KIM LAWTON, correspondent: On any given weekend, some 15,000 people worship with the evangelical Northland Church, but about a third of them never set foot in the building here in Longwood, Florida. They’re worshiping online via the Web and Facebook and Smartphones.

MARTY TAYLOR (Northland Church, Director of Media Design): We call ourselves a church distributed because we don’t want to be confined to this space. We want to be everywhere, every day, and technology is a great tool for us to be able to do that.

LAWTON: On site, worship leaders always welcome the online participants. On this Sunday that includes a small gathering at a nearby prison and people from as far away as Japan. As the main service progresses, online minister Nathan Clark connects with his virtual flock.

NATHAN CLARK (Northland Church, Online Minister): I provide pastoral care. I provide direction and really help them connect to other people around them as well, ultimately to connect them to God while they are in the worship environment.

LAWTON: Sometimes that includes offering an online prayer.

CLARK: For a long time I said, “I will pray for you right now,” and in 20 seconds later, “Okay, I’m done.” But I don’t think that has the punch. I type it all out, and I email all the prayers. A lot of people have told me that the prayers that we exchanged together they actually took and they printed out and carried them around with them afterwards, and it’s cool because it ended up giving that prayer shelf life far beyond what you and I would experience if we did it out loud.

LAWTON: With the explosion of online technologies and social media, religious institutions across the spectrum are finding more and more creative ways to connect with their members and reach out to new audiences. The Vatican, for example, has its own channel on YouTube, while the Dalai Lama tweets updates through Twitter. The innovations are providing new ministry opportunities, but some wonder if they are also changing fundamental beliefs and practices.

Northland Church and its prominent senior pastor, Joel Hunter, have been on the cutting edge of using new technologies, and they are helping others follow suit, especially churches in other parts of the world. Their online worshipers, they say, are demographically much like those who attend the main service. But the online ministry allows Northland to connect with people who wouldn’t have been comfortable attending a church. At the same time, Clark says Northland has created a worldwide church community.

CLARK: The relationships the Apostle Paul had that we see throughout the New Testament were often carried out by letter, and I don’t think there’s anything that substantially different than what we are doing here.

LAWTON: Still, some question the nature of a virtual religious community.

REV. HENRY BRINTON (Fairfax Presbyterian Church, Fairfax, VA): There’s a level of trust and support and accountability that you get in a face-to-face relationship with someone which I don’t think is possible online.

LAWTON: Reverend Henry Brinton of Fairfax Presbyterian Church in Virginia believes that, especially in the Christian tradition, there are limits to how much worship can really occur online.

BRINTON: There is something powerful about coming into a sanctuary and being with others. We still require that baptism be done with water and that communion be a community meal where real bread is consumed, where the fruit of the vine is received, and people do feel a very strong connection with God and with each other through those physical acts.

LAWTON: Northland leaders say they try to build face-to-face connections as well.

TAYLOR: Our goal is not for someone to log in and watch a service and, “Hey, I’m done.” We want them to be in community with other people where they meet together and have a meal together and go out and serve others together.

LAWTON: One way of doing that has been through Roku set-top boxes that enable people to watch Web-streamed video on their TVs. Northland created the first church channel on Roku, which allows people to gather in places from bars to prisons to homes to watch the live stream of the service. About 150 miles away from Northland Church, a small group gathers every Sunday to watch on Marcy and Ron Burth’s 53-inch TV.

RON BURTH (Northland House Church): The main reason why we bought the big TV was for sports.

MARCY BURTH (Northland House Church): We were going to watch tennis, call the balls, be down on the football field. God had other plans.

LAWTON: The Burths hadn’t been able to find a church they liked in their own neighborhood, and they invited neighbors who weren’t part of a church either.

MARCY BURTH: We have a closeness that you don’t have when you’re in a large congregation, but we really do have the benefit of the live service coming into our home.

RON BURTH: It seems to be unorthodox, but yet it’s really the early church that did meet in homes initially.

LAWTON: Would you go back to a traditional church having been through all of this?

MARCY BURTH: Probably not.

LAWTON: Outside Boston, the Daughters of St. Paul are also making active use of new technologies. Their order was founded almost a hundred years ago by an Italian priest who believed the media would have a profound impact on culture.

SISTER KATHRYN JAMES HERMES (Daughters of St. Paul): He said, “Look at the churches.” He said, “Where are the people? The people are not in the pews. Where are they?” So it’s our job to go out to wherever they are and make that place a church, a sanctuary, a place where they can meet God and God can meet them.

SISTER SUSAN JAMES HEADY (Daughters of St. Paul): Whereas maybe people before might have thought they had to go to church to do religion, they are doing it in the comfort of their home, having religious, theological discussions with their friends—maybe even a lot more fun because people like to get on their computer and go on Facebook.

LAWTON: Many of the sisters have blogs, Twitter accounts, and Facebook pages, and they have developed a series of mobile web apps, such as the Rosary App, that people can use on their Smartphones and iPads. Sister Sean Mayer is an administrator of the Facebook page for the award-winning Daughters of St. Paul choir. She says the tool allows them to interact with their fans almost instantaneously.

