Take the money and run? When Hollywood came calling: When Hollywood came calling
The day after Easter my church received a surprise visit from a Hollywood location scout. He offered us $10,000 to shut down our sanctuary for three days so that his company could use it to film the wedding scene from an upcoming Adam Sandler movie. The film's plot involves a teenager who impregnates his schoolteacher (the Mary Kay Letourneau story played for comic effect). The wedding scene takes place years later, when the offspring of this illicit union is a grown man getting married. Our sanctuary would be featured in a scene that included a fistfight between a priest and a worshiper whose telephone repeatedly interrupts the marriage ceremony.
I'm sure that I'm not the only pastor who's been tempted to throw a punch at a wedding ceremony cell phone user. That bit resonated with me. And I've seen enough Adam Sandler movies to know that the funniest scene from any of his films is the fistfight he had with Bob Barker on a golf course in Happy Gilmore. The thought of paying homage to that particular ridiculousness right in our sanctuary made me smile.
Moreover, the offer happened to arrive on the same day that our office staff spent hours stuffing hundreds of envelopes announcing the kickoff of our latest capital campaign—an effort to raise $100,000 quickly in order to renovate our Sunday school facility during the summer.
