Jim Britts thought for sure he had declared the wrong college major. Britts graduated from Biola University in La Mirada, Calif., with a degree in screenwriting. But already he knew he was pointed to another career: That of a youth pastor. Working with kids steadily from the time he graduated from high school himself, he was already deeply in ministry before he left Biola with his diploma.
Turns out, Britts’ degree is paying serious dividends more than a decade after he graduated. The youth pastor wrote a screenplay for the film To Save a Life, the story of how a boy’s tragic suicide helps change the trajectory of many, many lives. It wasn’t long before the film had acquired a casting director, a cast of professional actors and some outside funding. The result: One of the slicker, grittier and perhaps better Christian films ever made.
YouthWorker Journal had a chance to talk with Britts about his screenplay writing, his work as a youth pastor and how the two nicely dovetailed — thanks, perhaps, to a little divine orchestration.
YouthWorker Journal: You’ve got an interesting background for this film, being both a screenwriter and youth pastor. I’m guessing you showed the film to your kids. What did they think of it?
Jim Britts: They saw it kind of through two lenses. They absolutely loved the film, first of all. We’ve shown it to a lot of youth workers too, and they loved it, but teenagers love it more than anybody. My kids loved it as a movie, [but lots of them were in it, too, and so] every 12 seconds you hear someone go ‘hey, that’s me!’ So I try to tell them that once it’s in theaters and you have all your non-Christian friends there, you can’t do that every 12 seconds or they’re never going to get into the film. But they are very fired up. It was cool getting to do that with them.
YWJ: I imagine you see quite a bit of yourself in here, too, more figuratively than literally. How much of this was based off of your real-life experiences as a youth pastor?
JB: I would say every character was definitely based off a student that I’ve had in our ministry, and in writing the script, I envisioned different students. A bunch of the scenes were definitely all based on real life. The whole story isn’t a true story, but I sure had to pick up kids at parties before. The beer pong scene (Jake, a hot-shot basketball player and champion beer pong player, walks away from a critical “match,” deciding that beer pong goes against his newfound Christian values) was actually based off a kid in our group who is now a leader in our junior high ministry. First time he came to our church he came hung over. But he started going to our high school group and he became a Christian not too much later. He shared with me how he was the top beer pong player in the area and, just after accepting Christ, was in a match. It was the exact scene. He dropped the ball in the cup and walked away. What’s cool is that that kid is actually the guy playing against Jake in that scene. That’s his story and he got to be the guy in the scene.
YWJ: I gotta say, that party almost looked a little too fun. You can definitely see the attraction in some ways of being a really good beer pong player, just because of the scene.
JB: That scene and the other party scene were the hardest for me to be a part of. Two or three times in between takes I had to say, “I have to remind you that this life leads to sorrow,” because they were looking like they were having a lot of fun. It was hard for me as a youth pastor to watch, even though I knew they were acting.
There is a reason why so many people go to parties … I have seen so many faith-based films where the party looks really dorky and cheesy it’s hard to imagine that people would ever want to do this. But we really wanted to convey that what God can do in someone’s life is so much better. People have no idea that it can get so much better than that.
YWJ: The crux of the whole story revolves around Roger, the boy who committed suicide, and what we see of his journey trying to find meaning. One of the movie’s most powerful moments comes when Chris, the youth pastor, admits to Jake that he missed his own chance to save Roger when Roger came in and Chris just didn’t have time for him. Was that something based on your own experience?
JB: That exact story hadn’t happened to me [when I wrote the screenplay], but it actually has since we made the film—a kid who came to our group several times and then committed suicide. I think a lot of youth workers really connected with [that moment]. It’s really painful, knowing we only have one shot at some of these students, and we can miss it.
Its not totally on us, and we need to train up our whole youth ministry in being welcoming and loving from the get-go. Within the first five minutes a student walks in, they’re going to make a decision as to whether they’ll come back or not, and that might be the only chance we get. Absolutely I’ve missed with some kids. I’ve even felt sometimes that, as they’re walking out, that ‘we’re going to call them and invite them back, but I think we blew it.’
