Christians in Cinema: Erwin McManus

by Angela Walker
Christian Cinema.Com

A gifted and passionate communicator, Erwin McManus is the lead pastor for Mosaic, a community for people of faith in Los Angeles. Two weeks after encountering Christ through his family and people surrounding him, he threw himself wholeheartedly into sharing this Jesus he knew with his friends by organizing outreaches.

From the beginning of Mosaic, he has intertwined the arts with his storytelling. For several years, he and his staff created films for their own use, and have recently produced DVDs for wider distribution. In love with the city of Los Angeles and its inhabitants, he believes the world can be reached and changed from Hollywood if we can reach out and love Hollywood just as it is, and love those who call it home.

CC.com:    What made you decide to produce films for distribution beyond what’s used on a regular basis at Mosaic (Erwin’s church)?

Erwin:    We’ve been making films for 10 years here at Mosaic in Los Angeles. We interweave dance, film, and art in the middle of my talks. So on a typical Sunday in Los Angeles I’m accustomed to speaking on Sunday using all kinds of mediums as part of the storytelling process.

We didn’t start with this, but decided to take what we’ve been creating here at home and make it available as a resource to people across the country. People have seen our films as we’ve traveled the world, and they’ve been asking for it. But we’re more of the artists than we are the economists. We’re much better at the creative process than the economic process of saying, “Ok, how do we get these films out there?”

It takes an immense amount of work, and we finally thought if we’re going to continue having a conversation with the people that really matter to us, people who are maybe not being reached by traditional approaches to telling stories, and connecting people to their own spiritual journey, we had to do broadly what we’re doing here in LA. So it’s a perfect match.

“Soul Cravings” is a book that really speaks to the intrinsic longings that every human has. It’s sort of a human story. And Crave Films are three films that unwrap each one of those cravings, our craving for meaning, our craving for intimacy, and our craving for destiny. It just seemed like the perfect complement to the book.

CC.com:    How would you describe yourself and what you do at Mosaic?

Erwin:    If I were explaining myself to Christians in terms of why do I as a pastor do things like this, I’d say that most pastors come from either an academic approach and they love to teach, or they come from a more therapeutic approach, and they love to counsel. I think I come from more aesthetic approach, and I love to create.

I love to create beauty and truth. I love the creative process, and I see that our lives are really our greatest work of art, and it’s an integrated process. If I were to say it in ten words, I’d say that I am an artist and my canvas is history.

We’re all creating something that’s beautiful and true and good.

CC.com:    When you were ten or twelve years old, did you see yourself as an artist?

Erwin:     When I was growing up, I used to endlessly write and create stories. I would devour the writings of Robert Heinlein, who was my favorite science fiction writer. I was not a person of faith; I didn’t grow up in a Christian environment.

By the time I was in sixth grade, I had read every single mythology book in the entire library. I loved the power of mythology. It stirred me because it made me question deep things about myself. I felt like I would find in mythology humanity searching for itself, figuring out if there was something transcendent. When I was 10 or 12 years old, those really were the questions I was grappling with. How do you make sense of all of this?

CC.com:    What was the turning point for you? When did you figure out that God might make sense of all of this?

Erwin:    It was the week I turned 20 years old that I came to faith in Jesus. Honestly, it caught me by surprise. I was a philosophy student at college. I wasn’t studying it because I loved the abstract and the theoretical. I was studying philosophy because I was really trying to decide if my life had any meaning and if there was something that was real beyond myself.

I’m an emigrant from another country who never knew his real father. I have an alias for a name. I’m a poster child for post-modernism. My grandfather taught me reincarnation. My grandmother was Roman Catholic but never went to mass. My mom brought a Buddha into our home. So I didn’t even know who I was. I was searching for identity and searching for the prospect that something might be true and real. I wasn’t sure if it was. But if there was something, I wanted to find it.

I really was in this desperate and passionate pursuit. Looking back, I realize that I kept meeting people of faith, people who would tell me about Jesus. I guess I didn’t have the ears to hear yet because I kept saying, “Well, that’s fine, but it’s not really what I’m looking for.”

So I’m really grateful that God is incredibly patient, and he kept coming back to me with the lives of other people. I was astonished by some of those lives. I saw something really beautiful in them. I saw a vibrancy and a passion that was incredibly attractive to me. I wish I could say it was all rational, E=mc2 or something like that, but it wasn’t.

I kept meeting people and thinking to myself, “I sure do like what it means to be human when I look at them, more than what it means to be human when I look at me.” And if I could find the source of that, I would be really inclined to pay whatever price was necessary to find that.

CC.com:    So what happened the week of your birthday?

Erwin:    It wasn’t just one thing. My mom was about 40 years old, and called me up to tell me she had become a Christian. I didn’t know what that meant. I figured it was kind of a broad word for a humanitarian. I go home for Easter break from college, and all of a sudden, she’s profoundly religious. That made me a little nervous, but she was happy, so I was OK with it.

