In the past few years, viewers worldwide have been binge-watching a new TV show with an old story—the ministry of Jesus. The Chosen has been seen by millions of people, becoming one of the most beloved pieces of contemporary Christian media in decades.
Dallas Jenkins, the creator, director and co-writer of the show, spoke with Outreach editor-at-large Paul J. Pastor to discuss his rocky path to Christian filmmaking, the inspiring crowdfunded success of a show about Jesus, and how all of us can tell better stories.
Dallas, I’m grateful you’d make time to speak to us in the middle of filming the next season of The Chosen.
Absolutely. I’ve really appreciated Outreach [the parent company of Outreach magazine] over the years. Honestly, The Chosen was birthed at a church. I’ve always had a heart for the local church and a marriage between church and media. This feels very natural.
Let’s start with your personal story. Talk to me about your background, your early faith and what led to you entering creative work.
Well, many readers will know that my dad is Jerry Jenkins, co-author of the Left Behind books. His work has been if not formal ministry, at least a Christian calling his whole life. I was raised in the middle of that, with a very strong, evangelical, conservative upbringing for home, church and school. But when I got to middle school and high school, my dad opened up a bit of a wider side of himself that he wanted to share. He revealed to me that he was a huge movie buff. Up until that point, he didn’t emphasize that much. In fact, he kind of protected me from it because he was trying to raise me in a safe, innocent environment as much as possible—and young kids aren’t ready for a lot of what’s on the big screen.
But once he believed I was old enough to start being introduced to some of the great movies, it became a great time of bonding between us. Over one summer he started showing me some of the real cinematic classics, like The Godfather and Bonnie and Clyde, which had remarkable stories at their core, even though they had elements in them that required some discernment. And when I saw One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, that’s when the direction of my life changed.
I am intrigued. Go on.
Well, at the time I was a big sports freak and wanted to be a sports broadcaster. And we got to the scene in Cuckoo’s Nest where Jack Nicholson is denied the opportunity to watch the World Series, so he broadcasts a fake game just to get himself and the other inmates excited. The scene was so moving. It was so powerful. I was completely overwhelmed. I wanted to tell stories that move people like that one moved me.
So that was the beginning of me asking, Wait a minute. How come there’s nothing like that that actually comes from a faith perspective? There had been like one movie every five years that would come out that churches would watch. Movies like The Hiding Place or a Billy Graham movie or things like that. But I remember they were never nearly as good as “the good stuff.” So, I thought, Boy, that would be really cool if you could make stuff that was that good but also came from a perspective of faith or telling my story or telling Christian stories of some kind.
What shaped your thinking about the integration of your faith and your moviemaking?
I began a kind of a parallel path to try to figure it out. I went to a Christian college. I never left or strayed from the roots of my faith, but I was also trying to figure out how to incorporate media and entertainment into that faith in a balanced, nuanced way.
I noticed that in evangelical spaces there’s often very little room for not only the encouragement of creating quality media or entertainment as a calling, but even for watching it. I discovered that my family had been a bit of an outlier in that my dad just truly loved well-made movies and TV. When I went to college, I was finding that not only was there not a whole lot of encouragement toward doing it, there wasn’t even much encouragement toward thoughtfully watching it.
Now, there are reasons for that. I mean, I understand that there are lots of movies and television shows that are great, but if watched improperly or unthoughtfully can be damaging to the mind. They can violate some of the standards of the Gospels and of Paul’s letters about filling your mind with things that are good. But I do think that there are ways to engage maturely with complex media as Christians.
I remember realizing while in college that if someone’s going to be a missionary, they don’t just go and quote Bible verses and preach. They understand the culture. They absorb it as much as possible. They’re in the world but not of it. There are so many classes and chapel services and books on how to understand and work within any culture that you’re trying to influence. And it became very clear to me that the most influential medium in the world was film.