SISTER SEAN MAYER (Daughters of St. Paul): I try to put up something every two to three days. When we are actually recording or when we’re on the road, it’s every two or three minutes practically.

LAWTON: Their most active site is the “Ask a Catholic Nun” page on Facebook, which has more than 12,000 followers.

SISTER HEADY: The site was founded not to be a place for debates, but more for information so that people who have questions about the faith or who would like to connect with a sister and may not have the opportunity in their local parish could get on and ask a question.

LAWTON: People from all over the world ask questions about the Christian faith or Catholic Church teachings. Some ask for opinions about difficult relationships. Recently, there were some questions from Muslims trying to understand the concept of the Trinity.

(speaking to Sister Heady): Are there sometimes you’re not sure what the right answer would be?

SISTER HEADY: Well, the good thing about Google is anything you want to know you can Google. So I have my reliable sources, the catechism of the Catholic Church. There’s certainly Scripture. There’s other reliable places that you can search out answers.

LAWTON: She recognizes the limitations and tries to direct people to a local priest or counselor, but this format, she says, also has its place.

SISTER HEADY: Sometimes people need to first venture into a safe place where they are unidentified, and they just connect with someone, and I consider it a blessing that they have connected with me and not some other kook that will lead them astray.

LAWTON: Pope Benedict XVI has encouraged the church to use social media, but he cautioned Catholics to make sure they are authentically representing the church online. Professor Stephen O’Leary at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication says the grassroots character of social media does pose challenges to traditional religious authority structures.

PROFESSOR STEPHEN O’LEARY (Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California): In many cases, members of the congregation are acting as media producers and are functioning independently of their own local church. So the authorities from the church—pastor up the line to the denominational heads—no longer have the kind of control that they once did.

LAWTON: O’Leary likens social media to the invention of the printing press, which made the Bible and theological debate more accessible to everyone. This, he says, paved the way for the Protestant Reformation.

O’LEARY: It was the innovation which had changed everything and challenged the authority of the church in a way which was never possible before. I think that today’s media technologies, from the Internet to Twitter and all these things, are having a similar effect on the church.

LAWTON: O’Leary and other experts agree it’s still too soon to know what the ultimate impact of social media will be on religion. Still, many groups say there is no choice but to move forward.

SISTER HERMES: I think we have to have a little more faith in God, that somehow he knows what’s happening and that he himself, God himself, is actually using this means to bring some of his love and peace into the world.

LAWTON: And whatever the impact, there’s no going back.

I’m Kim Lawton reporting.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: At the First United Methodist Church of Pasadena they’re rehearsing for the annual Christmas pageant. There’s been a pageant here done by the children for as long as anyone can remember. The scripts vary from year to year, but the basic storyline never changes. It’s about the birth of Jesus.

REV. DEBBIE GARA (First United Methodist Church, Pasadena, Calif.): Children tell the story that is always in one way or another the story of a baby being born who brings a new kind of hope and a new kind of life and a new kind of love to the places that that has gone away. Everyone gets that.

LAWTON: The Christmas pageant is a tradition that is being played out by congregations across the spectrum this holiday season and it has for generations. The pageants run the gamut, from small Sunday school programs to large-scale Broadway-style productions. There’s usually a choir or some kind of singing. Sometimes the participants are adults, but more often than not the pageant is performed by the children and documented by proud parents who these days are likely to post the video on YouTube or Facebook.

John Witvliet is professor of music and worship at Calvin College in Michigan. He says the Christmas pageant is one way that churches actively connect with their history.

PROFESSOR JOHN WITVLIET (Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Mich.): It’s participating in something that has gone on over time, a story that’s been told for 2000 years, children who participate in a pageant just like their parents or grandparents did.

LAWTON: Interest in the circumstances of Jesus’ birth goes back to the earliest days of Christianity. The story as described in the Gospels was depicted in icons and other religious art. In medieval times, the Nativity story was enacted on traveling wagons as part of religious dramas about the life of Jesus. Saint Francis of Assisi is credited with popularizing the tradition. In a candlelit Christmas Eve service in 1223, he staged a reenactment of Jesus’ birth, and he included live animals, a tradition many churches continue to this day.

WITVLIET: What historians are a little less clear about is when Christmas became such a child-centered celebration and when kids were involved in these dramatic reenactments in a significant way.

LAWTON: At the heart of the Christmas pageant is a fundamental tenet of Christianity called the Incarnation, the belief that God took on human flesh in the form of Jesus and was born as a baby.

WITVLIET: This is not a story of the high and mighty. It’s a story of the humble origins of Jesus and ultimately of, as Christians understand it, a God who chooses to work through very humble, ordinary means.

LAWTON: Witvliet says it’s a story with universal appeal. Nativity dramas can be found all over the world.

WITVLIET: What’s wonderful is the way that different cultures bring their own insights to bear on telling the Christmas story.

LAWTON: But it can be a challenge for churches to come up with fresh ways to approach the familiar story year after year. This year’s pageant at First United Methodist is from the perspective of animals that might have been there when Jesus was born.

ZOE PEREZ: The animals are all squabbling, and then the wise old donkey just like told them that they had a gift to give to the birth of baby Jesus.

