Dallas Jenkins, creator of The Chosen, recently gave an excellent talk at BYU. It is exciting to hear such talks from people of other denominations.
Dallas' talk was on overcoming adversity and failure by giving everything to God. With some fascinating insights from the story of the Feeding Of The Five Thousand, Dallas talks of his personal experience of failure and the new worldview he gained by reading this Biblical account.
I have no idea if I'll make another movie and while that's no fun career-wise it's truly enriching
spiritually I'm serious I feel a sense of comfort and peace and contentment and yes joy that you wouldn't normally
expect after the biggest disappointment of your career and that's what a relationship with Christ does Joy
regardless of Happiness Freedom regardless of opportunity don't hold on to things too tightly realize you're not
as smart as you thought you were it feels good trust me
[Music]
all right welcome to Quick show my name is Greg Matson and in this episode we are talking about a recent speech given
by Dallas Jenkins the creator of the chosen if you have not seen the TV
series The Chosen you need to go watch it it is incredibly inspiring very very well done on the life of Jesus Christ
alas Jenkin was invited to speak at BYU he does a fabulous job this is not just
about hey having an Evangelical speech speak at BYU this is about his talk the talk was excellent and I love seeing
this type of thing because he seems so at ease speaking to a a a a stadium full
of an arena full of Latter-day Saints and he should be of course now he has a lot of interaction with Latter-Day
Saints there are people that work on the Chosen and Angel Studio Studios obviously that uh produce the film The
the TV series and and so he's very I I think he probably feels very comfortable around latterday Saints so much so that
some evangelicals have accused him of being a Latter-Day Saint now this episode is brought to you by scripture
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we're going to start here with this uh EP with this speech by Dallas Jenkins uh
I love the joke that he gives here starting off listen to this no I love you very much I'm actually really grateful to be here I love being here in
in Provo as you know hopefully we actually film a third of the show on the set in Goan the set that's owned
by your church you've been always so warm and welcoming the rest of the show we actually shoot in Texas and that's where
I live now that's where I come to you from and I send greetings from there the reason we shoot it in Texas of course is
because Texans believe Jesus actually lived there so um so I figure we might as well shoot
there um it's funny that joke actually plays differently here because I'm sure there are some of you actually going
actually I'm going to look mosiah right now did did he okay that's a good joke that's that's
a good joke it's like okay wait a minute he was Jesus visited the Americas was he in Texas it's a good joke I love this
kind of thing and so I want to tell you my story of how we got to this place today and it's actually a story rooted
in failure and I know that that's not a typical topic um and it's especially odd
maybe coming from the creator of the chosen because by all objective measurements as I stand to you now the
chosen is actually quite successful but the lesson that I learned and the thing that changed my life
happened at the launch of the Chosen and I want to share it with you I'm going to take you back a little bit probably when
I first started my career in movies uh I was as you heard earlier at 25 years old
I made my first feature film he's going to go on and he's going to talk about making a feature film it
flopped uh nothing was working he is going to go through an immense amount of adversity and failure as he talks about
this is again this is a a message this could have been a latterday saint talk
the principles are the same the relationship with God is very similar the idea of sacrifice prayer giving it
all to the Lord really good stuff when I first started in this business my idol
my passion my goal was legitimacy you see in my business you're
measured not necessarily by how good you are at your job but you're measured by
how successful you are how others think you're good very good lesson here
everything is about to change for him a wrestling company and a church in Elgen Illinois combined to produce a film that
I wrote and was ready to direct I had arrived I had gotten what I sought
legitimacy and approval and interest from some major Hollywood companies and
producers producers and in Hollywood what they do is they grab random audiences and get them together and they
watch the movie sight unseen previously they don't know anything about it now they watch the movie and then they give scores and recommendations and it scored
higher than any of the other movies these companies had made and the companies were like oh my goodness we got to do more so we're going to do five
movies over the next 10 years and everything's very exciting until January of
2017 January 20th 2017 I'll never forget because that was the day my movie was
released to the to the world came out in theaters all over the country and everyone was very
optimistic and Hollywood runs on math so you can know within the first couple
hours on a Friday what the numbers are from the East Coast as they come in and
it's a math equation within a couple hours you can know if the movie is going to do well that night how it's going to
do that weekend and in many cases how it's going to do for the next month or two and there's of course exceptions to that rule but for the most part it's a
math equation that they know how to solve and the numbers came in in the first couple hours and the movie was a
complete bomb lower than their lowest projections and within two hours I went