YWJ: That must be one of the biggest challenges of being a youth pastor—connecting with these kids who really need it. You want to make church and youth group engaging for the kids who are there, you want to make it fun—but you want to make it meaningful to, and that must be such a painfully hard line to walk.
JB: About two years ago, I was in our church prayer room, and for some reason I started writing down all the past student leaders we had had in our student ministry from the seven years before. And wrote down about 60 names and, of those 60, 31 of them were either not walking with God now or I didn’t know where they were at. And these are my student leaders. I was crushed, going, ‘I think we were working so hard at making it a ministry that students really loved, that we didn’t set them up to have a faith that would last.’ We’ve changed how we do things a lot in the last two years. We have to spend at least as much time helping kids have a faith that is going to bear fruit that lasts as much as just having a ministry that’s enjoyable right now. I think that’s a huge thing. The success of a good youth pastor is [based on] where your kids are five or 10 years after they graduate—not just how many do you have in the room right now.
YWJ: That is a big deal. I thought I could detect a little of your frustration in the scene with the sock (where youth are guzzling sodas using a dirty sock as a filter). It’s one of those fun games that really draws some attention, but then you have Jake standing up, saying essentially that ‘people are dying and we’re drinking through a sock.’ What advice would you give to other youth pastors on how to make youth ministry a little more meaningful for the kids, and to make fruit that lasts?
JB: First, there’s nothing wrong with games at all. In fact, we say in our Tuesday nights high school ministry that our goal would be that, in the first 20 minutes, every single kid splits a gut laughing. That really emotionally prepares them for what’s going to happen for the rest of the night.
But the biggest thing that we’ve learned in having fruit that lasts, is that if a kid is not madly in love with the word of God by the time they graduate from high school, they’re not going to make it. Ron Luce came out with a stat recently that 88 percent of students involved in youth ministry are not going to church within a year of graduation. If a kid doesn’t know how to feed himself spiritually on his own, we consider him a goner. We don’t give up on him, but [to keep that from happening] we’ve changed how we do small groups. In our small groups, we say that every student is responsible for reading the Bible on their own … and they teach the other people in their group. If a kid is not reading the Bible on their own and coming in and sharing what they’re learning, we’re setting them up to fail. It’s been a slow learning curve, and when we started doing that a lot of kids rebelled, but now two years later the vast majority of our kids understand that, ‘oh, that’s what Christians do, they read the Bible on their own and share it with other people.’
[The groups are small, too]. We’re not looking for small group leaders; we’re looking for shepherds, and you can’t shepherd more than 3-5 people. We tell the youth workers, let your leaders just have a couple kids, so you need way more adult leaders. Make the goal to ask how [the kids are] going spiritually, what’s their next steps—not just ‘hey are we having a good discussion.’
YWJ: Let me ask you, how long have you been a youth pastor?
JB: 10 and a half years.
YWJ: That takes some energy – even for two years or 2 months – because youth pastors are really on duty all the time, aren’t they?
JB: It’s definitely a lifestyle. My wife is a high school English teacher, too, so teenagers are part of our life, for sure.
YWJ: What do you think is the most trying part of your job?
JB: I would say the most trying thing, for me, is feeling like I’m not making a difference at times, and apathy among students. That’s what I felt for sure when I sat in that prayer room and looked at all the student leaders that weren’t walking with God. My thoughts were going, ‘is what I’m doing, does it matter?’ And students don’t ever say, ‘hey that was a great talk.’ There are times when I drive home and I go, ‘man I would love just a 9-5 job … ‘
YWJ: What keeps you going?
JB: I love the, as I call it, the ‘get-it factor’—when a student gets it. If I have one student in our ministry who gets it, it’s so worth it. We have a bunch right now. … I love it. The reason why I think I want to be in this ministry forever is that students are so moldable at this point in their lives. When they get it, everything changes and their whole future changes, and you can be a dream-giver in their lives and come alongside them and go, ‘hey, God had bigger dreams for you. You can do this.’ They believe it. We have kids from our ministry who are missionaries right now, ones that are pastors, and these kids can go out and be world changers.
