By Paul Bremmer
It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a … four-story-high rainbow-colored banner?
Yep.
If you live in San Francisco, New York City, Los Angeles, Dallas, New Orleans, Portland, Seattle, Austin, Houston, Denver or Colorado Springs, you may see this colorful banner flying overhead in the next few weeks. It will advertise the new 55-minute movie “Audacity,” which is set to debut on YouTube Wednesday.
Christian apologist Ray Comfort, founder and CEO of Living Waters Publications, produced the film. It was also his idea to fly the aerial banner.
“I wanted to do everything I can to get ‘Audacity’ out of the church and into the world,” Comfort told WND. “My big fear is that it’s going to stay within the [proverbial] choir. My concern is for the lost and this movie is made for the lost, so one way to get the lost’s attention is to fly a four-story-high banner across San Francisco and 10 other cities throughout the U.S., so we’re going to do that. I hope it gets people’s attention.”
The filmmaker said the banner will begin its 11-city tour in San Francisco during the last week of August and continue through early September. In addition, people can go to AudacityMovie.com to find out how they can get the banner to fly over their city.
The top line of the banner mentions the movie is free, and it will be free on YouTube beginning Wednesday. Comfort said he is offering the film free of charge because he wants as many people as possible to watch it.
However, anxious viewers also had the option of downloading it from AudacityMovie.com for $19.99 before the Aug. 19 release. Those who downloaded ahead of time also received a number of items for free: a behind-the-scenes video, a music video for the film’s theme song “Love Can’t Stay Silent,” an eBook copy of “Audacity: A Novel,” and an eBook copy of Comfort’s “Mark Twain: A Christian Response to His Battle With God.”
Comfort said thousands of people have already paid to download the movie, and many have offered positive feedback online. In fact, the producer already appears to be achieving his goal of reaching his target audience.
“We’ve noticed comments on our YouTube channel even from pro-homosexual people saying they’ve watched this and they like this,” Comfort said. “They don’t agree with the message, but they said it was filled with compassion and love, and one lady says, ‘I’m gay and I’m an atheist, but I like the movie.’ So that was very encouraging.”
Comfort said the movie is meant to reach homosexuals and non-Christians without condescending to them.
“This movie paints a very clear gospel message, and it goes into the issue of homosexuality and Christianity in a very loving, compassionate, but uncompromising, way,” he said.
While he made the movie especially for non-Christians, Comfort made clear that Christians can learn from it as well.
“The criteria for watching the movie is if you’re breathing, you qualify,” he said.
The plot revolves around Peter, an aspiring comedian and Christian who struggles with himself over how best to minister to homosexuals. His faith is put to the test during a face-to-face conversation with a pair of homosexual lovers, as well as during a near-death experience. He also struggles with how to talk to a skeptical friend about Christian teaching on homosexuality.
Comfort said it was a struggle for him to make a film that defied stereotypes about Christian movies, but he thinks he pulled it off.
“We didn’t want to do a documentary,” he revealed. “A documentary on homosexuality would go something like this: you interview experts, talk to ex-gay people and they’re married with children and they’re happy. That’s almost nauseating. It’s stereotypical, and who’s going to watch it but the choir?
“So what we wanted to do was make a scripted movie using professional Hollywood actors and make it so interesting that people couldn’t look away, and I think that’s what we achieved.”
While the movie is scripted, Comfort also inserted footage of his own real-life interviews with ordinary people on the streets. In the interviews, the subjects reveal they are either homosexual or sympathetic to homosexuals, but Comfort reasons with them on the issue. The results sometimes surprise.
Comfort disclosed: “We were very nervous doing that because I hadn’t ever seen it done before in a scripted movie, but we had pre-screens with a thousand Christians from four different demographics and said, ‘Tell us what you like, tell us what you don’t like.’ And they said, ‘We want more street interviews. We love them.’ And so we put them in, and I think it works.”
Comfort realizes many LGBT supporters may initially be skeptical of a movie like “Audacity.” In fact, more than a thousand LGBT supporters have already given it a 1 out of 10 rating on movie review site IMDb.com.
Comfort said, “I don’t blame them because they’re thinking this is a typical Christian documentary that rips into homosexuals and says what they’re doing is wrong, but what we did is we stayed away from stereotyping the whole issue. We made sure we had nice-looking actors that weren’t stereotypical of the image most people have of homosexuals.
“So we think that when people actually watch it, they’re going to be surprised that we didn’t compromise, but we managed to be loving and compassionate.”
The movie’s tagline is “Love can’t stay silent.” Comfort said that is how Christians should approach life; they must proclaim the gospel to those who need to hear it.
“We are like doctors with a cure to cancer,” he explained. “We’re like someone who’s standing around watching a four-year-old drown in the swimming pool when we have the ability to jump in and save them. We can’t stand on the sidelines.
“So we’ve got a commission given to us: ‘Go into all the world and preach the gospel,’ and every preacher and every Christian should see that as a moral obligation and say to themselves, ‘Love can’t stay silent,’ because hell is a very real place, and we don’t want anyone to end up in hell.”
Comfort has previously authored such books as “How to Know God Exists” and “God Doesn’t Believe in Atheists.” He also co-hosts, with Kirk Cameron, the award-winning television program, “The Way of the Master.”