I thought, The most important message in the world deserves the most influential medium in the world. I began to think of myself as a missionary to the culture of media. Any real missionary will find themselves amidst settings, circumstances, people and conversations that typically they might not engage in within Christian circles. But proximity and relationship are what it takes to have an impact while not compromising the message or the gospel. I wanted to do the same thing in media. I wanted to study the greatest influencers in film, and understand what it is that makes their work powerful.
So, a big part of my journey was to watch great movies and seek to learn. I remember seeing Pulp Fiction for the first time and walking out of the theater with my mouth wide open, thinking, Wow, there are no rules. That’s unquestionably a masterpiece. I even found spiritual truths in the film of darkness and light.
Another waypoint was when I came across an old proverb that says, “It’s better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.” When my dad and I started our company, Jenkins Entertainment, 25 years ago, the logo started dark, and then you hear the strike of a match, and then a candle is lit. The inspiration came from the feeling that we always complain about the darkness. We complain about the negative influence of Hollywood maybe, and we’re encouraged by lots of Christian voices to avoid it all. But what if instead of cursing the darkness, we lit a candle? What if we tried to utilize the storytelling strengths of great film?
I started to realize that the Bible actually tells one of the darkest storylines imaginable. And I thought, If you made a faithful movie about the Bible, it would be rated R. It has some of the most awful, horrifying stories and settings in history, and yet, would never be considered wrong by the church. So, it’s not the ratings per se, is it? It’s not the darkness that’s the problem. It’s a lack of light.
All these thoughts influenced me toward focusing on art not only as a career, but as a Christian calling. I decided to do my best to focus on making great art. Now, to be clear, I think that’s what a lot of Christians feel when they get into the arts. Especially college students today, for example, where getting into media entertainment is now considered by many to be a noble calling, an important calling. It’s much different than it was even a couple decades ago. A lot of them are like, I don’t want to be a Christian filmmaker. I just want to be a filmmaker who happens to be a Christian.
At one point during those years—about 2005 or so—I experienced one of the probably five times in my life when I most clearly felt the Lord speak to me. I was thinking through my career aspirations, and I remember the Lord laying it powerfully on my heart that the church deserves good stuff too. The takeaway was clear. I thought, Why are you trying so hard to be cool, trying so hard to almost apologize for explicitly Christian content, and trying to avoid doing it? The problem isn’t that there’s no Christian content, it’s that it’s just not very watchable. Why don’t you try to make good stuff but quit trying to shy away from the explicitness of the message?
I told my wife that I was feeling called out to be more unabashedly faith-filled in my storytelling. She was kind of embarrassed by that idea, and so was I. But that’s where I shifted.
That ultimately led to me doing the movie What If … in 2010, which was an unabashedly, explicitly faith-based message film. It turned out to be my best film up to that point, and the most successful. It was the most meaningful to people who weren’t believers, who just thought it was a good movie. And so that’s the time when I was like, You know what? Like my dad, I’m going to carve out my own space in this genre, or in this world, of media and arts. I’m not trying to be cute. I’m not trying to outsmart myself. I’m trying to tell stories and infuse truth there. I’m going to tell unabashedly Christian stories, and try to make them as good as I can, try to be the best filmmaker that I can with each project. All of this led me to a point where I’m not ashamed to be a filmmaker who is making stories of faith.
With that in mind, how do you view success and failure in your work?
Well, that changed a few years ago. For about the first 20 years of my career, I measured it the same way everyone else does. I wanted success at the box office, and I wanted to win an award. That was how I measured success.
So even though movies have to make money in order for you to be able to make more of them, I was never motivated by being wealthy. I wanted to make a living, and I wanted to be able to keep making movies, which is, in and of itself, very rare. To make a living making films is very difficult. Most people who try can’t do it, so that was the minimum that I sought, but I wasn’t seeking wealth.
But early on, I was motivated by affirmation, which comes from success at the box office and winning awards. And I think I justified that motivation by saying, “Well, if I do that, I can have more impact. Think of how cool it would be for a Christian project to be taken seriously by the world.”