from being a director with a very bright future to being a director with no future and that afternoon I'm home alone
with my wife Amanda and we're praying and crying and
confused because God's not the author of failure that's what we've been told our whole
lives and I failed and so this calling that I thought was so clear over the last
couple years so many things had happened whether it was Impressions from the Lord or whether it was doors being closed and
then opened that were made it so clear that I was doing what God wanted me to do and then the movie bombed so what
does that make you do well it makes you question I guess I wasn't hearing from God that couldn't have been God I guess
that was me I guess I was wrong and that is a very very hard pill to swallow especially for
someone like myself who prided himself on problem solving and accomplishment and understanding results and making
good decisions so I'm very confused at this point I go into the kitchen and I'm
wallowing in my sorrow and my wife comes in and she says I don't know why but I know that
God is putting it on my heart almost as clear as it's an audible voice read the story of the feeding of the
5000 and I do impossible math I don't know what that means I don't know why
he's saying that but I just I just know that I know that I know okay just on this again I love this he goes to the
scriptures he's going to pull up a message here and he's going to do a very the message is going to be it's
interesting because for him I'm sure it sounds very Evangelical it is also very
restored gospel very restored gospel and I want to talk about this a little bit here because Dallas's message here in
many ways is a convergence it seems of an Evangelical
sense of Faith versus works and a latterday Saints idea of how
faith and works work together so listen to what he finds out here as he reads
the story of the feeding of the 5000 so he opened up the story of the feeding of the 5000 in the Gospels
we're reading through it trying to glean what we can and as we're reading it we see something that I hadn't really
noticed before and that's that when the disciples come to Jesus and tell him
that the people are hungry he's not surprised they say to him we need to
send these people home to get food and Jesus says immediately oh no we can't do
that if we send them home they're so hungry they'll faint along the way
now Not only was he not surprised it was actually his fault depending on your theology he either allowed them to get
hungry or he caused them to get hungry but he's the one who'd been speaking for three
days he can see them he knows that typically they would eat at a certain amount of time and he's talking through
that time and he got them hungry and desperate he brought them to the place
where the only thing to satisfy their hunger or desperation was him a
miracle so that was encouraging and I thought okay combined with I do
impossible math which we think that's what God was saying to my wife this is
encouraging Hollywood operates on math so what's going to happen is he's brought us to this place of desperation
and hunger we're there all right now we're ready to be fed God thank you in advance for what you're
going to do with these numbers this weekend they're going to turn around and multiples multiple multiple are going to
be fed right you know it's interesting because so often we expect still what we
want when we go to prayer I do this all the time right there there's an objective that I have it's what I want
and and you pray about it and you're going to pray usually for what you
want and the whereas the objective here should usually be what does the Lord
want and can I align myself with what he wants that doesn't mean that we can't pray and and and ask for his will to uh
honestly to agree with ours sometimes but ultimately the idea is to to mold
ourselves to the will of the father that didn't happen in fact that
night the numbers got worse it was almost as if God was saying that's not the message I have for you right now
making it very clear so now we're just even more confused because the numbers weren't getting any better
so that night I was up till 4 in the morning doing what I do really well and that's
analyzation what we call a postmortem this is what went wrong what went right
what can we learn from how can I make sure this never happens again because I don't know if I'm even supposed to be in
this business but if I am I'm going to make sure that I succeed and I'm going to succeed by learning from what just
went wrong so I'm writing a 15-page memo I'm on page 15 of this memo
and it's good and to be fair I was accepting blame I wasn't putting it on anyone else which is rare in my business
I was saying you know what I made mistakes I made bad decisions and here's where it went wrong I was going to send
this memo to all the people that I'd worked with and as I'm working on
it message pops up on my computer screen it was from someone that I'd never met
we were Facebook friends and it came through Facebook Messenger we'd spoke maybe once a year
guy by the name of Alex didn't say hi didn't say hello didn't say heard about your movie just literally said remember
it's not your job to feed the 5,000 it's only to provide the Loaves and fish okay
so there's a couple of things here that that I think should be thought about I think about this all the time when we
talk about prayer or we talk about the intervention of God in our lives and and
it's like okay well if Dallas was praying and his wife were
praying let's say they didn't would this message have come
through through Facebook did their prayers make a difference to the point where somebody
else was was touched by this and and they sent the
message and then you say to yourself okay well what where is God's hand in this did he did he initiate this in
response to prayer would it have happened anyway uh as part of a greater