LAWTON: Zoe Perez has been in several pageants. Last year she was a shepherd. This year she and her friend, Maggie Cole, have dual roles. They are birds, and they are also sheep.

MAGGIE COLE: I think it is important to have pageants because they’re fun. They don’t take a lot of practicing, well at least ours don’t, and they always turn out really good.

LAWTON: Director Pam Marx believes embodying the characters helps, in her words, “burn the story” into the children’s brains. The actors agree.

COLE: The kids get to learn more, and the people that are in them get to learn more about like Christmas and God, and the parents can be sure that their kids are getting what they need about—what they need to learn about things like that.

LAWTON: Marx says it’s not always a perfect production but, she adds, it always seems to work.

PAM MARX: Remarkably enough it comes together, and I would say there are times when it’s been a greater miracle than others, but it’s always a miracle to me that somehow, wow, they told the story again.

WITVLIET: I sometimes think it’s in the lines that are forgotten and the bathrobes that the shepherds put on and in the halting rendering of these Christmas songs that are not always sung perfectly in tune that some of the beauty of the Christmas message is depicted and shown.

LAWTON: First United Methodist associate pastor Debbie Gara says children bring a special quality to the pageant.

GARA: There are always the faces that we can’t help but smile and feel warm about when we have all these hard places inside as adults. The children soften us in the telling of the story. The story of the telling of a baby child, of an infant, is something that warms everyone.

LAWTON: But Witvliet cautions that warmth and fuzziness shouldn’t overwhelm the ultimate spiritual message of Christmas.

WITVLIET: There’s always danger in even in a variety of Christmas celebrations and pageants that at the end of the day the kids pick up a message that is ultimately sentimental. So there is a challenge for adults and those who mentor children to point them in a deeper and better direction.

LAWTON: The message is what it’s all about at Evangel Cathedral in Upper Marlboro, Maryland, and so they do their pageant up big. The church calls this a Broadway-style production that includes the modern day, the Victorian era, and biblical times. There are live animals such as sheep, donkeys, alpacas, and yes—camels in the sanctuary, too. This year’s twentieth annual pageant has a cast of over 200, including some of the biggest names in Gospel music like gold record artist Marvin Sapp and Grammy-award-winning superstars Yolanda Adams and Donnie McClurkin.

DONNIE MCCLURKIN: Because the story is an age-old story it can, you know, we’ve heard it in so many different forms and different ways, but here the production behind it makes this thing become alive, makes it more than just one-dimensional. You can see, you can feel, you can hear, and it brings you into another place when you are watching it.

LAWTON: Congregation members here see the Christmas pageant as an opportunity to reach out to the community and share their faith, and that’s why these artists wanted to be part of the project.

MARVIN SAPP: At the end of the day we’re strongly letting people know and giving them the message that, you know, the real meaning of Christmas is Christ. We can put an “X” in front of it, we can try to do all that other stuff, but the true meaning of Christmas is Christ.

LAWTON: And from the smallest children’s program to the biggest extravaganza that’s the ultimate story of the Christmas pageant. I’m Kim Lawton reporting.

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Protesters outside gun store: What do we want? Sign the code. What do we want? Sign the code.

LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: This is a rare site these days—protesters outside a gun shop. It’s called Delia’s, and it’s in North Philadelphia. The organizers are religious leaders from many different faiths. There are also people of faith protesting the protesters, like Bill Grumbine.

BILL GRUMBINE: Well, I am not here to demonstrate against the gun store. I’m here to show support for the gun store, and I always have a Bible with me.

SEVERSON: Both sides say gun violence is a moral issue, and both rely on their religious views to support their opposing positions. Pastor David Tatgenhorst and Bishop Dwayne Royster say they’re not against guns or gun ownership but can no longer keep silent about gun violence.

PASTOR DAVID TATGENHORST (St. Luke United Methodist Church, Bryn Mawr, Penn.): Our coalition of pastors and rabbis and different religious leaders has just become so appalled that we’re so tired of burying young people and policemen. It’s just senseless what’s happening.

BISHOP DWAYNE ROYSTER (Living Water United Church of Christ, North Philadelphia): The numbers of handgun-related crimes and murders in the city of Philadelphia is larger than that of most industrialized countries.

SEVERSON: So these pastors who have preached against gun violence from the pulpit have joined an interfaith group called Heeding God’s Call in cities in Pennsylvania and Maryland, and they have taken their message to the streets. It’s aimed at gun store owners, and it asks them to sign a code of conduct designed to stop so-called “straw purchases.” That’s where a private citizen buys guns with the intent of reselling them on the street to someone who cannot legally purchase firearms.

ROYSTER: Whenever they sell a gun through a straw purchase, there’s potentially a body at the end of that gun.

SEVERSON: The same code of conduct was signed by Walmart, the largest seller of firearms in the country.

ROYSTER: What we’re asking the gun shop owners to do is to do something moral and ethical in terms of their behavior, by being responsible not just for making money for themselves, but to be responsible for the community in which they find themselves, to make sure that guns go to only those who legally have a right to own them and to be able to use them.