That’s what excited me when I had the opportunity to make The Resurrection of Gavin Stone. I made the film in 2017, but its story goes back to 2010. That year I had decided to accept a job at Harvest Bible Chapel in Chicago. I moved from Los Angeles to Chicago with the understanding that I would be able to make movies using their resources. After filming, we would find distribution and get it out to the world. Ultimately a short film that I made for the church’s Christmas Eve service got into the hands of Jason Blum, a top producer in Hollywood, particularly of horror films. He was exactly the kind of guy that I would want information from and want to work with. His work has won multiple Academy Awards, and has been monstrously successful at the box office. He loved my short film and wanted to make a faith-based movie with me.
He got the script that I was developing, The Resurrection of Gavin Stone. His company liked it. It’s a long story, but it got into the hands of the WWE, the wrestling company. They liked it and wanted to finance it. And now I found myself in a situation where a horror film company, a wrestling company and a church were combining to make an explicitly faith-based film.
I got to make the film I wanted to make. Before we released it, it tested through the roof. Audiences were super excited about it. The team wanted to make more movies with me. We started planning it out: five faith-based movies over the next 10 years. We were going to forge a new path. And then the movie came out in theaters and completely bombed. It was lower than our lowest projections. They all pulled out of future projects, and I was left with nothing.
It’s a story that’s on the internet and easy to find—I tell it a lot—but this led to one of the other times that God spoke very explicitly to my wife and me. He pointed us to the story of the feeding of the 5,000. I read that, and then someone randomly out of the blue from across the world, whom I’d never met, reached out. They said that God had told them to tell me—again, that same day that we were reading that story—“Dallas, it’s not your job to feed the 5,000; it’s only to provide the loaves and fish.”
In that moment, everything changed. That’s when I had my definition of success dramatically redefined. You know, I wish it could have happened earlier, but I went from someone who did feel responsible for “successful” results, and measured success by whether the 5,000 were fed, to someone who simply cared about if I were giving God everything that I had. That box office failure brought me to a place where I was truly only measuring success by whether God was pleased.
And that’s when everything changed. That’s when I became willing to do another short film on my friend’s farm in Illinois. It was about the birth of Christ from the perspective of the shepherds, something that I had put off because I was making my Hollywood movie. I did it because, even though it felt like a step down again, I feel like it was what God wanted. And, of course, that little movie ultimately birthed The Chosen.
It certainly seems that the “loaves and fishes” that you brought have multiplied with The Chosen.
That’s what’s funny about it. I got to the point where I let my expectations about outward success go. And that’s when God, I believe, said, Well, now you’re ready for The Chosen. I think if this would have happened 10 years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to handle it. But I’m different now.
As we talk, it’s now, by all measures, one of the most successful shows in the world. Our best third-party numbers estimate that it’s been viewed over 500 million times, and viewed in some form by over 100 million people. When a couple of episodes were released to theaters, it performed in the top five of the box office during its run. Like I always wanted.
And it continues to grow, by every standard. Now it’s been translated into over 50 to 60 languages. I’m in the middle of filming Season 4, which is pretty extraordinary. At the time we began, it was the highest crowdfunded media project of all time.
I’m curious about the crowdfunding. It’s unique to allow the public to participate in funding the creative process for a major project. What principles do you see as you reflect on that aspect of this project?
I was hoping to make as good a show as possible. I wanted it to resonate and that’s what I want to focus on. My partner, Derral Eves, is one of the top brand builders and audience developers in the social media space. He said from the beginning that in order to really connect with the audience, it’s your story as much as it is “the show.” An important part of building the audience is people need to know you; people need to see your journey. People need to trust you, especially with this kind of content, and participation can encourage trust.
