more great listening

We attended an evening with Charles Price event last night -- a dinner/celebration banquet at the Ramada Place Hotel in Abbotsford.

We sat with a couple we'd never met before and in the course of getting acquainted, found the gentleman was a roofer (our son is a roofer, so some instant common ground) whose avocation is acting. We were sitting with Andrew Abrahams, an actor who has played parts like C. S. Lewis in "The Shadowlands," Atticus Finch in "To Kill a Mockingbird" and others. He has acted with Abbotsford's faith-based Gallery 7 Theatre Company as well as the drama department in his church, Northview Community.

We had an interesting discussion about drama and its place in church culture. His convictions about how a Christian participates in this art were -- well, refreshing. Not every Christian actor feels as strongly as he does about not compromising his principles. We were formerly subscribers to Pacific Theatre in Vancouver (another faith-based company), but didn't renew our subscription this year -- even though the acting was superb -- because so many of their plays were laced with nasty language, often, it seemed to us, gratuitous.

Andrew has noticed something interesting. When he asks a non-Christian director if he can skip the swearing bits in a script, no problem. But when he puts the same request to a Christian director, there's a lot more resistance. I wonder why. We agreed that in all our time of attending theatre, we'd never heard the complaint that a play would have been so much better with more swearing.


Then Charles Price spoke. He is the pastor of People's Church in Toronto and speaker on the popular weekly TV program Living Truth. What a great communicator! Not only is he a fabulous story teller with a dry sense of humor but also a meaty, interesting, and inspiring Bible teacher.

Living Truth is now being broadcast in all kinds of places. It can be seen in the U.S., Australia, across India, UK and Europe as well as South Korea.

The Living Truth website has also been updated. Visitors can now get Price's weekly 45-minute message as an MP3 download for the week after it is broadcast. They can also listen to other messages (Resample versions - not quite the entire message it seems). Right now a series on the life of Abraham is running.