SEVERSON: Heeding God’s Call staged regular protests, sit-ins, and prayer vigils at this Philadelphia gun store called Colosimo’s. The interfaith ministers were responding to a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms study showing that over 400 guns from Colosimo’s had been used in crimes. In fact, 12 interfaith ministers including Tatgenhorst were arrested for obstruction and conspiracy and spent a night in jail. Then they pleaded their case to the judge.

TATGENHORST: The judge listened to this, and she acquitted us. Our argument was that we were trying to prevent a greater harm by breaking a smaller law.

SEVERSON: A few months later, Colosimo’s lost its license to sell guns, a victory for Heeding God’s Call.

PASTOR RUSS TENHOFF (Safe Harbor Ministry, Baltimore): I already have the Glock. I already have the 1911.

SEVERSON: When the Baltimore chapter of Heeding God’s Call tried to close down Clyde’s Sports Shop after complaints of selling guns to straw purchasers, Pastor Russ Tenoff was there to defend the store. One of the owners, Bill Blamberg, says he won’t sign the code because it violates his customers’ privacy. But he knows some people get guns who shouldn’t.

BILL BLAMBERG (Clyde’s Sports Shop): And I’ve had this happen a couple times. A guy comes in, you know he’s got a police record. He can’t buy one, right? He looks at this gun. It’s $549. He says, “I’ll give you a thousand dollars if I can take it today.” Now I’m not saying some dealers don’t do that, but Clyde’s don’t do that.

SEVERSON: Pastor Tenhoff leads the Safe Harbor Ministry in a rough Baltimore neighborhood. He opposes Heeding God’s Call’s mission.

TENHOFF: If we could eliminate all guns I would be all for that. But the fact of the matter is until Jesus puts his feet on the Mount of Olives and then peace reigns over the whole planet, we’re going to have to protect ourselves and even protect the people around us, and if the criminals have guns, then we need to have them.

SEVERSON: One thing is certain: there is no shortage of guns in the US—as many as 300 million at the latest count. In some circles, owning a gun appears to be the patriotic thing to do. For those who predicted a rash of gun control laws after the Tucson shooting—barely a whisper. A few weeks after the shooting, the governor of Utah signed a bill proclaiming the first official state gun, and the University of Texas is about to become the second major school after the University of Utah to allow students to carry concealed weapons on campus. Clyde Wilcox is a professor of government at Georgetown University and author of several books on subjects like gun control and the Christian right.

PROFESSOR CLYDE WILCOX (Georgetown University): The interesting thing is we’ve come to the point where the debate is over whether you can carry a weapon in a bar, in a church, in a gymnasium, which were the places in the past where we thought maybe you don’t want to have a gun because fights can break out or people can become inflamed. So it’s really on the edge that we’re having this whole discussion now.

ROYSTER: Jesus ministered to the most marginalized, and he didn’t do it with a gun. He didn’t do it with violence. He did it with love.

TENHOFF: I have been a man who has turned the other cheek. You’re talking to a man who has been jumped by gangs and beat. You’re talking to a man who’s been in several knife fights. You’re talking to a man who has been shot at, and you’re talking to a man who has grown up in the drug-infested violence of this area, and I have turned the other cheek and I have taken beatings. But I’m not going to let my little boy suffer violence. I’m going to act. I’m not going to let my wife be raped. I’m going to act.

SEVERSON: A number of mainline churches have had longstanding positions in favor of some kind of gun control, but for the most part churches have been noticeably quiet. In fact, an increasing number of pastors are now speaking out in support of the Second Amendment, saying it was inspired by God.

WILCOX: I talk to a fair number of pastors who kind of take a fundamentalist reading of the Second Amendment the way they take a fundamentalist reading of the Bible.

SEVERSON: Pastor Tatgenhorst says he understands why more religious leaders haven’t been more outspoken about gun control.

TATGENHORST: It happens, and I know that I have had colleagues who are scared to talk about guns. They’re afraid that people in the pews will object to that.

WILCOX: Well, the mainline congregations are declining. Their populations are aging, and so the question is what issues do you want to take on that might possibly divide your congregation? Would you take a risk of losing 10 percent of your members in a declining church by taking the prophetic stand about gun control at a time when gun control laws are probably not going to be stiffened?

SEVERSON: Rick Hellberg is a member of Pastor Tatgenhorst’s church. He supports his pastor’s position against gun violence but, unlike the pastor, he sees the Second Amendment as sacred. His rationale is quite common among opponents of government-sponsored gun control.

RICK HELLBERG: If part of my right to hold a gun is to protect myself from the potential tyranny of a government or a standing army—if that’s the case, then I should probably be able to be armed almost as well as those standing armies are. The NRA [National Rifle Association] takes the position that if we give an inch Washington will take a mile.

SEVERSON: But this isn’t coming from Washington. It’s coming from faith leaders who are trying to do what they say Washington and state governments haven’t done—curb gun violence.

ROYSTER: We’re not trying to prevent their business. We’re not trying to prevent them from selling guns. We’re not trying to prevent people who have a legal right to possess guns from possessing them. We just want to make sure they don’t get into the hands of the wrong people.

SEVERSON: While religious voices against gun control are getting louder, so are those on the other side…

Protesters: Sign the code!