I went home for the summer and my brother, who’s an atheist, all of a sudden starts going to church and reading a Bible. My sisters are going, and I’m the lone holdout. One by one I saw them all crumble under the weight of religion. I felt like they were abandoning me.

They would talk to me about forgiveness and Jesus and heaven, and I would look at them and think, “Well, what criteria does God have? Why should they be OK and not me?” So some of it was that my whole family was swept into this community. And they invited me in and treated me with kindness.

We lived in Orlando and every time you turned around, there was another Christian, and another. It didn’t look like strategy to me, it looked like kindness. And as I look back, I’m convinced that it wasn’t strategy, they were just really being who they were: kind, caring, loving people. I certainly had room for one moregood human being in my life, someone who was naturally kind and caring and really enjoyed life.

I know some Christians had really negative experiences growing up in church. I was spared that. I didn’t grow up in church, and all my experiences were very very positive when I met people of faith.

CC.com:  After becoming a believer, how long was it before you found yourself thinking about perhaps being a pastor or communicator of the gospel?

Erwin:  I didn’t know how Christianity really worked. Really the moment I entered a relationship with Jesus, my understanding of it was you were now entirely sold out to this movement that is lead by Jesus. There was never any ambiguity in my mind. It was either all in or out. I came to Christ the evening of August 20, and I came back to college the next week. I started my first non-profit organization within two weeks of becoming a believer.

I started putting on concerts and artistic events on campus to try and create environments where students could be in a conversation and perhaps meet Christ. This happened instantly for me. It was a little surprising because I was a quiet, introverted, socially awkward human being, and I never saw myself in a public medium at all.

I wasn’t thinking “I need to preach to thousands of people.” It was really more me thinking how I could help my friends who think and feel at all like I am meet this God who changed my life. Honestly, I loved the church, but I knew that the environment, the context in which the message was coming, and the way in which the message was being communicated would not reach the world from which I had come.

CC.com:    What was the path from there to Mosaic?

Erwin:    What ended up happening was that as I was finishing up college, I was thinking about going to Yale Law School, or something like that. I really didn’t know what do.

Some people said, ‘You’re really excited about God and on fire about Jesus. You should go to seminary.” I had no idea what seminary was. I was just doing what they said I should do, so both me and my brother went to seminary. When I got there I worked among urban poor to see if the stuff in the scriptures really worked. I felt like the only way you could really know if it worked was if it worked among broken and hurting people.

Then, because people told me to, I got rid of everything. I got rid of all my philosophy books, all my materialistic stuff. I stopped watching TV, stopped going to movies. I used to go to film festivals and watched 4 or 5 movies a week. I was basically boycotting all media because that was what I was told to do.

In the middle of that, I felt like God was doing some things. In the middle of that weirdness, he was building me in the simplicity of that life. Then I felt like he said, “OK, I want you to go back into the world from which you came.” So I moved back to LA 16 years ago and I started devouring every film that was made in Los Angeles to learn the culture here. I screened everything and watched everything to understand my position.

I felt like God called me to be part of this city and to be connected to the soul of LA. If I wanted to shape the future of Los Angeles I had to absorb the past and the present of LA and be part of it and love the city. I think when you do that, it sends you on a different course. I love LA, and I think it’s the epicenter of human creativity, whether for good or evil. If you want to shape the future of humanity, you’ve got to be part of shaping the ethos of the culture of Los Angeles.

CC.com:    Many filmmakers are saying that Christian filmmakers should start a movement to be separate of Hollywood, but you’re embracing it. What would you say in conversation with someone who might think this way?

Erwin:     I think that people who think and feel that way probably should stay out of Los Angeles, because they probably wouldn’t be good for the environment either. It goes both ways. The last thing people without Christ need to feel is the disdain and judgmentalism of Christians.

The dilemma is that if you want to earn the right to be heard, you have to create things that are more beautiful, more astonishing, and more admirable. A lot of times, we don’t want to pay the price of learning how to create the level that people without have learned how to make and tell stories.

I’m one of those people that says, “Look, if Jesus is willing to take on flesh and blood, if God is willing to live in the mess of humanity, and I’m not nearly as holy as Jesus, if he could tolerate us and beyond that, to be known as the friend of sinners, where do we get this idea that Jesus would isolate himself from the world?”

Jesus was the friend of sinners. He was accused of being far too secular and far too worldly because he hung around the tax collectors and prostitutes. We get the idea of holiness mixed up with isolation. The real test of holiness, of life, is that you can be in the middle of darkness and still shine.

And on top of that, I don’t want to sound noble. These are my friends! I love these people. They’re the most enjoyable people in the world. I love sitting and dreaming and talking about storytelling and making great films and changing the course of humanity. I look at a lot of people in Hollywood and see how they are affecting the world.

George Clooney has spoken up about Darfur. Bono called the world to Africa. The truth of the matter is that a lot of these people care about things that we should care about, and haven’t. I think we should ask ourselves how we these people that we perceive as corrupt and misguided have values and concerns that more reflect Jesus than many of us in the church.

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