A few years ago we opened Ebenezer’s Coffeehouse on Capitol Hill and God has blessed it big time.  The original motivation was pretty simple.  Jesus didn’t just hang out at the synagogue.  He hung out at wells, natural gathering places in ancient culture. Coffeehouses are postmodern wells.

Tomorrow we meet with the Visioneering Team to begin dreaming about restoring the People’s Church, our soon-to-be acquired 7th location on Barracks Row, and turning it back into a functioning movie theater, which it was for half a century from 1910-1960. The question is: why would a church open a movie theater?  For the same reason we opened Ebenezers.  Doing church in the marketplace is part of our DNA, and it seems to me that movie theaters are the marketplace of ideas.  Theaters are the postmodern Aeropagus.  Movie makers are culture creators.  They are the prophets and poets in our society.

It’s no coincidence that I put my faith in Christ after watching a film called The Hiding Place.  God used that medium to invade my heart.  So we’re going to get into the game.  Do we have it all figured out?  Not any more than we had the coffeehouse business all figured out.  We’ll obviously need to creatively and conscientiously figure out what we’ll put on the screen and what we won’t put on the screen.   We certainly have some ideas.  We think kid’s films are a no-brainer as matinees.  I like the idea of some retro films given the fact that we’ll try to recreate the old movie house ambiance.  And I’m sure we’ll probably have a mix of second-run, independent, and documentary films.  But right now we’re on our knees and we’re all ears.