Charles Mulli, left, Paul Boge, right
Paul Boge, the Winnipeg engineer-author-filmmaker with a heart for Kenya, will make a return visit to Thompson Feb. 27 to March 1 as guest speaker at this year’s annual Thompson Christian Centre Fellowship’s Family Enrichment weekend, says Pastor Ted Goossen.
“He will speak at the Friday night banquet sharing about his work and how he integrates his faith into his work environment,” Goossen said. “Saturday morning brunch Paul will share about his newly released children’s book – The Biggest Family in the World – an illustrated book on the Charles Mulli orphanage in Kenya.”
Mulli was a poor abandoned six-year-old Kenyan boy who grew up to become successful, powerful and very rich, but decided to sell all he had to rescue street children whose condition reflected his own childhood. Saving one child has turned into rescuing thousands for Mulli.
Faye Hall, administrative assistant for 54-year-old Winnipeg Juno-winning singer-songwriter Steve Bell’s Signpost Music and IncarNATION Ministries, who is herself an increasingly noticed artist, spent two years creating 32 paintings that capture Mulli’s life for Boge’s The Biggest Family in the World. “She has done an indescribable work,” Boge blogged last Sept. 8. “I could not even dream of the paintings being this good.”
Boge, 41, is an award-winning author and has also written The Urban Saint: The Harry Lehotsky Story; Father to the Fatherless: The Charles Mulli Story; Hope for the Hopeless: The Charles Mulli Mission; and most recently, The Biggest Family in the World, chronicling the life of Charles Mulli in an illustrated children’s book published last December.
He has also written two novels in a potential trilogy, The Chicago Healer in 2004, and The Cities of Fortune in 2006.
Boge was last the keynote guest speaker at Thompson Christian Centre Fellowship’s annual family enrichment weekend five years ago in 2010, when he talked about his then recently published book, The Urban Saint: The Harry Lehotsky Story, which explored the life of old west end Winnipeg inner city pastor Harry Lehotsky, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2006 at age 49.
Boge won Word Guild’s best new Canadian author award in 2003 for his first book, The Chicago Healer, published the following year.
In addition to being an author, Boge, is a consulting mining engineer and capital project manager with the family firm Boge & Boge Consulting Engineers in Winnipeg, and no stranger to Thompson. He lived and worked here for nine months in 2003, five months in 2005 and for another 10 months in 2007, while working on three separate surface projects for Vale, and doing much of his writing in his apartment at night.
Boge is also behind FireGate Films, an independent Winnipeg company that made the 2006 feature-length movie Among Thieves, with Boge writing, directing and producing the film, which explores the possibility the end is in sight for the United States dollar as the world’s reserve currency, as Gulf Arab countries including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar have contemplated ending dollar dealings for oil and moving to a basket of currencies including the euro and Chinese yuan or renminbi. The last Middle East oil producer to sell its oil in euros rather than U.S. dollars was Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1990.
Boge is also the co-ordinator for the fifth annual Winnipeg Real to Reel Film Festival at North Kildonan Mennonite Brethren Church, running this year from Feb. 17-22. He is a member of the church.
On March 1, the Sunday night wrap up for Thompson Christian Centre Fellowship’s Family Enrichment weekend will include the traditional free chili dog supper.
Following the chili dog supper, there will be a free showing of the 2003 movie Flywheel. Alex and Stephen Kendrick, who are both associate pastors on the staff of Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Georgia, conceived the idea for Flywheel in the spring of 2002 after they saw the results from Barna Research Group demonstrating empirically popular culture movies and television shows are more influential in American society than the Christian church.
Flywheel, which tells the story of a dishonest used car salesman who comes to grips with his need for God, relied on untrained actors from the Sherwood Baptist Church congregation to play all the roles, debuting as an independent film on a single Carmike Theatre screen in Albany, Georgia in April 2003 and ran for six weeks initially, often outdrawing Hollywood films on adjoining screens.
Then came Facing the Giants in 2006 and in 2008 Fireproof, made on a $500,000 budget, but generating more than $33.4 million at the box office, making it the highest-grossing independent film of the year. Their most recent film, Courageous, was released in September 2011. It was produced with a budget of $2 million and has grossed more than $34.5 million to date. Facing the Giants, which grossed more than $10 million; Fireproof, which grossed more than $33 million; and Courageous have a combined gross of nearly $80 million at the box office, with a combined budget of less than $4 million.
The Kendicks wrapped up principal photography on their fifth movie, War Room, last July in and around Charlotte, North Carolina. It is their first project independent of Sherwood Pictures, the movie ministry of Sherwood Baptist Church. It being produced by Kendrick Brothers Productions with Provident Films and AFFIRM Films in distribution partnership. Provident Films, a division of Provident Music Group, develops, produces and markets faith-based films. Nashville-based Provident Music Group is a division of Sony Music Entertainment. AFFIRM Films is a division of Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions (SPWA), a Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) company, which is a subsidiary of Sony Entertainment Inc., which in turn is a subsidiary of Tokyo-based Sony Corporation.
It is also the first Kendrick brothers project shot outside their hometown of Albany, Georgia. It drew more than 1,000 volunteers from 85 churches in the Charlotte area who stepped up and reached across denominational lines to support the production. Pre-production began in 2013 and the movie is in post-production currently and scheduled to be released Aug. 28. The Kendricks remain associate pastors at Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Georgia.
Each Kendrick brothers film explores a subject important to Christians and the Christian life: personal integrity in Flywheel; resilient faith in Facing the Giants; loving marriages in Fireproof and heroic parenting in Courageous. War Room’s focus on prayer strategically highlights a subject of interest to a majority of Americans. According to a National Opinion Research Center survey on frequency of prayer, nearly 90 per cent of Americans claim to pray regularly. Some 60 per cent say they pray at least once a day – for Christians, that number grows to 84 per cent, according to a U.S. News and Beliefnet online poll. Almost 80 per cent of American Christians say they pray most often at home.
A family-friendly drama, War Room is about learning to fight the right kinds of battles. Filled with humor, wit and heart, it follows Tony and Elizabeth Jordan, a middle-class couple, and their daughter, Danielle, as they struggle through personal, marital and spiritual issues. Their lives are forever changed after Elizabeth meets an elderly widow who helps her develop a secret prayer room in her home.
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