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41 °F Forecast | Road Cams Tuesday, March 16, 2004 Today's News | Classifieds | Autos | Homes | Jobs | Tempo | Health | Community | Home Delivery SECTIONS Home Page Local News Sports Business Obituaries Life Opinion - Politics AP News Weather Classified Archives Site Map EXTRA Newspaper in Education Personals Movie Times TV Times E The People CLASSIFIEDS Find a Car Find a Home Find a Job Find a Rental Place an ad eSouthernOregon Automotive Communities Entertainment Publications Recreation Calendar CUSTOMER SERVICE Frequent Questions Advertising Information Home Delivery Employment Contact Us Media Kit Network Affiliate Email Story to a Friend February 27, 2004 David Bruce runs a popular Web site that mixes pop culture with evangelical Christianity from his White City home. Mail Tribune / Bob Pennell Finding God in Hollywood A White City man says the Rev. Billy Graham challenged him to bring evangelism to the World Wide Web By JOHN DARLING for the Mail Tribune WHITE CITY — He’s got a Web site irreverently called "Hollywood Jesus" that gets more than a million "hits" a day. You might think David Bruce was using it to trash religion, but he’s doing quite the opposite — using movies and all popular culture to show God is operating everywhere. On his Web site, www.hollywoodjesus.com , Bruce will take any movie and reconstruct it into a story of Biblical proportions and meaning. And if he can’t correlate it to Scripture, he reframes it as one of the many "secular stories" that show the spiritual quest in everyday life. "I’ve found that almost everyone is spiritual," said Bruce, a White City minister who earned his master of divinity degree at North Park University Seminary in Chicago. "People just don’t talk about it. But I do. People think all the time about God, their inner life, their struggles, why am I here, would life be better without me and, of course, is anyone out there?" To show that God speaks through culture and not just Scripture, Bruce re-framed the movie "The Bourne Identity." A man is born (reborn) out of water (baptism), not knowing who he is. He goes on a long, painful quest and finds he’s an assassin (the discovery that your life isn’t working). He finds a woman to help him (Mary Magdalene). Further mimicking Jesus’ life, he goes through a death-resurrection experience and finds love and the good life (salvation). Advertisement In "Superman," the super child is brought to this strange place, Earth, by his parents to become a supreme being. Martha and John (Mary and Joseph) raise him. He undergoes a trial in a "fortress of solitude" to understand his mission (Gethsemane). He is "crucified" by krypton. He spins a similar story with "E.T." — showing the alien as a divine being who "calls home" and says, "I’ll be right here" (in your heart) at all times. The Ring Trilogy was written by a Christian, he said, who plays out many biblical themes. Pointing at the steady decline in church attendance, Bruce said religions are losing flocks because they see the vivid language and images of pop culture as anti-religion, missing the presence of the spiritual around us. "Every movie has spiritual messages in it," said Bruce, who preaches at the White City United Church of Christ and moved to the Rogue Valley from California in 2000. "Christians are out there counting how many times they hear (the f-word), and censoring nudity and violence. That’s a terrible, corrupting thing to get your head into." "Organized religion just isn’t connecting with people. There’s been a painful realization they haven’t been doing a good job for years. So there’s been a big effort to learn to speak the language of the culture." Church-goers are moving from the old mainline churches to the fellowships, he said because the fellowships are speaking the popular language of the culture and that doesn’t have to be all about Christianity. "I review a movie if it’s popular, and if it’s popular, that means it’s about relationships and that means it’s spiritual because relationships are spiritual." The goateed and black-hatted Bruce hosts a weekly movie review show on Rogue Valley Television with the purpose, like the Web site, "to evangelize for Christianity by using movies as a common ground." A former cameraman with NBC’s "Tonight Show" and "Wheel of Fortune," Bruce gets DVDs mailed to him in large volumes and has reviewed about 3,000 on his Web site since it started in 1997. He gets most of his income from speaking engagements. "I did it on a challenge from Billy Graham," he said. "He told us to use the Internet for good. I knew what he meant — to use it to evangelize." Bruce gets up at 6 a.m. and puts in a "grueling" day till midnight, answering e-mails from all over the world — keeping up running electronic conversations with as many as 100 people at once, he said. He links to other reviewers, accounting for many of his Web hits, and also posts reviews from other ministers and rabbis, including a Lutheran bishop, a priest in Rome, "a Christian mom and a super-fundy (fundamentalist) Baptist." Bruce’s Web site is a member of gospelcom.net, the largest Christian Internet provider in the United States. He is branching out into Christian music with an agency called United Christian Artisans. It will serve as an agent for "gigs" in the Rogue Valley (see artisansonthego.com on the Web.) On request, Bruce helps ministers spice up their sermons with PowerPoint software slide shows, music videos and movie clips that illustrate scriptural messages. "He’s helped me ‘use the culture to reach the culture,’ as he calls it," said the Rev. Jim Larson, of the Ashland Church of Christ. "I e-mail him my sermon and he adds music videos that show values. He’s helped me appreciate the younger generation and not write them off because their style is different than ours." In a video by The Blue Man Group, Bruce provided a song that "seemed to sing about sex and drugs," but it said, "No one knows my trouble but God," said a surprised Larson. "It was all this noise, but underneath it was someone hurting and looking for help." John Darling is a free-lance writer living in Ashland. E-mail him at [email protected] Mail Tribune Home Local News | Sports | Business | Obituaries | Life Opinion - Politics | AP News | Archives | Site Map E Southern Oregon | Classified Copyright © 1997-2004 Mail Tribune. All rights reserved. Privacy Policy | Terms & Conditions Website Feedback 3 WEEKS FREE! 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