie reel. I got pretty good at changing reels, so I came to have some spare moments while the tape-slide feature was running before I had to start the second reel of the movie.

In the 1970's, of course, without computers, DVD players and the like, we had to improvise a lot. I have often wondered what we could have done with FFN had we had the technologies then that are now available.

I discovered that a local photo store owner across the river in LaSalle had a 16mm film projector he would rent fairly inexpensively. I started renting the projector for Family Film Nite showings. The idea was, I could change reels on one projector while the other was running. It was just like a movie theater where the audience is unaware of the film change. I got pretty adept at cutting from the church’s projector to the rented projector when showing the films.

We screened many of the best Christian films of the time, from Mark IV, the Christiano Brothers, Ken Anderson, Gospel Films and others. One of the best was Greater Than Gold. It was the story of a doctor’s daughter who was pregnant and scared and didn’t know what to do. As a Christian, she knew what she had done was a violation of the will of God for her life. She considered abortion, and, after much struggling, she had an abortion. Then her struggle with her sin issue really began in earnest. Finally she learned that God’s forgiveness was the one thing in life that was truly greater than gold. Christian film making came of age in the 1970s, with better writing, acting and story telling. And always there was the presentation of the gospel of Jesus Christ embedded in the story and dramatized for the audience.

But soon things began to change. VHS video tape made its appearance, and 16mm sound films became less attractive and harder to find. Attendance began to decline at the showings. When we finally ended the series after about three years, attendance was sparse.

But during those years we were having Family Film Nites, I showed two special films that were made, not by the professionals, but by the young people of our own church.