So, from the beginning, we pulled back the curtain. We wanted people to see not only how the sausage gets made, but who’s making the sausage and why. We made the building of our brand personal and direct. When you go to our social media posts, we’re using personal pronouns, we’re speaking very directly. We’re not saying, “Hey, guys,” we’re talking to one person at a time. I’m not trying just to reach as many people as possible with every post. I’m saying specific things. I’m talking about my motivation. I’m talking about what God is revealing to me. I’m sharing struggles, I’m sharing mistakes. I’m talking people through the process.
When it comes to content like this, I think that’s important because they do want to know that the person who was ultimately responsible for sharing the story of their Savior is trying to walk a road of humility and authenticity. So everything about our communications falls under what we call four brand categories. “Brand” may be a crass word for it, but we’re intentionally and authentically the following four things: authentic, intimate, playful and disruptive.
First, authentic: everything we say we really try not to sound like we’re marketing or that we’re trying to be general. We’re trying to be as authentic as possible. Intimate: we try to make it very personal, very connective. It’s a relationship between me and the audience, and the viewer.
Playful: we don’t take ourselves too seriously. We take the work seriously but don’t take ourselves too seriously. And you find that on the show itself. These are all brand identifiers. You can see this in the actual content and in our social media. And then, disruptive: we don’t hide the fact that we’re trying to do things a little different, that we’re trying to upset the applecart a little bit. Not just for its own sake, but we’re up against a genre—biblical storytelling—that has kind of its own, in the past, rules. We’re trying to subvert those a little bit. The media industry needs a little shaking up sometimes, I think, or at least that’s how we do things.
We try to apply these to everything. Like when we make a new gift item, whether it’s a book, a shirt, or anything, we ask, “Does this fit into at least some of those categories?” I think that’s been part of our growth. The viewer feels connected to me, they feel connected to our team, they feel like this is a relationship as much as just a piece of content.
Tell us about the storytelling philosophy behind the content of The Chosen. What are some of the principles that you’ve learned about biblical storytelling that you would bring forward for pastors or other people who routinely work with the Bible?
Well, it’s interesting. The principles of good storytelling go back to Aristotle and the three-act structure: the beginning, the middle and the end. Typically, everyone agrees that a great story starts with a character who has a need, a weakness or a question. Then there’s the middle—the journey of finding the answer to that question, or the journey of addressing that weakness or overcoming that challenge. And then there’s the climax to completion, finding the answer to the question. Some stories don’t end well, of course—they’re tragedies—but that three-act structure goes back to the Greeks. Well, it also happens to be a great framework to understand the story of the Gospels, the story of the Bible, God’s story of humanity.
I practiced this from a Christian perspective through making testimony videos for our church. The idea was three parts: “I was … but God … and now.” I learned that structure by making videos in a way I hadn’t done before. At the time I didn’t appreciate it—there I was at this church in Chicago to make movies. It was taking a long time to get going, and here I was “stuck” doing testimonial videos for the church, which was very humbling. I’ve been building my career for years, and now I’m making testimonial videos for a church in Chicago? But I approached every video from that perspective: I was … but God … and now. “I was a drunk, but God introduced someone to me, or brought me to my low point, or spoke to me, or whatever it was, and now I am sober.” “I was in a bad marriage, but God intervened, and now we are in a good marriage.” “I was lost, but God saved me, and now I am found.” I did dozens of these videos.
When I finally got a chance to make a short film and a movie, I was like, Man, I am actually five times the filmmaker that I was. I actually understood storytelling not only from a general perspective but from how this actually applies to the God story that I’m trying to tell. So, I’ve actually taught that to churches multiple times. Whether you are [filming] testimonial videos or you are preaching a sermon, consider the story from that perspective, that three-act structure. It applies to small stories, and it applies to feature-length films. But that’s ultimately the story that most resonates.
Something I’ve tried to avoid doing in The Chosen is retelling a story simply because it seems cool. Instead, I’m looking for stories that actually make for good television: that have a three-act structure. Not every single story in the Bible does, and not every story in the Bible makes for good TV or a good movie.
