This Is Why I Believe

This project was started by one simple phrase. I was sitting with my wife in church and the pastor said, "Why do you believe in Jesus?" Now, this wasn't the point of his sermon. It was almost a random line in the sermon, but it made me think. Why do people believe in God? I looked into it and found out that fewer people believe in God than I would have thought. A Gallup poll conducted in 2023 states that only 47% of Americans believe in God with absolute certainty. It's startling to find out that less than half of Americans have a strong faith in God. 

This brought me back to my pastor's original question. Why does that 47% of people believe? And, if we could get their stories out there, maybe, just maybe we could move people back towards believing in God. 

So, I started to do some interviews. Our first group was in my studio in downtown Lebanon. I quickly found from these interviews that people believe in God for a wide variety of reasons. I also found out that people want to know why other people believe in God. It's reassuring to fellow believers and it's also inspirational to those who don't. I then had the opportunity to do a small series of interviews at a local church. 

I cut one-minute versions of each video so that the church could open with one each Sunday. I found that these videos not only encouraged believers and reached out to non-believers, but they also worked as community building tools inside the church. After this, I did some more interviews at our Annubis Productions studio space. 

Another opportunity came up to shoot more interviews when I volunteered to do a video for the very same pastor who started this idea. After almost 20 years, he was retiring. While doing this, I managed to grab a couple interviews to add to our This Is Why I Believe project.

I love telling these stories, but I realized that I need to think bigger if this is going to reach a broader audience. We're moving forward with the plan to turn this project into a feature documentary. We'll be doing interviews with the specific intention to include the best pieces of them into the documentary. We're planning to talk to theologians and psychologists to find out what connects these individual stories and why believing in God is so important and fundamental. 

A lot of time and resources go into creating these pieces. We are looking for any and all donations, but we are hoping that churches or religious organizations will join us at the $5,000 level to support this effort. These videos work as an amazing outreach to the community, while at the same time building community inside the body of Christ. In church, we see people Sunday after Sunday, but we don't know their story or why they believe. At the $5,000 level, churches can get 6-10 videos at a highly-discounted rate to share stories of their members with their church community. Using these interviews, we will be able to curate stories for the feature documentary, post new videos to our social media more frequently and reach a broader audience.

Thank you for your interest in our project! Please Like, Share and Comment on our Facebook page. Your support there means more than you'll know when it comes to reaching people with our message and garnering attention for distribution.