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Alex laughs, now, when he recalls how inexperienced he and the others were. "We'd drive over to Home Depot to buy our lights, and we'd start aiming them until it looked halfway decent, but Flywheel was very low in terms of production values," he says. "It should not have happened. The movie should not have worked."

But work it did, despite the odd calamity or two. The church had already booked a local theater for the premiere when the hard drive containing all the edits was accidentally destroyed only a couple weeks before showtime. Then the church's music minister lost the music files that he had recorded for the soundtrack. The Sherwood team worked round-the-clock for ten days to put the film back together, and finished the job a mere five and a half hours before the first matinee.

Much to their surprise, the film was a local hit, and played for six weeks in Albany, plus several weeks in other towns. The film proved even more successful after Sherwood released it on DVD, in a two-disc set complete with bonus features. And Sony released a slightly shorter "director's cut" last year through its Provident label, which is geared to the faith-based market.

"I remember thinking it would be great if we sold a thousand DVDs, and now we're over 150,000 DVDs, just on that film," marvels Alex. Stephen notes that although there was little promotion for Flywheel, "word of mouth has so carried that baby."

Then came Facing the Giants, which depicts a high-school football coach struggling with a losing team, the possible loss of his job, and various problems at home before God intervenes. The film became a national cause cé;lèbre when word got out that the MPAA ratings board might have given it a pg rating, rather than a g, because of its evangelistic elements.

Pundits raged. Members of Congress threatened to investigate the MPAA for possible anti-Christian bias. And the film capitalized on the free publicity by opening in over 400 theaters and grossing over $10 million—a total bested by only a few independent Christian films, all of which had much, much bigger budgets. The film has since gone on to sell about 1.5 million copies on DVD, says Catt.

As per standard industry practice, most of the money remained with the theaters or with Provident, which distributed and marketed the film. But the church did get a small cut; they refuse to say how much, but it was enough to allow them to move ahead faster than expected on an 82-acre sports park—complete with baseball fields, tennis courts, a fishing pond, and an equestrian center—open to the wider community of Albany.

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