Now, I have a different responsibility than a pastor does. A pastor is navigating congregants through the Bible and finding the important truths within that, and it doesn’t matter whether or not it works for the characters of your TV story. I have a different responsibility. To your question, my advice would be more for filmmakers than it would be for pastors, because I’m not a pastor, and I’m not going to ever try to compare my needs and what I need to do for my audience.
What I have seen is that a lot of Christian media professionals sometimes just go, Oh, it’s a Bible story. Therefore, it belongs as a movie or TV show. And that’s not always the case. I think [the reason] why we sometimes misfire in our movies or TV shows is maybe we pick a story that seemed good on the surface, but it doesn’t have a very good “I was …”—that initial need, initial question. That initial problem isn’t actually all that significant, isn’t dramatic and isn’t the kind of thing you would normally care to watch. And that’s OK. Not every story belongs as a TV show or a movie.
Sometimes we think that because God did something cool, we should make a movie or TV show about it. I think it’s sometimes healthy to recognize the difference between something you preach from the pulpit, something you teach from a Sunday school class, and what actually belongs on film.
I imagine that spending so much time in the stories of the Gospels has touched you personally. What has it felt like to inhabit the story of Jesus so closely?
The No. 1 thing is seeing, more than ever, that Jesus is a personal God. When you look in the Gospels and study his ministry and miracles—like when he calls a disciple to follow him or even when he rebuked someone—it was rare that he was saying general proclamations to a mass audience. Now, of course, there are times where that happened, [for example] the Sermon on the Mount. I mean, he gave lots of principles that apply to everybody. But when it came to relationships, he called [the disciples] each in unique ways to their personalities, to their experiences. When he would do healings, it was often not only specific to their physical malady, but to their spiritual malady. There is a very intimate God we see in Jesus of Nazareth.
When I film scenes for The Chosen—I think you’d notice this if you watch the miracle scenes or the scenes where Jesus is calling someone—when it comes to the actual style of filmmaking, we make it very personal. We shrink the scene. We move in for close-ups, the audio becomes more focused on the person Jesus is talking to. It really speaks to their individual experience. And that’s impacted me significantly, just in my own life, just how specific God is to us and our personal journey. He wants a personal relationship.
That’s what I hear from viewers constantly: “I saw myself in that show. Mary Magdalene’s experience is mine.” “Simon’s experience is mine.” “I felt like Jesus was speaking to me in that moment.” “It’s never felt so personal.” “I’ve never felt the Gospels come alive for me personally so much.” “Since I’ve watched The Chosen I’ve realized that their stories are also my stories. Now when I read the Bible, I feel like it’s gone from black and white to color.” Meaning not that The Chosen is replacing the Bible, meaning that The Chosen has for them illuminated their experience to the point of saying, “Ah, when I read this story, I used to just see it as words on a page, just a general story. Now I’m realizing it’s specifically for me. It’s specifically for my experience. I can have this same relationship with Jesus that they did.” And I think part of that could come because that’s been my experience, as well.
You’re only about halfway through the project, but do you have any idea what will come next creatively for you? Is there any connection to that original calling that you are able to share at this point?
Right now, I’m focused, obviously, on The Chosen. We’re also realizing the need for and the requests for more of this. For biblical storytelling. For the opportunity to apply to other Bible stories the same approach that The Chosen currently has: humanizing it, bringing Bible heroes from the stained-glass windows into something that you can truly interact with and have it be made personal and realize that they were human beings. So, we’re in discussions with fellow collaborators on how we can do more of this. There are unlimited Bible stories to tell, and the audience seems to be appreciating our approach to it. That’s not as formal, not as emotionally distant. And so if I’m called to tell Bible stories the rest of my life I could do a lot worse.
Paul J. Pastor is editor-at-large of Outreach and author of several books. He lives in Oregon.