SEVERSON: …who think that something needs to be done to stop the killing.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly I’m Lucky Severson in Philadelphia.

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KIM LAWTON, correspondent: Sunday morning at Friends Church in Yorba Linda, California. Richard Nixon’s family helped found this Quaker congregation 99 years ago, and the former president attended here as well. Today, it’s a megachurch with a nondenominational evangelical style. During worship services, pastor of creative ministries Brent Martz makes sure everything goes as it’s supposed to, and in the control room, church media director Jon Van Dyke calls the camera shots. Those may be their day jobs, but the two have another responsibility as well. They’re helping Friends Church make a feature film.

JON VAN DYKE (Director, “Not Today”): And I still hear people say it in the church, that “What are we doing? We’re making a movie? What are you talking about?”

LAWTON: The film is called “Not Today,” and it tells the story of a spoiled young American who goes on a partying trip to India and gets pulled into the search for a little girl who was sold to human traffickers. The film was partly shot in India and centers around Dalits, the so-called “untouchables” on the lowest rung of the traditional caste system. Friends Church connected with Dalits during mission trips.

BRENT MARTZ (Producer, “Not Today”): I had never heard of the Dalits until I went to India, and then to meet them actually and to touch their hands and to be involved in their lives was overwhelming, and to come back and do something about it—that was part of the mission of our church was to get involved outside of ourselves.

LAWTON: The church committed to help free Dalits who had been trafficked and to build 200 schools for Dalit children, and because they’re in the backyard of Hollywood, they decided to make a movie as well.

PASTOR MATTHEW CORK (Friends Church): It wasn’t just to make a movie, because we’re not in the movie business. We’re a church. But as a church we do have an obligation and a responsibility to tell the message, and so we believe that this was the best way for us in what God had gifted us with.

LAWTON: What’s happening here at Friends Church in Yorba Linda is being repeated in congregations across the country. More and more local churches say they are frustrated with the movies Hollywood has been putting out, so they are making their own. But there are questions about whether this is something local churches should be doing. Mark Joseph is a film producer who writes about religion and pop culture.

MARK JOSEPH (MJM Entertainment Group): I guess I have an outdated notion that churches are there to inspire parishioners to then go and do things in whatever genre, whether it’s politics or media or whatever. I’m not sure about church as film studio or church as commercial enterprise. But that’s, I think, the danger down this path.

Film crew: Roll camera, roll sound.

LAWTON: The church filmmaking trend really began at Sherwood Baptist in Albany, Georgia, where associate pastors and brothers Alex and Stephen Kendrick have released three feature films since 2003. They are currently finishing up number four, “Courageous,” about policemen struggling to be good fathers.

From film clip: What I want for you is that you seek the Lord.

LAWTON: In Sherwood films, volunteer church members make up virtually all the cast and the crew and do everything from catering to building sets. Sherwood teamed up with Provident Films, a division of Sony, and found a very receptive audience. Their third film, “Fireproof,” starring Kirk Cameron, was made on a half-million-dollar budget, and it took in more than $33 million at the box office, making it the highest-grossing independent film of 2008. Sherwood films always have a specific message, and they say making their own movies gives them the freedom to express it.

From flip clip: David, I’ve asked God since you were a baby that he would show how strong he is in your life.

LAWTON: The films all have an overtly Christian tone, and the upcoming “Courageous” continues that. Sherwood’s efforts have inspired churches across the country.

JOSEPH: You’ve got these church media directors and their pastors going, “Hey, why can’t we do that?” They’re in position where they have access to a studio sometimes, to cameras, equipment, lights, and some talent in the church.

LAWTON: At Calvary Church of the Nazarene in Cordova, Tennessee, optometrist David Evans wrote and directed the church’s annual passion play for 15 years. He says after watching “Fireproof” he came away believing Calvary should make a film.

DR. DAVID EVANS (Director, “The Grace Card”): I realized that God had been preparing us for the last 15 years to do something far greater than we could ever imagine, and that’s what set off the course of actions for me to begin writing the basic story of “The Grace Card.”

LAWTON: It’s a story about forgiveness and racial reconciliation.

Dialogue from film clip: Something going on at home? / Don’t go preacher on me, man. / I’m not going preacher. I’m your friend.

LAWTON: Although many in the cast are Calvary Church members, the film also stars Academy Award winner Louis Gossett Jr., and it has several Hollywood partners, among them Samuel Goldwyn Films. “The Grace Card” was released in theaters this week at a red-carpet premier in Memphis.

EVANS: We want, number one, for God to be glorified through this movie. We want to plant seeds that result in people demonstrating forgiveness and extending grace. That’s something we all need to do on a larger scale.

LAWTON: The team at Friends Church says they tried to incorporate their characters’ faith into the main story in a natural way.

MARTZ: This isn’t a Christian movie. It’s a movie about human trafficking that happens to be through the experience of a couple of Christians, a couple of Christians who are really struggling to live a good Christian life, you know?

LAWTON: But they acknowledge they do have an agenda—helping the Dalits. The church contributed the budget of under a million dollars, and any profits will go toward the work in India.

CORK: At the end of the movie, we want to give something compelling to say, “You can do something. You can change this issue of human trafficking, as Dalits are the majority of those in India that are trafficked. You can sponsor a child. You can build a school.”

