Kirk Cameron says God’s message is ‘Unstoppable’

9/21/2013

Kirk Cameron has a new movie about faith and tragedy. Though titled Unstoppable, it stops after a very limited nationwide run—one night only, on Tuesday—and it will be shown on two screens in the Toledo area, at 8 p.m. at the Fallen Timbers 14 in Maumee and Toledo's Franklin Park 16. It will be released on DVD in 2014.

Unstoppable will be presented as a live event by NCM Fathom Events. Mr. Cameron had a similar movie event in 2012, showing his film Monumental.

Mr. Cameron, who is now a prominent figure among Christians, “kind of a traveling pastor,” he said, after earlier being the teenage star of the Growing Pains TV sitcom, will host the moviecast from Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., where he will introduce the film, musicians Mandisa and Warren Barfield will perform, and other guests will speak.

In Unstoppable, “You don't hear me interviewing professors and theologians,” Mr. Cameron said. “I simply take you into the heart of that book that's sitting on your shelf at home,” the Bible.

“We dive into the garden of Eden and witness the tragedy of Adam and Eve,” Mr. Cameron said. “We see that tragedy has been part of the story since the very beginning, and I think it's going to be very intriguing for the viewers to watch this.”

Unstoppable gets close to tragedy. Mr. Cameron said that when his friend Matthew, 15, died, he took cameras to Matthew's funeral and burial and was “able to give the viewers of the movie a very intimate perspective.” He said that “it was very important to me to be very discreet, and we were, didn't interfere with things going on there.”

Though he is involved in the nonfiction film as the star and writer (Darren Doane is the director and editor), he said, “This is not a documentary. This is much more of a very personal video journal. I have been researching the whole idea of God in the midst of tragedy for 25 years. My wife and I started and run a camp for terminally ill children and their families, so we deal with this every year.”

Mr. Cameron said that the question of God in tragedy did not affect his own faith, “but for a mother and father to deal with losing and burying a child, there is a ripping of the heart that I wanted to deal with.”

He said that he became a Christian when he was “17 or 18 years old, when somebody invited me to church and I heard the gospel.” He said when he was growing up, his family “did not go to church, never talked about God, and I declared myself an atheist because of my science teacher.”

When he became a Christian he developed a worldview, he said, in which “I have faith in God and not that we have evolved from a rock, not from worshiping the environment or endangered bugs.”

Mr. Cameron has generated controversy for the intensity and passion of his faith. The film trailer for Unstoppable was briefly prohibited on Facebook and YouTube, being labeled unsafe and abusive. More than 500,000 people protested and it was then allowed, a media release from Mr. Cameron's publicists stated.

“When you take a position and have a conviction about truth, people aren't going to like what you have to say,” Mr. Cameron said. “My concern is to advance the [godly] kingdom, advance the hope, lead by example as a husband and a father.” He and his wife, Chelsea, who was also Mr. Cameron's on-screen love interest in Growing Pains, have six children, ages 10 to 16.

“And by the way, I think controversy is not always a bad thing. Jesus was controversial,” as were Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln, and George Washington, he said. “It's through controversy that people often wake up and smell the coffee and say, 'What's going on here? Do we need to rethink something here?'”

Mr. Cameron said, without rethinking, that "God is there. The question is why does he allow and ordain things to happen the way that they happen? Isn't there a door number 2? Those are the questions, I believe, that are reserved for heaven." On earth, he said, "God steps into the suffering with us and he takes it on himself and he walks through it with us and he uses it to create something in you that is unstoppable."