We all come into the world looking for someone looking for us.
—Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves
Growing up in the 1980s, I found that movies felt more like mirrors than mere entertainment. Stand by Me, Dead Poets Society, The Outsiders—these weren’t just films; they were companions that walked with me through the formative years of adolescence. Many years later, I now realize the impact those films had as they gave shape to many quiet questions: Who am I becoming? What will I stand for? How do I stay true to myself in a world that often asks me to conform? Looking back, I now see those movies as thresholds, moments of crossing, when something inside me shifted or awakened, and a deeper sense of self began to form.
I’ve come to believe that carefully chosen films can become sacred spaces for them too: not just entertainment, but invitation
As a Christian school teacher today, I watch my students wrestle with those same questions, often quietly, often beneath the surface. I’ve come to believe that carefully chosen films can become sacred spaces for them too: not just entertainment, but invitations—invitations to linger at the thresholds where questions of identity, belonging, and courage are already pressing in on their vulnerability, anxiety, and convictions. These stories help students navigate the in-between places of growing up, where innocence fades, complexity emerges, and faith begins to take deeper root.
Stories matter—not just that we tell them, but how we tell them. The right stories help students recognize and step into moments of courage, discovery, and transformation. These stories don’t just teach: they awaken. They help students cross the thresholds of adolescence into a deeper understanding of who they are and who God is calling them to become.
If, like me, you remember yourself as a child captivated at a campfire, where storytellers wove fiction into moral and formative experiences that stirred reverence and awe as the embers slowly dimmed, then you know the power of story. Today’s students experience coming-of-age films in much the same way. These stories open a space to explore what it means to live with integrity, courage, and compassion as they strive to examine and live out faith in a broken world.
Films like Akeelah and the Bee invite reflection on identity and perseverance. Eighth Grade speaks honestly about anxiety, loneliness, and the pressure to conform. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind helps students see innovation and resilience in the face of injustice and poverty. These stories ask essential questions: Are these characters trying to prove themselves, or are they discovering who they truly are? In asking that, students begin to reflect on their own lives through the lens of faith.
Sacred Screens in a Secular Age
As a teacher who believes that Christ is restoring all things, I want my students to grow not just academically, but emotionally and spiritually. That’s why I return each year to clips from Pay It Forward to explore author Curt Thompson’s insight: “Shame makes us hide; compassion helps us heal” (34). I’ve seen students moved to tears by the vulnerability of these characters, and more importantly, moved to action in their own relationships.
We are living in what Jonathan Haidt calls “the anxious generation” in his book of the same name: a time when young people are increasingly disconnected from embodied experiences and deep, meaningful relationships (9). This disconnection is fueling a growing mental health crisis and hindering spiritual growth. As Christian educators, we are called to respond with wisdom and compassion, dedicating ourselves to the holistic formation of our students.
I believe stories, especially well-told stories in film, can provide a spiritual jolt and reawaken wonder, empathy, and emotional courage.
I believe stories, especially well-told stories in film, can provide a spiritual jolt and reawaken wonder, empathy, and emotional courage. These stories offer the very thresholds of meaning and formation that today’s youth so desperately need. Haidt’s research offers a sobering backdrop. But film can offer a hopeful response to the very challenges he describes: the loss of relational learning, embodied presence, and emotionally formative spaces.
The right film, prayerfully chosen and thoughtfully engaged, can do more than support a lesson. It can become a spiritual invitation. In the Christian classroom, film can open space for reflection, formation, and transformation.
John O’Donohue speaks of “thresholds,” moments of change, charged with possibility and risk. In To Bless the Space Between Us, he writes: “Thresholds are places where the old and the new world touch, where something is ending and something else is waiting to begin . . . frontiers that cannot be crossed without the heart being passionately engaged and woken up” (49).
I’ve come to believe that certain films can function as thresholds for our students. When we enter these stories with eyes to see and ears to hear, film becomes more than entertainment: it becomes an encounter. These stories help students examine the world around them and the world within them, inviting wonder, empathy, and spiritual curiosity.
Movies, then, can become what Charles Taylor in A Secular Age calls “cross pressures,” spaces where the sacred still breaks through the secular, often in surprising ways (594). A well-chosen film can nudge a student to ask deeper questions; it can awaken sleepy hope; it can stir a passion a student had been unaware of. In these moments, a film isn’t just entertainment or curriculum support; it becomes an encounter, and this is where, in the new image- and visual-rich reality of students, the work of formation begins.
We now live in an age where belief and authenticity are constantly contested, not because faith has vanished, but because we are surrounded by competing narratives and a culture of expressive individualism. What Taylor calls “substation stories” urge us to consider a “radical reflectivity,” which allow us to start to dismantle our illusions (28–30). In this noisy, distracted world, film can cross the threshold of what Taylor calls a “sense of fullness” (5). These are the glimpses that awaken and stir our longing for something beyond. For our students shaped in a visual and digital culture, these moments act as echoes to Taylor’s “enchanted world” (25) and now, the sacred is able to haunt the secular. The right scene from a movie creates the tension between our “buffered selves” (27) and the mystery that lies in that space between our consciousness and spirit—a tension that calls to them, There must be more!
We now live in an age where belief and authenticity are constantly contested, not because faith has vanished, but because we are surrounded by competing narratives and a culture of expressive individualism.
Crossing the Threshold
In James K. A. Smith’s ably titled book, You Are What You Love, we are reminded that we are not simply thinkers or even believers; we are desiring creatures shaped by the stories and rhythms we inhabit, which are “shaped and configured by imitation and practice” (Smith 19). In this way, films function as cultural liturgies: patterned narratives that rehearse particular “visions of the good life” (Smith 19). Like the liturgies of worship, they form our imaginations and affections, inviting us to love rightly and to pay attention to what God is doing in the world.
Each film becomes a kind of threshold, a sacred space where formation can happen. Liturgies and thresholds are deeply connected. Both are transitional and invite transformation. Just as a worship liturgy moves us from distraction to presence, from confession to renewal, the right scene in a film can move a student from passive spectatorship to active participation in God’s unfolding story. In this way, movies move beyond mere instructional strategies. They become sacred invitations, a threshold that invites students into deeper understanding, compassion, and calling. This is an abridged version of this article. To read more, subscribe to Christian Educators Journal.
Works Cited
Haidt, Jonathan. The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Penguin, 2024.
O’Donohue, John. To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings. Doubleday, 2008.
Smith, James K. A. You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit. Brazos, 2016.
Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007.
Thompson, Curt. The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves. InterVarsity, 2015.
Colin Ward teaches social studies and Bible at Covenant Christian School in Leduc, Alberta. He has recently completed his doctor of ministry at Carey Theological College in Vancouver in the field of teacher efficacy and spiritual resiliency.