“The word community has many connotations, some positive, some negative. Community can make us think of a safe togetherness, shared meals, common goals, and joyful celebrations. It also can call forth images of sectarian exclusivity, in-group language, self-satisfied isolation, and romantic naiveté. However, community is first of all a quality of the heart. It grows from the spiritual knowledge that we are alive not for ourselves but for one another. Community is the fruit of our capacity to make the interests of others more important than our own (see Philippians 2:4). The question, therefore, is not “How can we make community?” but “How can we develop and nurture giving hearts?’” -Henri Nouwen
A Strange Brand of Happy isn’t just a movie. It’s the intentional by-product of a community of friends. Nothing about making a movie is individualistic – from writing to producing to acting to distributing to experiencing the final product. This film comes from a group of friends who genuinely love each other. We wanted to make a movie that felt more like a movement than just a piece of entertainment. We wanted to invite the world into our friendships and into our vision of seeing people move from boredom and despair to hope and life.
I sincerely want you to feel invited into that.
I hope by the time this movie hits the big screens all across the country on September 13, you can authentically say that “our movie” is in theaters. There’s still time to join the team and become part of our “our.”
By my rough count, about 300 people have combined to get ASBOH to where it is today. We need hundreds more who will join us to help us finish the race we started. There are no shortcuts on this one…no millions of dollars in advertising, no huge celebrity endorsements, no major studio partnerships. It’s just you and me and a few hundred of our friends heaven-bent on the world being a better place – desperate for people to find their strange brand of happy…and in doing so, ignite sparks of hope in some lonely and lost hearts along the way.
Won’t you join this community? Invite others in as you do. Help us finish what we started.
2. Email Harmony Hensleynow if you can join the team and help us promote the film in your city.
Here are a few outtakes from A Strange Brand of Happy featuring one of my friends, Mike Betette. He’s a great example of someone I love like a brother…and love working with. I’ve got a pretty good gig.
*If you read my blog in an RSS feed you may need to go directly to www.joeboydblog.com to see the video.
So we all have a story, right? There are narrative through-lines that run through our life that make us who we are. I can’t tell you how many times I have said the following sentences in my life:
“So I went from working at a church to working at a casino overnight.”
“Then my wife got me classes to The Second City and it changed my life forever.”
“I had no idea how selfish I was until my first son was born.”
“I was a working actor in LA and the next thing I knew I was driving to Cincinnati to become a pastor again.”
You get the idea. Those are turning points in my story. Strung together with a pinch of revisionist history and presto! You know who I am.
Flash to February of this year. I meet Ray Attiyah. Ray has a new book coming out that he wants to promote. I read Ray’s book and it’s really good. I go to Vegas with Ray to get to know him better…and 72 hours later I really know Ray.
Ray and Bumblebee on our trip to Las Vegas
Here’s the cold hard truth:
Ray’s book is good. But his story is unbelievable.
So when the time came for us to make a video about his book, I told Ray that what we needed more than anything else was to tell his story. “The world needs to meet Ray,” I said. Sprinkle in the magic creative dust of the Rebel Pilgrim team, and you get this video below. I want you to see it because I’m proud of my team. But more than that, I want you to meet Ray. He’s a client who became my friend. And I am happy to say that our stories are now destined to be entwined for a long time to come. I couldn’t be happier about that.
*If you read my blog on an RSS feed, you made need to go to www.joeboydblog.com to see the video linked above.
See more about how we’ve devoted our lives to telling stories like Ray’s at www.rebelpilgrim.com.
About a decade ago I was done with Christianity in my heart. I didn’t believe it. I wasn’t sure there was a God. (Full disclosure: still struggle with that one.) Beyond that, I didn’t really like Jesus either. The gospel I knew seemed all about getting to heaven after I die and being forgiven of my sins through believing a series of less-than-logical facts in my head. Since I was a pastor, I wasn’t telling people this stuff. I was just looking for a way out – a way out of my job and ultimately a way out of my faith.
And then I met Dallas Willard.
Dallas WIllard
Not, literally. I never actually met him. But he brought me to Jesus.
I don’t know how else to put it: That book saved my life.
Dallas passed away today. It broke my heart to hear it. I feel like I lost my Ben Kenobi. If there’s one thing he taught me, it’s what he says in response to John Ortberg’s question at the 2:10 mark of the video below. The bottom line is that Dallas is in Heaven today, not because he died, but because he lived there in the first place.
*If you read my blog in an RSS feed you may need to go directly to www.joeboydblog.com to watch the video.
A major theme of our new movie A Strange Brand of Happy is that in discovering that creative thing God put in you, you can begin to discover God in a new way. I find a lot of people want to be more creative, but are afraid.
Here are five simple things to get you going:
1. Start right now. Your art will never be perfect. If unstarted, your art will simply never be.
2. Be alone. It’s in regular solitude that we begin to hear our inner voice.
3. Get honest feedback. Critique is how we all get better. Defensiveness is just a reminder that you need more time alone. (See #2.)