The cool thing about making this film was that it was a living example for every student in our ministry, that, ‘hey, if you have a dream, you can do it.’ They heard my talk years ago—that I had this idea for a movie script—and they saw the whole process and they got to be part of making this film. That’s our favorite thing – figure out what God called you to do and then do it.
YWJ: I gotta tell you, this was a pretty impressive film—and pretty different from other Christian films I’ve seen. Was that your intention, to break away from that Christian-ese mold we’ve seen in some other films?
JB: We never really set out to make a Christian film. We said we wanted to make a film for teenagers that would never set foot in a church but would go to the movies—something that would reach them. Obviously youth group kids love this film like crazy, but that was not my first thought. We wanted to make a movie that really mattered, and that empowered students to be able to reach out to their friends.
My wife and I watched at least one faith-based film a week for the whole year before the movie was made, and I would say we learned a lot. One of our core values [in making the film] was for sure, cheesiness equals sin, and we said this thing has got to be very real. There are so many films out there for teenagers and most of them deal with the tough issues—even the non-faith-based ones—[but they have] real shallow characters and they laugh at some of these issues that we really dealt with seriously. We wanted to make a movie that mattered.
YWJ: One of the things that struck me was that the moment of conversion, when the main character is saved, takes place here at about the mid-point of the movie, not at the very end. And really, once Jake becomes a Christian, we see that his problems are just beginning.
JB: It was totally intentional. A lot of teenagers pray a prayer at some point, and then nothing happens. This movie is much more about the discipleship than it is about the conversion, so that was intentional.
I’ve seen this story a hundred times, that a student accepts Christ and then their world falls apart and then they blame it on God. If we’ve given them a faith where they believe that accepting Christ means everything is going to go great, then we’ve turned them away from God for the rest of their lives because God didn’t deliver. And so I really wanted to paint that picture too that [faith] is about trusting God no matter what. The truth is that probably bad things will still happen, and are you going to trust God through that and do what’s right anyway?
YWJ: You mentioned you wanted to make this film real and believable. But obviously some Christians are going to be fairly troubled by the language in here or the party scenes. What would you say to them?
JB: Another big [criticism] we get is that the movie never directly presents the gospel.
The first thing I’d say, as a screenwriter, is there are probably no other screenwriters that that pray over every curse word, and I did. I don’t cuss at all, and it’s not cool in our ministry. There are just a couple times where we needed to put some b-rated curse words in there (we didn’t go to the big ones) so it would be real. And if you look at it, most of them happen at the beginning of the film. Doug (the movie’s bully) says one or two things at the beginning, and so he doesn’t have to cuss for the rest of the movie because you already get, ‘oh, this is a guy who does that.’ I learned that in screenwriting classes back in college. If you put a lot of violence in the first two minutes of the movie, you don’t have to put violence later on because people get that, ‘oh, that’s what the nature of the film is like.’ So there are actually very few [bad] words. I wrote it in a way where I didn’t have to put very many cuss words in there at but just enough at the beginning so people would go this is real. And every kid in youth groups, unless they’re home-schooled, are hearing much worse words every single day. It’s reality.
As far as not sharing the faith, that’s very intentional. We didn’t set out to make a film that someone could walk out and become a Christian. Instead, I … wanted to make a film that would empower [teens] to share their faith. So if someone says ‘why didn’t the movie share the faith,’ I say ‘that’s your job.’
YWJ: I doubt very many people are saved just by watching a movie. It takes kind of that one-on-one connection, doesn’t it?
JB: Absolutely. So in our youth ministry, we actually wrote a ‘how to present the Gospel using the film.’ Our kids are going to be walking on campuses and a student who says ‘I saw the movie you told me to see,’ they can go, ‘there is a deeper message to it.’ We wanted to set up kids to be able to be the messengers, not just say see this film and then good luck.
YWJ: So what’s your plan for the foreseeable future, to keep writing and being a youth pastor at the same time?
JB: Yes, it is. I love it. Its wearing two hats right now where I am on the phone with a producer or director and then I am on the phone with a 7th grader the next minute. Two different worlds. I sure love the combination.
More to explore:
Youth Culture Lesson: Devos to Go
‘To Save a Life’ Resources
Watch the movie trailer