plan I I don't know what the whole answer is to this always I do believe in prayer and and the other thing is is if
if he'd not been in prayer he and his wife had not been in prayer would he have understood the message in the same
way would he have been in tune with God in the same way and understood
it and acted upon it or would it have been something like just this is just a
bother to me right now I am in the middle of failure this is not what I want to hear just some thoughts and I
honestly looked around for a second because I wondered has my computer been recording what we've been saying today
like who have I told Amanda and I have been talking about this and wrestling with this and trying to figure out what
the feeding of the 5,000 is about for us and I haven't told anybody how does he know this so so I responded I didn't say
hi or hello either I just said what are you doing up at 400 in the morning and he says well I'm actually in
Romania I'm in a different time zone I'm here visiting my brother and God uh has been you know working in
me and I decided to open my computer and I saw that your movie didn't do
well and I said can I just ask you before I respond why you so why you said that to me he said oh that wasn't me God
told me to tell you that there you go and I found out later that he was walking home looked the movie he had
liked it so he was saw that it was a disappointment and God put it on his
heart as clearly as he put it on Amanda tell Dallas it's not his job to feed the
5,000 it's only to revive the Loaves and fish and Alex said No I barely know Dallas that's a pretty condescending
thing to say to somebody when they are going through a big failure and God said tell him and he just kept
saying no and finally said okay well it's 4 in the morning over there he won't get it any anyway so he sends off this message and of course gets an
immediate response and that moment changed my life
in that moment I knew that God was present I knew that God was looking over
this I knew that God had indeed probably brought me to that place of failure and
he did indeed have something in it for me and I wasn't I I I really like this message right here I I love the way he's
bringing this together this is a very good talk it's a great talk it is you know think about the current Bush right
that we who was that huie brown I think that had originally given that talk uh
it's do you get yourself into a position where you are completely humbled sometimes we have to be humbled
we don't usually get there ourselves it's you're you're blessed great in Greater abundance if you can
get there yourself but but often times we have to be humbled in order to turn
that far to God and and and take advantage of the blessings that he has to offer us and
and this becomes kind of like this this wrestle with God and I love that concept
it's and I know the wrestling I we see wrestle and you know the word is
oftentimes used as kind of the embrace the ritual Embrace at the veil when you see that in the scriptures but the idea
of wrestling with God I think is very very important and and if we are simply
passive in receiving Revelation or or in trying to
accomplish something with his assistance to the point of well this is what I'm asking for am I getting it or am I
actually working through this am I pushing through this am I wrestling in a
sense with God I I I think that that is something we don't do very well and we
should ask the questions be upset about something be upset about it
why isn't this working what is going on but but do it with sincerity and be humble with it but work it work through
that I mean that's that's building a relationship that is how you build a
relationship wasn't going to find it by writing a 15-page memo or by using any
of the tools that I'd learned in college that I had learned at business seminars
I wasn't going to be able to solve this and figure this out on my own now I still didn't know what impossible
math meant in this case because success wasn't on the horizon but in that moment
all I cared about was God's Will and so I surrendered probably for the first time
in my life I broke down and I thanked Alex and I put aside
the memo and I got to a place where I was truly okay with whatever God wanted
for me and so I decided to write something different that's an important Place something that I want to read to you now and I posted this on
Facebook and typically when you in my business when you have a movie or a TV
show or whatever that's not doing well it's similar to a politician you even if
the polls are bad you always put on a brave face you always say well we understand that you know the polls may be telling you this but actually we're
doing much better and it's the same thing in my business oh the numbers aren't good but people are loving it and you need to go see it and yada y it's
it's how we do things and I said you know what no more of that no more trying to impress no more trying to convince
I'm just going to be honest so I'm going to post on Facebook something different than what you'd normally post when your
movie's out so I wrote this and I think there might be something in it for
you so what do you do when something you poured yourself into just doesn't land I
won't mince words the resurrection of Gavin Stone that's the movie I made had a very disappointing opening weekend and
an even more disappointing day yesterday yes we've gotten good feedback from those who've seen it and it's had
tremendous impact on multiple churches and individuals and that's the main reason we do these movies but to be able
to make more movies your movie has to perform and people on a mass scale need to want to see it and as much as I can
point to multiple factors that impacted the box office I can't play the blame game something I created and believed in
and thought would work simp simply didn't connect on a measurable level people didn't want to see it in a theater and I thought that they would