4. Help others. Someone out there needs your help to get where you already are…no matter where you are.
5. Fail. Over and over. As much as you can. As fast as you can. Until you just run out ways to fail and the only option is success.
A few years ago I went through a series of fairly intense assessments while making some major life and career decisions. The person I hired to help me figure out my life, after reviewing my tests, came to a quick and firm conclusion: Joe Boyd is a performer.
When she said that to kick off our meeting I had two distinct and immediate emotional reactions:
1. Yep. 2. And that’s a bad thing.
The truth is that I am hard-wired to perform – to speak, teach, produce, improvise, act and write. And I’m not at all a pure artist. I only like doing those things with people watching. At the bottom of it all are some very dark and scary motivations: to be popular, to be needed, to be important, to control others, to acquire money or fame. I hate those things, but I’d be lying to myself to say they aren’t there. The truest thing I can say is that they are there, but they aren’t there nearly as much as they used to be.
Truth is, I should have had a third reaction to her comment:
3. It’s also a good thing.
The older I get, the more comfortable I am in my own skin…and with my own faith journey. I’m never going to not be a performer. My only hope is to become a redeemed performer: to use my urges to be seen in away that benefits others more than myself.
If you had told me ten years ago that I would be the leading actor in a movie coming out in over 40 theaters nation-wide, I would have acted humble but been inwardly proud. I would have thought about the perceived glory in that. The truth is that the greatest thing God has ever done for me is to consistently give my all of my life dreams AFTER I don’t want them anymore.
When I was 25 I wanted to be a mega-church pastor.
When I was 30 I didn’t want that at all.
It happened when I was 35.
When I was 30 I wanted to be a movie star.
When I was 35 I gave up on that dream.
Now at 40, I am not movie star, but I am starring in a pretty darn legit movie.
I tried to get out of acting in A Strange Brand of Happy no less than ten times. Every time I tried to quit, Brad Wise, the film’s director and my friend and collaborator, convinced me that I was the best man for the job. The main reason I didn’t want to act in the movie was that I was worried about people questioning my motivations. Brad pushed and pushed. Luckily, I find the release of this movie timing up perfectly with a true inner sense of not needing anyone to approve of my motivations. Think whatever you want to think about why I do what I do. I honestly don’t care if you think bad things about me. Thank God, I’m not that way anymore except for occasional short bouts of ego-inflated remission. (Side note: Richard Rohr’s book Falling Upward closed the deal for me on this. I recommend it to anyone ready to move beyond needing approval or success in life. There is a second half of life that is exponentially more fulfilling than the first half.)
So here’s the deal: I’m starring in a movie opposite Shirley Jones, the Academy Award winner for Best Actress in Elmer Gantry, a favorite movie of mine somewhat ironically about both preaching and acting. That’s a cool thing, but it’s not a big deal to me. What is a big deal to me is that I have been allowed co-tell stories of hope and faith in a world that needs that more than anything else.
I feel like the luckiest preacher in the world…I get to proclaim good news outside of the church walls to people who don’t even know they are getting it. I love that God is letting me do this – and to top it off, I get to do it with my friends. I can’t prove this to anyone, but all I care about in regard to this project is the story. I want people to believe, if just for a second, that perhaps there is a God…and perhaps that strange brand of happy you feel when everything suddenly feels right…perhaps that is a taste of heaven. Maybe what Jesus called the “Kingdom of Heaven” can break in anywhere. Like a movie theater in Canton, Lexington, Las Vegas, Kansas City or Dayton.
So here’s what all this means for you:
I need your help.
I don’t want you to help me become famous or make money or be successful. I need you to help me get people to see this movie. My friends and I have devoted three years of our lives to create a story that sparks hope and action. We want people to see it. Of that, I am unashamed.
So here’s how you can help me get this story to lots of people:
1. Fork over some American greenbacks and pre-buy a block of tickets for you and your friends. I know it’s really silly to buy tickets for a movie four months in advance. I’ve never bought tickets for a movie more than one day in advance. But the bottom line is that we haven’t yet proven to the Hollywood decision makers that we can sell tickets to our movies. If we sell tickets now, they will take notice. (Money is their love language.) More tickets now = more theaters opening in more cities on September 13th = more people seeing the movie in more cities = a little more hope bubbling up in the world.
2. If you live in any of the 42 markets currently booked, please consider connecting us to your pastor or a community leader who can help us get the word out. Or volunteer to join one of our street teams in each city.
3. If you live in another city where the movie isn’t scheduled to play and you think you can lead an effort to pre-sell 500 tickets, then we can open up in your town. Again, contact us. (Pastor friends, we can work with you to sponsor it through your church as an outreach for non-churchgoers.)
6. Have a little patience with me if I talk about it too much. It’s important to me. I’m eerily silent during presidential elections, so maybe I’ve bought a little grace to talk about my passion area? I will try to be careful not to annoy you…
7. Pray for all of us involved. Sign up for Rebel Pilgrim prayer updates by sending an email to pray@rebelpilgrim.com. We sincerely believe this matters more than anything else.
I just asked for a lot. But I think I’m ok with that.
We have but one life…and when we find what we were put here to do it seems best to me to talk about it and to invite others to join the adventure.
