Passion spurs community outreach
OAKVILLE, ON-Free tickets to The Passion of the Christ are bringing people back to church to check out the rest of the story.
The Sanctuary, an Oakville church begun two years ago, purchased 4,000 tickets for Mel Gibson's controversial film at an estimated cost of $60,000. Then they offered them free to the public, no strings attached, through their Web site (www.thesanctuary.ca) and a newspaper ad.
The tickets were gone almost immediately.
"We bought 3,000 initially, and put them on our Web site so people could download them," says teaching pastor Jeff Christopherson. "We released them on Wednesday afternoon, and by Thursday afternoon all of them were gone. We already had an ad coming in the paper on Friday, so we went back to the theatre and bought another 1,000 tickets, and they went in just hours."
Christopherson first saw the film at in January at a pre-screening for Christian leaders.
"It was a lot more than I was expecting, in every way," he says. "For a Christian, it revitalizes your understanding of what the cross is all about. For an unchurched person, which is the target, it'll probably lead to more questions than answers, so we've been working hard on a follow-up strategy."
On March 7, the entire community was invited to The Sanctuary, which has a membership of about 300, for a service dedicated to questions and answers stemming from the film. The longer term strategy includes 15 small groups that will run for four weeks each.
"People are signing up like crazy for them," says Christopherson. "Even before we had the first public showing [of the movie on February 25], we had 175 people unrelated to our church sign up for these things...or give us their e-mail address to say, 'We're interested, give us some options of when we can sign up."
The church plans to use a discussion guide and DVD from Saddleback Church, pastored by Rick Warren in Lake Forest, California, as well as hosting a meal before each discussion, Alpha-style.
"Our goal is that they will experience a bit of community and really like it. What we want to do is have them slide right into an Alpha [group]," says Christopherson. "You take all these disconnected people and put them together for honest discussion. It just seems like there's a real need for that."
Church administrators of the Canadian Convention of Southern Baptist affiliated congregation say about 40-50 new people attended the Sunday service following the first week of Passion viewings and related outreach.
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