While the Oscar-nominated Tree of Life may be opaque, it’s “one of the most powerful treatments of explicitly Christian themes and rhetoric in popular film,” said Rini Cobbey, chair of the communication arts department at Gordon College in Wenham, Mass.

“Obviously, its direct and repeated quotation of Scripture and its visual and narrative exploration of sin, grace, God’s nature, creation and redemption put it in the ‘explicitly Christian themes’ category. It’s a gorgeous film, poetic and aesthetically about as far away from my experience of evangelical-Christian-church-audience directed films as you could get.” 

The Help, nominated for several Oscars this year, also reflects Christian themes, although not as effectively as Tree of Life, Cobbey asserted. “The overall artistry of The Help pales in comparison to Tree of Life, but its accessibility to a wider audience and its direct and challenging exploration of justice and personal choice make it true and good.” 

Another Oscar nominee, The Descendants, is essentially a Christian parable, she added, in its “treatment of revenge, grace, life and death and in the surprising, broken and honest characters and narrative pace moving.”

Cobbey also cited older films such as Dead Man Walking, The Visitor, Gran Torino and Lars and the Real Girl.

Michael Parnell, pastor of Beth Car Baptist Church in Halifax, Va., and a film reviewer for EthicsDaily.com, called Tender Mercies a film with an explicit “evangelical storyline.” Christian themes also are obvious in To Kill a Mockingbird and The Mission. 

“The Harry Potter movies give so many different Christian themes,” Parnell said. “There is the theme of reality that is beyond human sight. The wizard world is right in the midst of the Muggle world. It takes a change of vision to see it.”

“And then there’s the whole concept of redemption that runs from the death of Harry’s parents to the end of the saga,” he added.

It’s a Wonderful Life, focusing on the an ordinary man’s impact on a small town, reminds Christians that “there are no small roles in the body of Christ and even the cup of cold water given in the name of Christ can change a life,” said Parnell. 

When a character in Unforgiven tells Clint Eastwood a murder victim “had it coming,” Eastwood replies, “We all got it coming.”

“That’s the universal fall of humanity being discussed in a Western,” Parnell said.

Thomas Ward, a professor of acting and directing in the theater arts department at Baylor University in Waco, called the 1999 film Magnolia, starring Tom Cruise, “full of redemption and hope.”

Cliff Vaughn, media producer for EthicsDaily.com, said “some would argue The Shawshank Redemption could be labeled a Christian movie by a set of criteria that would include themes of redemption, friendship, hope and brokenness.”

Signed by leaders of the Progressive National Baptist Convention, National Baptist Convention USA, National Baptist Convention of America and Lott Carey Baptist Foreign Mission Convention, the letter accused the son of evangelist Billy Graham of joining those who “use faith as a weapon of political division” during a recent interview on MSBNC.

The faith leaders said Graham’s comments on the Feb. 21 Morning Joe program that he doesn’t know if Obama is a Christian and could not rule out the possibility that he is a Muslim “could have enormous negative effects for America and are especially harmful to the Christian witness.”

“Many of us are working around the world now to advance the cause of peace and religious tolerance, and we believe that statements like Rev. Graham’s have potentially dangerous consequences domestically and internationally,” the letter said. “The world is looking to America’s faith leaders to help build bridges of understanding and mutual respect, not to further erect barriers of doubt and mistrust. It is unsettling and counter-productive to American values and interests to engage in this kind of misleading rhetoric cloaked in religion that divides our nation and international neighbors over matters of religion and faith.”

The leaders said people can disagree about what it means to be a Christian engaged in politics but that Christians “should not bear false witness.” They also voiced concern that Graham’s words might be used to promote racism.

“We urge him to be mindful of the unprecedented verbal attacks on President Obama based on his race and be careful not to allow his own voice to be used to help drive such hateful words,” the leaders said.

Signers included Carroll Baltimore, president of the Progressive National Baptist Convention; Julius Scruggs, president of the National Baptist Convention USA; Stephen Thurston, president of the National Baptist Convention of America; and David Emmanuel Goatley, executive secretary-treasurer of the Lott Carey Baptist Foreign Mission Convention.

Other signers represented the NAACP, as well as Disciples of Christ, Methodist and Episcopal Christian traditions. One signer, Frederick Haynes III, a member of NAACP Religious Affairs Committee, is pastor at Friendship West Baptist Church in Dallas.