So, join me in telling this story. I’d be honored.
Here’s a video explaining more about the movie:
And here’s the trailer:
*If you receive my blogs via email, you may have to go to www.strangehappymovie.com to see the videos.
We’ve been pretty quiet over the last twelve months at Rebel Pilgrim, but that’s about to change. We’ve been planting a lot of story-seeds that are about to be harvested.
In the coming days we will be releasing the trailer and release date of our movie A Strange Brand of Happy. We’re excited that the movie will be opening in at least 40 theaters across the nation this fall.
We’re also busy preparing to shoot a new movie called Hope Bridge at Asbury University in July.
When we first launched RPP a year ago, we had no idea where the journey would take us. The greatest surprise has been the emergence of our Short Form video division. Under the leadership of Mark Haas, this new initiative allows us to partner with others to tell their stories with a Rebel Pilgrim twist. These videos are a mix of animation and live action. I’m excited to share our first video with you today and look forward to showing you more in the weeks to come.
This is our first in a series of “Fearless Fables” called Socctorpus. Working with our friend Ray Attiyah, the author of The Fearless Front Line, we took one of the core messages of his book and re-imagined it as a soccer game between Sea Horses and T-Rexes. (It could happen.)
Ray and the team here at RPP would like to freely give it to anyone interested in using it to help teach the important lesson that fearless leaders won’t stop until they get their players placed in the position where they can truly thrive.
Congrats to the RPP team on completing our first short! And I highly recommend Ray’s book for anyone in a leadership or management position. You can read my Amazon review of The Fearless Front Line here.
If you are reading this in an RSS feed and the video did not embed you can view it at this link.
As I near the one-year mark as a start-up business owner, I have learned some very big lessons. One of the biggest is this: Make a big ask. People actually like to be asked for things. Just be ok if the answer is no…it will be often.
I haven’t been blogging for many months. Primarily because I have had nothing worth saying. Today I have something to say.
I will first confess that it takes a lot for a news story to get to me emotionally. In part because I am by default rather cynical and fatalistic. Nothing surprises me.
This shooting in Newtown, Connecticut today is hitting me harder than other horror stories that pass through my twitter feed. Maybe it’s because I have a son in an elementary school right now as I type. Maybe it’s because it seems fractionally worse to kill little children than it does to kill adults or even teenagers. (That may be a strange thing to say – but this is sending me spinning more than Columbine did.)
I have a lot of different kinds of friends. I count that as a blessing. I have a lot of right-leaning Evangelical friends. They have taken to Facebook offering prayers, bible verses and outrage. I’m good with that.
I have liberal Christian friends who jump to looking for a societal fix like gun control reform, etc. I get that too. (Sadly, it never takes long for my conservative and liberal Christian friends to fight over politics on an issue like this before we even have a body count.)
I also have plenty of atheist and agnostic friends. They are also outraged. They tend to speak of the need for love and justice. I get it. Some of them get upset at people of faith for praying, saying that God could have stopped it in the first place if he is even there. They think us naïve. Again…I get it. I have always been honest with my doubts about the whole God thing. But I say to them, let us process the way we process.
The words of Paul in Romans 12 have been pounding in my head like a throbbing migraine today. I can’t shake them. I tweeted them earlier today. I think all of us – Christians of all stripes, people of other faiths or no faith at all – I think maybe we can at least for today rally around this ancient Jewish rabbi turned Christian apostle’s simple statement:
Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil. Cling to what is good. Be devoted to one another in love. Honor one another above yourselves.
My hope is that all of my friends would take these words to heart today. This is how we move forward – together. In love. United against evil and clinging to the good. And honoring one another as we go, even if we are different. Because we are more the same than we are different. We all want love. We all want hope. If nothing else, a story of despair like this fuels the fire in my heart to continue telling stories of hope. I’m blessed to have a career that let’s me do that, but you can do it too. We all can – in a hundred different ways.
So what do we do now? After something like this?
We pray if we are able. But ultimately we love. It’s the only way out of this darkness.
I am excited to speak this weekend at the Vineyard after a long break. My topic assigned months ago was “simple love.”
Good question. I get that one a lot. And…I am still figuring it out. We are completing our tenth week af operation at Rebel Pilgrim. I’ve been spending most of my time preparing for our next projects. The nature of the beast requires that I keep things relatively secret until they are official, but let’s just say that there are some big, exciting opportunities out there. Big, exciting, realistic opportunities. (My favorite kind.)
We’ve also been busy getting our current projects lined up with distribution partners. I guess this is the way it goes, but it looks like Hitting The Nuts will finally be released about the same time (this winter/spring) as A Strange Brand of Happy. The lesson, I suppose, is that some things take seven years to come to fruition while others take two.
If you’d like some more information on Rebel Pilgrim, you can see our first quarterly newsletter and sign up for more at this link.
I have awoken from my blogging slumber to share an amazing piece of art with you. In a world nearly 100% absent of patience and forethought, this video is amazing. Watch it – and ask yourself what I am asking:
What story could I begin today…and finish in 20 years?
