Recently, I got to speak on a Sunday evening at FBC, Covington, GA, and I found myself in a familiar setting, though I’d never been there. You see, the town, not far southeast of Atlanta, is something of a movie set, with all sorts of familiar TV series (e.g., The Dukes of Hazard, In the Heat of the Night, and The Vampire Diaries) and movies (e.g., My Cousin Vinny, Sweet Home Alabama, and Remember the Titans) shot there.

Reading through material on the town, I saw that portions of an unforgettable, black-and-white, Christian movie—A Man Called Peter—were filmed there in 1955. Marshall, who went on to become chaplain of the U. S. Senate, once pastored First Presbyterian Church in  Covington before heading to pastorates in Atlanta and Washington, D. C. When filmmakers came to Covington to capture scenes of his ministerial beginnings, they found First Methodist Church (pictured here) more photogenic, so they used it as a stand-in for the real thing. 

Marshall was an eloquent Scot, who, for instance, prayed, "O Lord our God, even at this moment as we come blundering into Thy presence in prayer, we are haunted by memories of duties unperformed, promptings disobeyed, and beckonings ignored. Opportunities to be kind knocked on the door of our hearts and went weeping away . . ." And his wife Catherine became a woman of letters, penning the biography on which the movie was based as well as a novel, Christy, which inspired a 1990s CBS series about the work of a teacher in poverty-stricken Appalachia.

Covington brought to mind my environs as a church planter on Chicago’s North Shore. Thanks in large part to John Hughes, the contiguous towns in which we lived and worked were movie sets in their own right, where we would regularly pass homes, schools, businesses, parks, and beaches appearing in such films as Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Uncle Buck, and Home Alone. 

Speaking of Home Alone, we lived for a couple of years a short block from the Home Alone church (Trinity Methodist, Wilmette), the one where Kevin (Macaulay Culkin) hid out in the manger scene and later met his scary old neighbor at a Christmas eve service. And much as the Covington crew took liberties with reality to give Marshall a suitably august church building, the North Shore movie craftsmen played fast and loose with settings. Remember the scene where Kevin, terrified by that same scary old neighbor, ran out of a store with a unbought toothbrush, slid across an icy pond between a hockey player’s legs, dashed across a pedestrian bridge while a commuter train passed underneath, and then walked forlornly down a residential street near his home? Well, the route covers about five miles, starting in Glencoe, continuing through Hubbard Woods, and ending in Wilmette. Why in the world would he walk five miles for a toothbrush, and wouldn’t he be more gassed at the end of an 8K scramble back to the house?

Never mind. It’s movie magic. Artistic license. Typically harmless, and often effectual to good ends. Of course, be wary. You can be played by bad guys. But not always. And not in these cases.