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Because of longstanding suspicions of Hollywood, some of them engendered by Joseph McCarthy's "red scare" of the 1950s, evangelicals were a bit slower to pick up on motion pictures as a medium for spreading the gospel.

The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association's World Wide Pictures tried to break that taboo, and Ken Anderson also produced a number of worthy films. But perhaps the most recognized evangelical film came from an unlikely source: a small production company in Des Moines, Iowa, called Mark IV Pictures. Russell Doughten Jr. and Donald W. Thompson combined to produce about a dozen movies—including, notably, A Thief in the Night—that demonstrated to many evangelicals the power of cinema to preach the gospel.

Aside from print, radio, television, movies, and now the Internet, evangelicals have also been quick to embrace communications technology in less spectacular ways: wireless microphones, electronic guitars and synthesizers, overhead projectors, and "canned" music accompaniment. Is there a single evangelical worship service in America today that is not recorded and copied onto cassette tapes for popular consumption?

Copyright © 2001 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

See also "A History of Evangelism and Mass Media," through Google's cache of the now-defunct site.

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February 19 2001, Vol. 45, No. 3