LAWTON: Cathleen Falsani wrote a book that explores religious themes in the movies of prominent directors Joel and Ethan Coen. She worries that with church-made movies, a strong message could get in the way of a good story.

CATHLEEN FALSANI (Author, “The Dude Abides: The Gospel According to the Coen Brothers”): I think artistically when you go into any kind of creative act with an agenda you run the risk of whatever it is that you produce being inauthentic, and I think audiences—particularly filmgoers, particularly young filmgoers—can smell inauthenticity from ten miles away.

LAWTON: She says she wishes conservative Christians would look more closely for spiritual themes in Hollywood’s movies.

FALSANI: One of the ways that I find my faith most enlivened is when I engage with art, particularly with film, and my favorite films in terms of what I think are faith messages, Christian messages, messages about God’s grace and love—not a single one of them is a Christian film.

LAWTON: Mark Joseph says he applauds people who want to make movies to appeal to faith-based audiences, but he doesn’t want to see Christian films ghettoized.

JOSEPH: These filmmakers are energized to tell their stories to the world, but if they’re too successful as a genre, they’ll wall themselves off and end up only making films for each other, and I don’t think that’s what they’re intending to do, but once marketing folks and distribution folks see a genre here, then they will likely create an industry that will ironically cut them off from the mainstream.

LAWTON: He’s also concerned about the production quality of many small-budget, church-made films.

JOSEPH: You wouldn’t go, you know, to a friend at church for brain surgery who hadn’t been to medical school, and I think the same thing applies to filmmaking. I mean, there’s a reason why people go to Hollywood to make films, because these are experienced professionals.

LAWTON: Friends Church intends to deliver Hollywood quality on “Not Today,” and that’s where they have an advantage over other churches. Director Jon Van Dyke spent more than 22 years in the Hollywood entertainment industry, and other Friends members are in the business as well. In addition, the church hired professional actors and crew members.

VAN DYKE: So, incredibly important, paralyzingly important that it not be perceived on any level as sort of a “B” movie. Clearly, there’s tons of talent in the church, so why are we making crappy home movies? I mean, we should be making—Hollywood should be following us. They should be going, “Wow, look what the church is doing.”

LAWTON: Friends Church hopes to release “Not Today” early next year, although they’re still negotiating for a distributor to get it in theaters. In the end, the church believes the movie is part of its overall ministry.

CORK: We’re going to go forth in maybe a new expression, in maybe a new way in creating a movie that has a cause and a mission behind it, because we believe that we’re going to do what Scripture tells us and be active in our faith.

LAWTON: And that’s not something you hear every day in Hollywood.

I’m Kim Lawton in Yorba Linda, California.

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FRED DE SAM LAZARO: It was an unusual sight at Mass last Sunday [January 9] in the dusty regional capital of Bentiu. There were empty seats. But Father Samuel Akoch didn’t seem to mind, because this was an improbable historic day in Southern Sudan. Most of the absentees were around the corner, lining up for the chance to vote for secession, to create their own nation

REV. SAMUEL AKOCH (Saint Martin de Porres Catholic Church): I know that each of you came here to pray. I also know that each one of us is carrying our voting card in our pocket.

DE SAM LAZARO: And as the service concluded, it took on the fever of a campaign rally. Those voting cards came out and Father Samuel led a bee-line to the polling center, joining hundreds already there. Their ballot choice was as simple as the set-up of this polling center under a tree: Stay as one Sudan or separate into a new republic of South Sudan. That was the overwhelming favorite here. Father Samuel imagined that nation.

REV. AKOCH: People will be free to express their own religion, they will use their resources without anybody telling them no, so it is really great help for us to see this day. It was many people have died and they never saw this.

DE SAM LAZARO: The predominantly Christian and traditionalist black African Southern Sudan has seen almost nonstop war with the Arabic-speaking and Muslim North since the country’s independence from Britain in 1956. Two million people are thought to have died in recent years in the battered South, an impoverished land even though rich oil reserves were discovered here in the 1980s. A few feet under this fading sign is a pipeline that conveys crude oil from here in the South north to the port of Port Sudan. It’s a metaphor for the South’s complaint. The pipeline, like the oil wealth, they say, is invisible here in the South.

Oil added a new intensity to the conflict in the ‘90s, a period which also saw the rise of the Islamist regime of Omar al Bashir. He’s since been indicted by the International Criminal Court for his role in the Darfur conflict in Western Sudan. But it’s the enduring North-South war that got the attention of evangelical Protestants in America. They saw it as a religious conflict.

REBECCA HAMILTON (Journalist and Author): The evangelical community has been pivotal in the battle of Southern Sudan for its freedom, and they framed the war with the North as a battle for religious freedom, and in many ways that was true…

DE SAM LAZARO: Religious freedom for Christians.

HAMILTON: Religious freedom for Christians in the South. In many ways it was true, because the Northern government was trying to Islamize the South, but it was also a very useful framing of the conflict for getting the attention of key members of the United States Congress.

