In search of a miracle

Novapres sent me a review copy of Gerry Velema's book 'Behind the Scenes. Another story about the EO television program In Search of a Miracle'. Recently Evangelical broadcasting company EO produced a reality series in which they took seven chronically ill people on a journey around the world to visit seven prayer healers. Their search for a miracle, including all the emotions that surfaced, were filmed and broadcasted nationally. None of the participants got healed. Perhaps God wasn't too eager with all these cameras around, pressing in to record a miracle.

Velema was invited to join the journey as a pastoral worker and write a book about it, but was hindered in her work and asked to leave halfway. In her book Velema questions a number of decisions made by the producers, for instance to put the final editing in the hands of a secular lesbian film maker who also produced an earlier documentary on a healing pilgrimage to Nigeria. Velema said most of the biblical understanding of divine healing was kept out of the program, and it turned into an emotion- and viewers' statistics-driven series that could have been broadcasted by any company. I believe that's a fair statement, to which I already commented in-part here. As a reality series it was probably quite successful, but it didn't help the cause of Christ, nor people in search for healing.

A better attempt to make an inspiring reality series was 'A Better Neighborhood' by Eric Velu Productions, in which seven young people who just graduated in different fields of study competed to develop projects to improve a disadvantaged neighborhood in Rotterdam. The series aimed to give people more compassion for the poor areas in their city, and the message was clear: you can do something about it. Of course the series also showed the enormous gap between seven naive students and real life in a neighborhood like this, the prejudice people have against 'churchy projects' and camera teams descending on their turf, and the apparent inability of Christians to approach problems strategically and holistically (all projects were on a tactical level). Still this series was a much better learning experience in which the participants quickly grew in their role.

Sometime ago Mark de Boer suggested on his weblog to have a Christian version of Peking Express, a series in which couples hitchhike long distance (the last trip was from Thailand to Nepal) while living on a shoestring. "How about a Luke 10 reality series?" Mark suggested. "Christians travelling and bringing the Kingdom, while cameras capture what's happening." I replied that I'm quite hesitant, as cameras tend to distort, manipulate and hype up. Perhaps a light version in which the teams keep a raw daily video journal and vlog it themselves, so it doesn't intrude too much with the mission, might work.

Hey, perhaps the main point is this: should we want to make reality programs on stuff that we're not yet doing in real-life. Why play with the Kingdom, try to make a good movie out of it to boost our own image, instead of living it unseen and uncaptured. After all most miracles happen out of sight, far from the mainstream entertainment circus, and I suspect God has a good reason for that.