Fred Luter Jr. of New Orleans is the highest ranking African-American in the Southern Baptist Convention and is widely seen as the denomination’s next president. (RNS file photo by Ric Francis/The Times-Picayune)

The SBC presidency will become vacant when Bryant Wright of Marietta, Ga., finishes his second one-year term.

Many began openly promoting Luter for the top job last summer, moments after he was elected the convention’s first African-American first vice president.

“If he runs, he’ll get elected overwhelmingly. He may be unopposed,” said Daniel Akin, president of Southeastern Baptist Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C.

No other candidates have announced so far. Other potential candidates were judging their chances on whether Luter decided to run, Akin said.

“I’d be very surprised if there were any other substantial candidates,” said Russell Moore of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky.

Akin, Moore and others say they are eager to elect Luter, both for his leadership gifts and to demonstrate Southern Baptist acceptance of the changing face of their work.

Luter’s church once was a predominantly white Southern Baptist congregation dying on the vine after its neighborhood became increasingly black in the 1970s. Luter, a black street-corner preacher with no previous pastoral experience, became pastor of Franklin Avenue Baptist Church in New Orleans in 1986. The church kept its Southern Baptist affiliation while Luter built it into a major success as a predominantly African-American congregation, and then he led his church in rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina.

Several Baptist congregations around the country tried to recruit Luter as a pastor or co-pastor, Akin said, believing he might be available after Katrina. “He was like Peyton Manning as a free agent.”

Luter’s stature grew in his decision to remain in New Orleans, Akin added. “You have to have unbelievable respect for a man who made that kind of commitment,” he said. “Look at what he did.”

Growth in traditional white congregations in the 16-million-member Southern Baptist Convention has plateaued. In recent years the denomination has actively sought to reach out to nonwhites, typically Hispanics, African-Americans and Asians. In 1990, 95 percent of Southern Baptist congregations were white; now the figure is 80 percent, said Scott McConnell of LifeWay Research, a church-related institute.

“Some critic said of us that the Southern Baptist Convention is as white as a tractor pull,” Moore said. “If that remains the case, the Southern Baptist Convention has no future. I think Fred Luter’s election will be pioneering; I pray it will not be an anomaly.”

Meeting in Phoenix last summer, Southern Baptists adopted a plan requiring its organizations to nourish minority leadership for the future. That’s a turnabout for a convention that was formed in 1845 by Southern slaveholding Baptists who broke away from anti-slavery Baptists in the North.

For much of the 20th century, many Southern Baptist pastors and rank-and-file church members across the South supported white supremacy and resisted the civil rights movement. But in 1995, the convention formally apologized for its past and committed itself to racial reconciliation.

“We need to live up to what we said in 1995,” said David Dockery, president of Union University in Jackson, Tenn. “This would be a positive step, but only a first one.”

The Executive Committee will recommend to convention messengers June 19-20 in New Orleans that churches, entities and organizations that cooperate with Southern Baptists but desire to use another name consider “Great Commission Baptists.”

Robert Anderson, pastor of Colonial Baptist Church in Randallstown, Md., opens Tuesday evening’s Executive Committee meeting with a devotional message.

The motion commends the alternative descriptor, proposed by an advisory task force appointed SBC President Bryant Wright, as “one fully in keeping with our Southern Baptist Convention identity.”

Darrell Orman, chairman of the subcommittee that brought the recommendation to the full Executive Committee, described the compromise between those for and against renaming the nation’s second-largest faith group as “Solomonic.” He said prolonging the debate with another year of formal study would be unnecessarily divisive.

Orman said he was opposed to even considering a new name for the convention when Wright, pastor of Johnson Ferry Baptist Church in Marietta, Ga., first surfaced the idea at the Executive Committee’s meeting in September, but since then he’s been exposed to sincerely held views ranging from African-Americans who intentionally choose their Southern Baptist affiliation to Baptists outside of the South that the regional designation brands as outsiders to “radical” Baptists who want to shed the Southern Baptist identity altogether.

“Most of us are in the middle between these positions,” said Orman, senior pastor of First Baptist Church in Stuart, Fla. “I think this is a brilliant, Solomonic compromise that can enable us to touch both.”

Orman said some have asked if the compromise represents an “incremental move toward a name change.” If the usage of “Great Commission” at some point in the future becomes so much more popular than “Southern Baptist” that it becomes an issue, Orman said, the change will be “from the bottom up” in autonomous churches rather than dictated from the top down by convention leaders.

“This had the opportunity to be a giant food fight,” Orman said.