period so what do you do when that happens in any career path certainly
sadness is a factor and my wife and I have dealt with that over the last week for sure questioning yourself the future
Etc it's all part of
it but Amanda and I did something that has sustained us through this
time we pursued God and sought to hear what we could from him and he made it
100% clear to us and through others who felt led to share something with me that I'm only to bring my Five Loaves and two
fish and the rest is up to him and I could honestly say I'm better spiritually right now than I've ever
been for the first time in my life I would be 100% fine if I couldn't make another movie that's actually a great
place to be in in my speaking engagements I often quote my friend an unintentional Mentor the great Phil
viser he' graded Veggie Tales yeah and he had a similar Fall From Grace or at
least a disappointment and he said something at a speech when I heard him and he said
where you're going to be in five years is none of your business and now I'm fully living that
out I have no idea what's next I have no idea if I'll make another movie and while that's no fun careerwise it's
truly enriching spiritually I'm serious I feel a sense of comfort and peace and
contentment and yes joy that you wouldn't normally expect after the biggest disappointment of your career
and that's what a relationship with Christ does Joy regardless of Happiness Freedom regardless of opportunity don't
hold on to things too tightly realize you're not as smart as you thought you were it feels good trust
me so I posted that on Facebook and of course it became the most engaged with
and responded to posts that I'd done any of the other projects that I posted about were paled in comparison to what I
said in this post and a lot of people mentioned how much it resonated with them because they'd gone through something
similar so here I am now still left with an uncertain
future so I went back to the drawing board I had written a script with my co-writer Tyler so I want to say
something here about this I want you to hear what he's saying and I want you to understand uh what I think sometimes
some people struggle with sometimes and that is this is not a member of the church and he's talking about an
experience with God we should never
discount another person's relationship with God that is from a different
religion right that that's not cool it's not right right that whatever that he's
going through here with his wife is very very similar to what you would go through and he's trying to turn himself
over to God and to overcome these things or to
submit that is a gospel message whether that comes within the church or without
and this to me is what is so living right it it is alive this idea that that
uh someone with a somewhat different Faith here than from us is going through
a very similar experience because the truth is the truth whether Dallas is
doing this or whether you or I are doing this and it expands our minds a little bit it opens up our it should open up
our understanding of the plan of God and that everybody is a
participant and that's why I love these types of discussions and interactions with people of different faiths it's
exciting I could listen to Dallas talk about these things all day long so I
went to the church and I said you want another short film for Christmas Eve and they said of course and so we went in
the middle of June in Illinois and filmed on my friend's Farm 20 minutes
from my house right behind a barn the story of the shephards on the day of
Christ's birth and the night of Christ's birth felt like a significant step down from what I'd been doing didn't even
feel like Five Loaves and two fish it felt like one loaf and half a fish I'm doing this little short film for my church on a farm in
Illinois but while I was doing it I never had felt more in my zone just
everything was feeling natural and right like man I love i' I'd done a couple other short films and nits from my
church about Jesus from different perspectives and while I was making that short remember the idea for the chosen
came up and I thought you know what in 20 minutes in this short film about the birth of Christ I feel like I'm learning
more and engaged more in this story than I ever have and even just by telling it
I feel like it's coming alive alive to me more than ever I thought man that'd be interesting you know there's been movies and miniseries about Jesus
there's never been a multi-season show where you can take this time and instead of going from Miracle to Miracle Bible
verse to Bible verse and never really connecting with the people who were touched by Jesus and seeing Jesus
through their eyes it just becomes kind of a reenactment and that can be good you your church has done it it's been done
many times just reenactments of the Bible verses some of have been done very well and they have they have a great
purpose but I would contend that most of the time you don't have an emotional connection you don't quite identify with
the people okay I want to say something this is totally true right I mean they
they are those little short things that the church produces are really well done we're doing a lot more of them the Book
of Mormon videos you know etc etc these are really good things but I think the
church has held back from doing a full production because we're always worried
about Doctrine and and and so it's nice to have someone like Dallas Jenkins come in
and do something that goes right along Ong with what we would believe about Jesus's life and uses the Artic the
artistic license that has always been necessary for this but no one does
it to the point of taking all of his life and and teachings and going through
and creating and this might be a little controversial but creating Jesus as a
human being and and you know that would be
