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This millennial-coded 2011 DVD Bible study series uses Facebook lingo, which was very en vogue at the time, to encourage people to upgrade their relationship with Jesus from casual to committed. NOT A FAN, the brainchild of minister Kyle Idleman, uses a clickbait-style title to grab your attention: what do you mean you're "NOT A FAN" of Jesus? What Idleman means is that on Facebook at the time, you could click a thumbs up to "become a fan" of something you liked, a shallow and performative gesture that serves as a metaphor for going through the motions of Christianity without participating with your full heart. Going to church every Sunday is meaningless without loving the process. To illustrate this, Idleman released a serial drama of 6 DVD study episodes about fictitious Eric Nelson, a cutthroat executive and "pleasure seeking rebel" who commits his life to Christ after a stress-induced heart attack. These episodes were condensed to a feature film, which we watched this week, with interstitial sermons narrated by Idleman himself. Nelson's family, shocked at his sudden transformation, does their best to keep up with his newfound enthusiasm but doesn't exactly love the life changes. The Nelsons go from a McMansion in the suburbs to a humble farmhouse, and Eric goes from the boardroom to the soup kitchen. They stay devoted to their patriarch and go along with what he says, but don't really "feel" the love and resent the new Christian austerity. A not-so-shocking tragic ending gives the Nelsons new perspective, and the entire family learns to be Followers of Jesus, not just Fans: people whose devotion to Christ has caused them to take on great sacrifice and inconvenience. Idleman basically says that if you're not feeling the burn of Christianity in your life, you're probably not going hard enough. NOT A FAN is delightful for its now-extremely-dated branding and vocabulary, but is overall a total slog, with constant scenes of death and suffering that don't do a good job of "selling" the Christian lifestyle to casuals. But then again, this DVD is for the Followers, NOT the Fans.
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