The recommendation includes study of how the phrase “Great Commission Baptists” can be protected and used by churches that desire to do so and various ways that denominational communications and publications can help them. Two of three URLs using the term have been secured, said Augie Boto, the Executive Committee’s vice president for convention policy.

Frank Page, Executive Committee president and CEO, said he would promote the Great Commission label in the organization’s communications and publications but it would not require changes to the convention’s logo or official seal.

Great Commission is the term that evangelicals use to refer to the Risen Christ’s command to his 11 remaining disciples at the end of Matthew’s Gospel: “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe everything I have commanded you.”

While unlikely to resonate with the unchurched, the phrase has gained credence among SBC leadership in the last couple of years as various calls came forward to follow up the denomination’s “conservative resurgence” that affirmed biblical inerrancy in the 20th century with a “Great Commission resurgence” to promote evangelism and missions in the 21st.

The two churches have more in common than their faith and their spot on the city’s main square. On the first weekend in March, a theater production will celebrate their shared history, dating to their founding as one church 200 years ago. Organizers hope the play will also be an important step in what’s developing as the two churches’ shared future. 

First Baptist Church on Wilmington Street

First Baptist Church on Salisbury Street

It’s not unusual to find racially separate First Baptist churches in Southern cities, where 11 a.m. Sunday morning is known as the most segregated hour of the week. In few places is the separation so physically stark — so near, and yet, apparently, so far. 

But appearances can be deceiving, and Carolyn Dickens, a longtime member of the Salisbury Street church, said the play shows how the two churches bridge the divide that grew up after the Civil War. And the joint production should help foster that relationship.

“We want to go forward into our third century with an authentic relationship of working together,” Dickens said. “There’s a lot we can do as sister churches downtown, being a witness and reaching out to our community. That’s something we are in for the long haul, both churches.”

Producing the play, “Two Buildings/One Heart: 200 Years of the First Baptist Churches of Raleigh,” developed naturally as organizers at Salisbury Street approached the bicentennial. “We have our sister church, so it’s not just about us,” Dickens said. “That has been a wonderful thing to keep us having a broader view than just ourselves.”

Fellow member Anne Bullard serves on the board of Raleigh’s innovative Burning Coal Theatre Company. She knew the troupe’s education director, Ian Finley, is “gifted at telling local history stories.”

Staging a play also was a natural fit for Chris Chapman, the pastor at Salisbury Street. With a background in theater and music, he works to find ways to “express faith through art.” Sometimes, he incorporates dramas with real or imagined characters into his sermons.

“We’ve sort of had a disconnect between art and religion in this country, as if the arts are suspect in some way, and art and artists are in some way alien to spirituality,” Chapman said. “I’ve never really understood the Church’s disconnect, the reluctance to use the arts other than music to proclaim truth and gospel, and as an insight into human experience.”

Chapman also believes in the importance of confronting history. “I have a bias toward holding onto history, particularly vis-a-vis race,” he said. “Some people want to go forward without dealing with the past. You can’t change things, but you have to understand where we’ve been and how recently we were very divided.”

“Two Buildings: One Heart” will be instructive for younger members of the congregation, Chapman said. “Young people have trouble believing that people related that unequally until very recently.” A play can make that history come alive for them much more vividly than something they read in a book, he said.

Finley, the playwright, drew on a wealth of material from both churches. The play will be told through vignettes, using voices of historical characters. Raleigh, the fledgling state capital, needed churches, so the legislature offered the Capitol itself as a meeting place for any minister who could pull services together. What are now the two First Baptist churches started 200 years ago with a meeting of 23 people — 14 African American and nine white — there. The two churches are planning a “birthday party” in the Capitol on the anniversary, March 8.

The church progressed until after the Civil War. The congregation moved a few times, meeting at the sites of both contemporary churches. In 1868, during Reconstruction, the African-American members asked for a letter of dismissal to start their own church. The separation was granted “amiably,” records show.

The play will portray the separate histories and the shared stories, such as the two churches’ ministers working together during the civil-rights movement of the 1960s. That led to more joint endeavors.
“Two Buildings/One Heart” is a part of that sharing. Burning Coal actors will fill major roles, but people in both congregations are being invited to audition. Singers from both churches will provide a choir.

Two of the performances on March 2-4 will start at the Salisbury Street sanctuary, with the cast and audience moving to Wilmington Street at intermission. The other two will start at Wilmington Street and travel the other way. As audience members walk through Capitol Square — where their churches started — they will pass actors who might tell them more of the story.