T.D. Jakes in the Movies

Continued from page 2

This is about marriage like Not Easily Broken was also about marriage. I think that we have to do something positive to project the significance of marriage today at a time in our society that more and more people are questioning the relevance of the family unit overall. I think that this is a subtle way to suggest to people that relationships are important and marriage is important and that it’s worth fighting for. But I think to say that Jumping the Broom is about marriage would be a myopic description of it. In reality I think that marriage is a canvas that it paints for them but it also paints in rich and vibrant colors other ideas about culture, about class, about one family [that] is from one sociological economic level of life, the other one is from another and how they struggle to become a unit, how their differences threaten the survival of the marital unit.

I think that it’s something that we should look at today as more and more we begin to recognize that some of the largest barriers between people today are not always race but sometimes class and economy. So I think it’s a very contemporary cutting edge look at families and at life and how can two very different families come together in a mass and function effectively and it’s funny and it’s humorous but it’s also real. Anybody who has ever brought one side of the family together with the other side in your own life soon runs into the fact and isn’t that what the church is all about bringing together all types of people. Paul said I became all things to all people that some might be saved. The church is not an elitist club for yuppies who think they have arrived nor either the gathering of ghetto minded people who are oppressed economically but it is an amalgamation of people of diverse walks of life who have heard the clarion call to come to Christ.

I think that this film kind of addresses what all happens when we all try to get together and how we often don’t understand each other and what makes me want to get behind the message is because ultimately they find out that there’s more to unite them than there is to divide them. And I think that’s a message that our country needs to hear at a time that there is so much cynicism and so much animosity being hurled within the human family in general.