Dallas Jenkins
speaker
227 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Dallas Jenkins’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
The truth will set you free. What does that freedom come from? And that was the experience you had. Oh, absolutely. So in that moment, I went from, how do I wrestle with this? How do I understand? What went wrong? Was it me? Was it God? Was it Satan? Was it my friends? Was it the studio? What brought me to this place? It didn't matter anymore.
In my life right now, for the first time in decades, I was perfectly willing to never make another film or TV show if that's what God wanted. Now, I didn't know if that was what God wanted. I didn't know what the future held.
And the delivery of the message, the fact that the message was— Could you call this a coincidence? Could you call it just random? It's quite a coincidence. It's such an extraordinary coincidence. Similar, I've heard your story. You talk about your wife, what God put on her heart, how she knew when— Yeah, right. You know, and you go, I—
The secularist or the humanist or the atheist would say, Dallas, it is a coincidence. These things happen all the time. Right.
I can't. And so I must accept God is clearly in this. He is clearly communicating to me. What must I draw from this? Well, I've attended business seminars. Every filmmaker will tell you to have a plan, five-year plan. Where are you going to be at in five years? Right, right, right. And Phil Vischer, who's the creator of VeggieTales, which was 25 years ago, huge.
And then he had a similar crisis of faith. He lost it all. He was left barren and found that God was trying to just get his attention. God was saying to him, I don't care what you do for me. I care that you're doing it with me. I want you. I don't care about what you're giving me. That was his ultimate message. I'll let him speak for himself.
But one of the things he said to me was, where you're at in five years is none of your business. So that, for me, was an extraordinary thought.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. So you could say, well, your strings were cut. Mm-hmm. No, my actually strings became stronger. It was the audience was removed from the equation. Am I still willing to be a boy on a string? Am I still willing to be in service to God? Am I still willing to bend the knee and commit to a life of more of him, less of me?
I am in service to him, even if there's not an audience while I'm dancing.
But I, in that moment, said, okay. Okay, God. I crumple up the 15 pages. I give up even, so that's the past, but I also crumple up the future. I don't know what my future is. I'm okay with that for the first time in my life. It may mean I don't ever make it. Why were you okay? Because I understood who God was and what he, and it was so clear he was present.
That I was like, whatever those five loaves and fish are, I'm okay. As long as you— I'm willing to go along with it. Yes. And so if that means driving a bus just so that I'm supporting my family, that's okay. Because what's more important is that I'm in your will and that I'm not basing my success or failure or my mood, my— who I am as a husband and father, on how well... Your identity.
Yeah, better. Thank you. My identity in how people see me. My identity, and the Bible talks about the fear of man. Yeah, right. I had a fear of man more that I didn't maybe know. I wouldn't have maybe admitted that about myself, but clearly I knew in that moment the fear of man was more than my fear of God.
And you say things like, oh, sorry, I'm rambling. Yeah, yeah, that's right.
Yeah, now the audience is above you.
You've got a guy who is narcissistic in a field that demands a bit of narcissism in order to succeed, in one moment having all that taken away from him.
for the next few months, I'm like, well, what's my future? Now, I happen to be, we won't get into this, but I happen to be working at a church in Illinois at this time. So I had made certain movies, but they had hired me to come make movies within the context of this large church in Illinois. And so one of the things that I had done previously was,
was for Good Friday services or for Christmas services at this huge church of 12,000 people, which had huge Good Friday services, eight of them over the course of two days for 2,000 people per service. My task was to make these short films or vignettes about Jesus. And so going back as far as, you know, 2012, I was doing these little—
like it's where I met Jonathan Rumi, who plays Jesus in The Chosen, is was I was doing a short film about the crucifixion from the perspective of the two thieves on the cross. And so this notion of telling the stories that I've heard hundreds of times, but from different perspectives, had already proven itself over the last five years to be an extraordinary tool in unlocking people's
emotional connection to the story.
Showing 61–80 of 227 · page 4 of 12
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