I was hooked on The Matrix from the first green line of code pure Gen-X dopamine.

Angsty dystopia? Check.

Long leather coats? Check.

Philosophy, you pretend to understand? Double check.

A savior with a tragic middle-part haircut? Inject it straight into my veins.

I convinced my relatively new wife, Christine, to see it with me. God bless that woman, she thought she was signing up for a date night. Instead, she got two hours of me gripping the armrest like a philosophy major who’d just discovered his first metaphor.

I lost my mind over the film. Neo as “The One”? Messianic prophecy? A hidden world behind the world? Resurrection? A chosen community who believes before he does?

This wasn’t just a movie. This was a Christology seminar with kung-fu and sunglasses.

I’m sitting there, popcorn untouched, whispering theological parallels to myself like that guy who reads one apologetics book in college and doesn’t shut up about it.

The lights come on. Christine looks at me, the man she married, and asks:

“So… what is the Matrix?”

This was peak comedy because the entire pre-launch marketing campaign was literally that question. All those early viral teasers pointing people to WhatIsTheMatrix.com… and here I am, married to the one person in the theatre actually asking it unironically.

And once again, my lovely wife is right: we’re all still asking that question.

Here’s the point: even when we don’t realize it, we are wired for stories that echo Jesus.

It was true in the late 1900s. It’s true now.

Fast-forward to 2025, and Hollywood is still accidentally preaching the same sermon:

• Superman: Legacy – A superhuman who refuses revenge, chooses mercy and justice, and carries the weight of saving a world that misunderstands him.
• The Peasants – A brutal story about the marginalized crying out for justice, mirroring Jesus’ insistence that the kingdom belongs to the poor, the oppressed, the ones no one sees.
• Elio – A kid declaring who he is in front of the universe, wrestling with belonging, identity, and rejection—the same ground the New Testament covers when it tells us who we are in Christ.

Our culture keeps telling parables that bend toward the gospel.

The only question is whether churches will leverage this or keep pretending movies are the enemy.

If You Care About Invite Culture, You Should Seriously Consider “At the Movies” for 2026+

“Movie series” isn’t a gimmick on the fringes anymore. Among fast-growing, prevailing churches, they’re basically a normalized outreach infrastructure.

In a scan of ~40 of the fastest-growing churches in America (1,000+ in attendance), roughly 50–60% have run an “At the Movies”–style series in the past decade, and most of those have turned it into an annual franchise.

Life.Church has done it every summer for over ten years. Their July attendance now beats Christmas and Easter numbers. Brazos Fellowship moved from summer slump to the largest non-Easter attendance in church history with their movie series.

This isn’t “gee-whiz creative church” anymore. It’s just what smart invite-culture churches do.

And yes, there are bad versions: shallow, legally sketchy and theologically thin.

But done right, an “At the Movies” series is exactly what I argue in “Unlocking Your Church’s Invite Culture: Strategies for Church Growth That Work Today”:

Shareable Weekend Teaching that is both deeply biblical and intensely practical, the “my friends and family will love this” kind of preaching people actually invite others to.

If you want your church’s invite culture hotter in 2026 than it is today, this should at least be on the whiteboard.

Voices from the Field: Three Leaders Who Keep Running It

This isn’t theory. Here’s what people in the trenches are seeing.

Scot Longyear – Maryland Community Church

“We do it as a means of inviting people to our church for the very first time… At The Movies, the month that we do it is our highest attended month all year.”

They dropped the series into June, historically their worst month. It is now their best month of the year. That’s not a cute, creative win; that is structural invite-culture impact.

Scot’s warning is also important: you will get pushback.

Some people will complain that you’re “bringing unholy stuff into church.” His answer isn’t snark; it’s missional:

“We’re doing this so that people who would not normally come to our church would come, and we’re doing the hard work of strong teaching, not letting the movie preach the sermon.”

Jess DiSabatino – Journey Church (Calgary)

“We’ve been doing “At the Movies” for the last seven years… four weeks in November… because it really drives our invitation culture, particularly in November as we lead up to the Advent season. We’ve seen our church double, triple in size over the last number of years… One of the ways we sustain [invite culture] is through At the Movies.”

This year, in the middle of the series, 10+ people made first-time decisions for Jesus in a single weekend.

That’s not “cute movie night.” That’s evangelism infrastructure.

Evan Courtney – The Fields Church

“We do it because we want to be fun… It makes it really easy for people to invite their friends: ‘Hey, we’re talking about movies this weekend. Do you want to come with us?’”

They run it every September to pour fuel on the “back-to-school, back-to-church” moment. Costumes, photo ops, a superhero day for kids and over time, they’ve built up a reusable costume library, so the series gets better and cheaper each year.

Evan’s other insight is gold: originally, they tried weaving clips through the whole message, and it was a nightmare. Now, they just use the trailer to launch the sermon, then preach the Bible. This freed them to use brand-new films people recognize without needing complicated edits. They keep teaching the main event.

Invite Culture, not “Cool Church”

Let’s connect the dots to invite culture framework.

It creates shareable weekend teaching.

In our research, the number one reason people attend church is sermons that teach the Bible, and number two is sermons that connect faith to real life. [ref]

A good movie series does both:

• It takes films that people already care about and addresses the universal pain points like fear, identity, grief and injustice that are reflected in those movies. These factors make it easy to invite others.
• It anchors those themes in Scripture, so the authority and clarity come from the text, not the screenplay.

Done right, the movie isn’t the hero; Jesus is the hero, the film is the parable.

It Gives You a New Big Day—One You Control

Big days drive big growth. Christmas, Easter and Mother’s Day aren’t just sentimental holidays; they are attendance multipliers. Churches reliably see 2–3x their normal weekend numbers because people feel a natural social permission to invite.

Here’s the problem: you only get those days a few times a year. And they are already pre-baked into the calendar.

“At The Movies” changes that.

It’s basically a custom Big Day season you can drop anywhere on the calendar—a man-made gravitational pull that creates momentum at the exact point you need it most.

And the data backs it up:

And here’s where everything converges.

If you strip away the leather coats, the theology-by-popcorn and the calendar hacks, what you’re left with is a simple truth: people invite when you give them something worth inviting to. “At the Movies” works because it lowers the barrier, lifts curiosity and creates a moment where evangelism feels natural instead of nerve-wracking. It’s shareable. It’s biblical. It’s strategic. And, frankly, it’s one of the few invite-culture tools that consistently produces measurable church growth.

Churches aren’t running these series because they’re bored and looking for a summer arts-and-crafts project. They’re doing it because it generates first-time guests, decisions for Jesus, and momentum at the exact point they need it. That’s why Life.Church built an entire outreach ecosystem around it. That’s why churches in Maryland, Calgary, Texas and beyond keep going back to it. The fruit is too obvious to ignore.

So, if you’re trying to strengthen your invite culture in 2026 and beyond, this belongs in the conversation as a legitimate, research-supported strategy for church growth—one that meets people where they already are and points them to Jesus with clarity and conviction.

Part two of this series will unpack the how: the legal realities, the preparation process, the calendar strategy, and the practical steps for launching an “At the Movies” series that actually builds invite culture. If you want a church where people invite boldly—and where guests keep coming back—you’re going to want to read the next instalment.

Until then, here’s the question every church leader should wrestle with:
If our culture keeps telling stories that echo the gospel… why wouldn’t we leverage the moment?