JOHN ASHWORTH (Catholic Relief Services): I think in the United States you had the coming together of the right-wing evangelicals, the [Congressional] Black Caucus, and the liberal human rights organizations. There’s probably no other situation in the world where those three groups would have common ground. But I think we also have to say that 9/11 played a role in bringing about the CPA [Comprehensive Peace Agreement]. On 9/11, the United States woke up to the reality that things happening in far-away countries had direct implications for the United States, and from that point we saw a much greater engagement with Sudan—Sudan, of course, having a history of being involved with so-called terrorist movements.

DE SAM LAZARO: Finally, in 2005 an American-brokered peace agreement was reached which called for this week’s referendum and also a sharing of oil revenues. At this church building—destroyed by fighting in the 1980s and now, ironically, a polling center—voters expressed hope that their sad history of slavery and exploitation would soon end.

KAFI ABUSALLAH: We have been mistreated by the Khartoum government, and we will show them that we want to stand firmly alone.

PETER PAL: The Northerners have made us their slaves for a long time, and we are ready to show them that we can lead ourselves. We are looking for good hospitals, good schools, good roads.

MARY DOAR: Our resources have never benefited us. Now we will get the benefit of our own resources.

DE SAM LAZARO: Managing voter expectations will be only one of several daunting tasks for the government of a new South Sudan. Keeping the peace is another immediate priority—not just with the North but within the South.

HAMILTON: South Sudan is itself a hugely divided community, and we haven’t seen for years because it’s been the greater enemy in the North, but I think once that enemy of the North is gone we will see all sorts of ethnic tensions rising inside the South.

DE SAM LAZARO: The Southern churches—Catholic, Presbyterian, Anglican, and others—have held ecumenical services for a peaceful referendum and will play a pivotal role in reconciling the South’s ethnic groups, whose rivalry stems mostly from land, water, and grazing rights for cattle. It’s a familiar role.

ASHWORTH: During the decades of war there was no infrastructure in the South except the church. There was no government, there were no NGOs, no UN, no civil society, and even the traditional leadership of chiefs and elders had been eroded by the coming of the young men with the guns. The church is the only institution which remained here with its infrastructure intact. It remained on the ground with the people. Now because of that we gained huge moral authority.

DE SAM LAZARO: Another key figure is former president Jimmy Carter. With Rosalynn Carter he’s been observing the polls and met with leaders from both North and South. On both sides the former president said he’d received assurances that religious minorities would be protected.

JIMMY CARTER: I met extensively with President Salva Kiir, and he assured me, first of all, that there would be absolutely no restraint on religious freedom in the South, that everybody, Islamic or Christian or Buddhist or whatever, would be free to worship as they chose. In the North, of course, they had had sharia law for many years, and there has been some accommodation for people of other faiths, Christians and others. President Bashir assured me this week that the same guarantees of the rights of other people to worship in different ways would be preserved, and they would not be harassed. He promised me personally that they would protect the churches and other things and protect the right of people to worship as they choose.

DE SAM LAZARO: There remain sensitive issues that could inflame tensions or worse: drawing borders, deciding on the rights of Southerners living in the North and vice versa, and a critical permanent oil-sharing revenue agreement still needs to be negotiated.

The new South Sudan, should that nation emerge, will be one of the poorest on earth. Paved roads, hospitals, and schools are virtually nonexistent, and the peace remains precarious. But all those worries have been cast aside by the euphoria of this moment—the chance, these people say, for the first time in their history for first-class citizenship.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro in Bentiu, Sudan.

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KIM LAWTON, correspondent: Although the social revolution led by Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. grew out of the black church, from even the earliest days of the movement there were white foot soldiers, too. King initially came to national prominence while leading the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, where he was serving in his first job as a local pastor, and working closely with him there was a young white pastor named Robert Graetz.

REV. ROBERT GRAETZ: We were here because God brought us here, and in a very real sense this changed the character of the movement here, because it was not totally black then from that point on.

LAWTON: Graetz is now 82 years old and still active in the Montgomery community.

GRAETZ: Fifty years ago we were a praying people…

LAWTON: On this day, he’s participating in the unveiling of a new sign marking a site that was important during the bus boycott. He and his wife, Jean, still work for civil rights, reconciliation, and a vision that began more than 50 years ago, a vision they shared with King called “the beloved community.”

GRAETZ: We are all different, but we are still all together in this one relationship, and the key to that kind of a relationship was respect, which means I look at you and I say, you know, “I know that you have value. God put value in you.” You look at me and you say the same thing.

LAWTON: Graetz had grown up in an all-white Lutheran community in West Virginia. While he was in college in Ohio, he become aware of the injustices faced by African Americans and had what he calls his “race relations awakening.” Graetz and his wife got involved in ministries in black communities, and when he finished seminary, Lutheran officials asked him to pastor an all-black congregation in Montgomery.

GRAETZ: We had very few black pastors because we require the seminary training for all pastors. That’s why they needed some white pastors like me to serve in largely black congregations.

LAWTON: The young Graetz family arrived in Montgomery in 1955 and began their work at Trinity Lutheran Church. They soon met a neighbor named Rosa Parks.

GRAETZ: When we got into town she was one of the first people outside of the congregation that we met. She was the adult advisor to the NAACP youth council which met in our church, so we saw her regularly.

