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
And John says, I can't believe Andrew beat Thaddeus. And Jesus says, even I didn't see that coming, right? Jesus making a joke about his own divinity. And I remember leading up to that, my wife, Amanda, had even said, I don't know. I don't know if this is, you know, sometimes people are uncomfortable with so much humanity of Jesus, right? I'm assuming. That's a good joke. Right.
That's what I think. It's a good joke, yeah. So I remember. I'll never forget it. I'm watching, I'm waiting, that joke comes, and the audience laughs hard, but I'm a fairly good audience gauger, and I could tell it was not only just a laughter of humor, it was a laughter of relief.
The air was let out of the balloon, maybe. And I've had people coming up to me going, oh my goodness, seeing Jesus have fun, seeing Jesus laugh with his friends. was a revelatory moment for them. It unlocked—it made everything else make more sense. It brought it more— Brought some play into it.
Of course, but then by that—then it opens you to the next part, which is when he calls Peter Rock the serious stuff. Your soil is tilled because you're laughing, because you're charmed, because—and this clearly must have been how Jesus was, because why else would children have found him so attractive? Why else would thousands of people follow him around just to hear him speak?
So it was not an offensive thing. It was a life-giving thing. And so we learned that that worked, right? So that was the training ground for what happened.
So a few months, fast forward to a few months after my failure, after my moment at four in the morning, and I take the script that we had written a year and a half earlier about the birth of Christ from the perspective of the shepherds, put it on the shelf because of my Hollywood movie, right? Yeah. Well, I'm thinking I'm willing to drive a bus. I'm willing to get a normal job, whatever it takes.
But, you know, let's pull this off. And I'm still working at this church. I've still got the security of that job. I say to them, you want to do another short film? Let's film it for Christmas Eve. And they loved it, right? So I'm on my friend's farm in Illinois, 20 minutes from my house.
I'm filming this short film called The Shepherd, and it's about what the shepherds would have been experiencing that morning, and what it would have been like to be a shepherd, and what it would have been like to be in the marketplace that day in Bethlehem, selling your sheep for slaughter.
And then that night, while you're out in the field, you're visited by a host of angels and choosing you as shepherds, the lowliest of the low in society. So we're going to unpack that. We see it in Scripture briefly, but... Scripture doesn't say the shepherds who happen to be lowly and happen to be poor. And you have to unpack that somehow. You have to get that from somewhere besides Scripture.
So that's what we're doing. And that short film, while I was making it, Again, it felt like a big step down from a Hollywood opportunity. Again, I'm on my friend's farm in Illinois.
Yeah, right. So I'm making this little thing, and I'm like, why is it that this feels so small, and yet I'm more comfortable than I've ever been?
Right, and that's where I go, loaves and fish, loaves and fish. I'm just focused on the five and two, and this is my five and two right now. It didn't even feel like five and two. It feels like one and a half. It's small, but it's life-giving, and I'm good at it. I can tell I'm better at this than I am— anything else. Biblical storytelling seems to be easier for me.
I don't struggle with it as much. I'm on set. I'm more comfortable.
Yes, yes. So I'm telling the story, and I love it, and I'm feeling like it's good. And while I'm doing that... I'm also—I'm binge-watching The Wire on HBO, which is a show that's been around for years, and it's vulgar, but I'm binge-watching it, and I'm appreciating the storytelling and how the show covers multiple—it covers the cops, it covers the city hall, it covers the people on the streets.
It's a crime show, but it covers multiple angles, and I'm like, that's never been done before in a Jesus story. You know, in a Jesus movie or miniseries, that's all there's ever been is movies and miniseries, which are limited by their time.
And because of their limited time, they don't explore much more than, and then Jesus did this, and then this verse, verse by verse, miracle to miracle, that's what these are. And I'm like, what if we had a multi-season show where you have the time to develop the backstories and develop this context like I did in 20 Minutes in the birth story?
Oh, yeah, cool. But no one's lining up around the block to do a show about Jesus, and certainly not with someone like myself who's failed. coming off of her career failure. But I'm like, boy, whoever does this I think is going to be really smart because I think it's going to really impact people like these short stories seem to do.
Very, very long story short, the short film got in the hands of a streaming platform at the time. It was called VidAngel. They loved it. VidAngel at the time. They're now Angel Studios.
Yeah, yeah. And they loved the short film and loved my idea for our show. And they said, we want to do this. We want to support you. And I said, great. And I was very excited. And they said we should raise money.
And they watched that short film and burst into almost uncontrollable tears.
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