Was that rumbling in the sky from thunder or Rick Warren just saying on national television that he has told his Saddleback Church congregants not to go to church Sunday?
Now, the Purpose-Driven pastor does not want the pews in Lake Forest empty every Sunday, just this Sunday.
Why?
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It's because of today's opening of Son of God, the big screen adaptation of the History Channel miniseries The Bible.
The miniseries was apparently a big hit on television, and Christian church leaders around the country and trying to get their followers into movie theaters this weekend in hopes of cracking the national box office top 10 list. If that happens, goes the reasoning, godless Hollywood might crank out more God-filled films.
“I'd go Friday, Saturday and Sunday,” Warren told an Inside Edition reporter as he left a theater showing Son of God. “I told my members this is so important skip church.”
The flick has received mixed reviews (our reviewer Alan Scherstuhl called Son of God “a kind of chintzy melodrama about the horrors of capital punishment”), and it's going up against the heavily advertised opening of Non-Stop starring Liam Neeson.
So we''ll see who has the greater particular set of skills, the 61-year-old action star or the King of Kings.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.