LAWTON: Graetz was also introduced to another new pastor, King, who had arrived the year before.

GRAETZ: I decided that anybody who sounded as smart as he was and was articulate as he was, and had the name Martin Luther, I had to get to know him better.

LAWTON: He also came to know the struggles of his congregation because of segregation and discrimination on every front, including the public transportation system.

GRAETZ: If you wanted to find one aspect of life here in Montgomery, and probably many other cities in the South, where people were really troubled about the way they were treated, it would be the buses. Everybody either experienced bad treatment on the buses or knew people who had been treated badly.

LAWTON: Several local activists, including the Women’s Political Council, had been talking about staging a boycott. Then came the final catalyst: the arrest of Rosa Parks for refusing to give up her seat. When a boycott was called for the following Monday, Graetz says he faced an ethical dilemma because of concerns about what his denominational leaders might think.

GRAETZ: The church officials knew that I had been involved in things like this, and they said, “We want you to go to Montgomery, but you have to promise not to start trouble,” and so the question was, would my taking part in the bus boycott be starting trouble? Jeannie and I prayed about that a lot and finally decided the only way that I could continue to be the pastor here was to take part in the activities that our members were taking part in, and from that point on we were totally a part of what was happening.

LAWTON: On Sunday morning, Graetz stood before his church and expressed full support for the boycott.

GRAETZ: And I said, “I want you all to stay off the buses. I’ll be out in my car all day long. If you need a ride, I’ll be glad to come and take you wherever you need to go.” So I spent the whole day just driving people around, picking people up on the street, whatever.

LAWTON: Community leaders formed the Montgomery Improvement Association to oversee the boycott. King was the chairman, and executive committee members included Rev. Ralph David Abernathy, as well as one white member—Robert Graetz. Graetz says it was exhilarating to be part of it all.

GRAETZ: The feeling among the people across the community was that we were doing something that was changing the world.

DR. HOWARD ROBINSON (Archivist, National Center for the Study of Civil Rights and African-American Culture at Alabama State University): The Graetzs were really like one of the very few white people in Montgomery who took a very overt, obvious position in support of the boycott, and they suffered because of it.

LAWTON: The Graetz family became targets of the Ku Klux Klan.

GRAETZ: People would call us up and say, “I see your children out in the yard there. Are you sure they’re okay out there?” And the children would be in the yard, so that we knew that there were people who were looking at what was going on.

JEAN GRAETZ: I was scared to go out and take the trash out, because I knew that these people had been around our house and put sugar in the gas tank and slashed our tires, and I didn’t feel safe outside at night.

LAWTON: Their parsonage next to the church was bombed twice, once while no one was home, and once in the middle of the night when everyone was sleeping, including their nine-day-old baby. The house sustained some damage, but no one was injured. Supporters later planted a tree in the crater where the bomb went off. Graetz says he and his wife wrestled over the impact on their children.

GRAETZ: It was okay for Jeannie and me to put our lives in danger, but did we have the right to put our children through that? And we finally decided that we couldn’t control that—that God had brought us here, the children were in God’s hands, and if God wanted them to be protected, that would be his job.

LAWTON: Jean Graetz says African-American friends and sympathetic white supporters gave them strength.

JEAN GRAETZ: I felt that the Lord had put a circle of love around us, because we had wonderful friends, and I knew God’s love was around us, and I just pictured this circle around us so that the hate from the people that didn’t like us couldn’t get through.

LAWTON: Graetz says the civil rights movement had a strong spiritual underpinning. The weekly mass meetings held in support of the boycott were basically worship services, full of prayer, sermons, and lots of singing of traditional hymns.

GRAETZ: These hymns oftentimes took on new significance because of how they related to how people related to one another in the movement. Bible verses which we would think of—oh, that’s a nice thought—became deeply moving to us because of what we were going through here.

LAWTON: Graetz says this reflected the theological tone set by King.

GRAETZ: In effect, the church in the black community was reinterpreting what the Bible said about how human beings ought to treat one another, so that it was the black Christians teaching white Christians what it meant to be Christian.

LAWTON: After about a year, the boycott ended when courts struck down the bus segregation laws. At the last mass meeting, Graetz read the Scriptures—I Corinthians 13, the well-known passage about love.

GRAETZ: And I got up and started reading and in the middle of the reading, again, loud applause, and I thought, they’re not letting me finish. And I looked down at what I was reading and realized that what I had just read was, “When I became a man I put away childish things.” And people knew that we had matured in this process. We were different people.

LAWTON: The Graetzs have remained active in many civil rights causes. They are now consultants at Alabama State University’s National Center for the Study of Civil Rights and African-American Culture. http://www.lib.alasu.edu/natctr/ They give tours and discussions about justice and the work that still needs to be done in order to achieve their vision of the beloved community.

GRAETZ: People will say to us, “We really appreciate what you did,” and our response always is it wasn’t just us. It was 50,000 black people who stood together, who walked together, who worked together, who stood up against oppression. If it had not been for this whole body of people working together, this would not have happened.

LAWTON: And that’s a story they want to keep alive.

I’m Kim Lawton in Montgomery, Alabama.

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