latterday sa Doctrine obviously but but as D says having that type of connection
being able to connect with this and anybody who's watched The Chosen and and followed it through all its Seasons you
know how what that means it is different from everything else that has been produced it doesn't sit there and in a
very dry way repeat the King James version of the Bible it makes it a reality and it adds
context to your view of what the gospels are and what Jesus's life was about that
doesn't mean that that's what happened you know he wasn't walking down a hill when he did this he didn't say some of these other words
fine that's not the point of this the point is to create a a connection and a
greater understanding of these are real people and real events I thought that's
I think that's something we're missing in artistic portrayals of Jesus and his followers so I had this idea for a Jesus
show and of course no way to make it there weren't people lining up around the block to do a Jesus project and
certainly not with me some someone coming off of a significant failure so I didn't think it would
happen but I thought man whoever gets a chance to do this it's they're going to look smart because I think this is going to work well long story short a friend of
mine got the short film in the hands of company actually here in Provo Angel
Studios at the time they were called vid Angel and they were looking for new content and they saw my short film and
loved it heard my idea for the show and loved it and said we want to do your show and I got really excited they said
we want to raise the money through crowdfunding and I got really depressed because crowdfunding rarely
works it's usually what you see on social media someone's trying to raise money on their birthday and the bar never actually quite gets to the end of
where their goal is and then the all-time crowdfunding record was 5.7 million from projects that had big fan
bases and I had no fan base and I had this short film that I did on my friend's Farm in
Illinois but Loaves and Fishes man not my job to feed the
5,000 so again now I want to go right into the idea of of works and Grace okay
because and and I told this to to my friend um Pastor Jeff Mulla you know
after after watching this and I I think Pastor he's here somewhere in one of these front rows here listening to Dallas in this in this uh uh Speech and
but this is the Latter-day Saint idea of Works he's going over it
perfectly we need to do our part right we are to supply the fish and
the loaves Latter-Day Saint Doctrine is very participatory because it is all about
becoming and therefore the plan that is in place requires us to provide the Loaves
and the fish in order for us to grow and to become and to learn and to become more
like God now I know that Dallas here would probably look at this a little more nuanced in a different
way but that is works and in fact the effort of
wrestling with God and praying is to us works why do we do
that we do that to love God God and to love our
neighbor and thereby through those efforts becoming something greater and
whether it is repentance or whether it is following the Commandments or whether
it is making and keeping covenants in the temple those are all things tied to
loving God loving our neighbor and becoming more Christlike so I I love the
convergence here of of of his story between our our faiths and our
doctrines were my Loaves and fish I said all right I got nothing to lose anyway and so we put this short film out online
and I did a pitch at the end of it kind of telling people how they could invest in this project and something special happened
it went viral and in January of that next year I'm sitting at the computer finishing up a live stream and my wife
is next to me we passed the $10 million Mark shattering the all-time crowdfunding record from 16,000 people
all over the world some of them might actually be in this room right now I gave a little bit on that and I hear my
wife sniffling and I look over and she's got tears streaming down her face and she says I do impossible math
and just as clearly awesome as he had said it to her a year before he said it again and he said
that's what I meant and so in that moment it was very easy to realize okay
this isn't us this is impossible math this is the kind of math that God's part of it's not the
math equation based on numbers and interest this is what he does he takes
the small the broken the surrendered and makes something out of it and so okay
so this is I I I I I would recommend that you go and look at his whole speech
I'm putting the link into the description box to go to BYU speech teaches and follow the whole thing it's
an excellent talk in every sense and and you can see
the the laughter and the humor the attention to the story he's giving his little autobiography
here we are all connected to this it's not just him connecting to God it is latterday Saints connecting with
evangelicals evangelicals connecting with latterday Saints and this is how it
should be done yes we have our differences yes yes we can be apologists and defend our truths you you don't
Venture away from that you don't do that but I can find commonalities here
with Dallas and I can really appreciate his story and I can look at the principles that he's following and say
those are Godly principles no matter what church he belongs to and I'm really glad that BYU
invited him to speak even the humor you know that's the great thing there's a little bit more
humor that he gives here at the end of the speech but it's that when you have that and you're you're you're connecting
with the audience he's connecting with a Latter-Day Saint audience and they're connecting with him
they understand his story they understand that adversity they understand being humbled they understand
getting to a point where you have to give everything to God and that's what I love about this thanks for listening