Interview (Written): Alex Kendrick and Stephen Kendrick (“War Room”)

An interview with War Room’s co-writers Alex Kendrick and Stephen Kendrick (Alex also directed the movie). The faith-based movie has over-performed box office expectations grossing over $15M in its first week in theaters.

GH: Tell us about War Room- what inspired you to make a film about prayer?

Alex: We spent a season in prayer after Courageous and felt like the Lord was prompting us to make a movie where we call the church back to prayer- I’m talking about intense, desperate prayer, seeking Him and His intervention. So in War Room, we used the analogy of a military war room; when the military goes into a battle, they assemble the leaders, they look at what the enemy is doing, and they form a strategy. After calling it whatever resources are needed, they disseminate that strategy to the troops in the field, and then engage in battle.

In our spiritual lives, we too often run into situations with our own logic. We get in over our heads, then wonder where God, is and run back to Him in crisis mode, saying “Where are you?” We should really go to the Lord first and seek Him; God has a solution to everything we will ever face. We’re reminding people of how crucial it is to seek the Lord.

Steven: Alex and I grew up in a praying home. We saw the weaknesses of the church but we saw authentic Christianity lived out at home by our parents. We’ve seen God work mightily through answered prayer; we attend a praying church, and every one of our films has been the result of a long string of one answered prayer after another.

We are personally passionate about this issue; we can tell a huge difference when we pray and when we don’t. The counsel that comes from the Lord is a thousand times better than anything we can come up with in our own human wisdom. There was a sense of rightness about War Room — it was a timely message for the Church right now with where our culture is going, it feels morally like America is sinking even faster than the Titanic going down. But when you look at Scripture and Christian history, it was in very desperate times that God’s people would unite and pray to the Lord, and He would show up in power.

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GH: From a national perspective, what do you hope will come from War Room?

Alex: If people are motivated to take the next step in their prayer life when they leave the theater, and go home and begin deepening their own prayer life, then that’s success for us. Anything that will draw us closer to God and keeps us clean before Him, we’re all about. That’s our hope for the response to war room and really the resources that accompany it. In our lives, we’ve seen that God is not limited by anything, and He can do way more than we can even imagine. We’re humbled by it…but it causes us to pray even bigger, and believe that God can do even more.

For more of the interview, go here.