GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — How do you love each other while you disagree?
Such is the premise of Leap of Faith, a recently released documentary featuring twelve Grand Rapids pastors who attend a series of retreats in an attempt to find friendship and fellowship, despite deeply held differences in opinion.
Directed by Nicholas Ma and distributed by Picturehouse, the film's characters were brought together by The Colossian Forum, a Grand Rapids-based ministry founded by Michael Gulker. The Colossian Forum works with people, churches and schools to create "healthy conflict cultures," by using disagreement "as a driver for connection," according to its website, and bases its work upon Colossians 1:17: "He is before all things, and in him all things hold together."
Watch the trailer for 'Leap of Faith':
In September, the film premiered in Grand Rapids at Celebration Cinema Grand Rapids North.
"Every aspect of the word different," said Dr. James Stokes, senior pastor at New Life Tabernacle Church of God in Christ, describing the diverse backgrounds of the pastors who participated in the documentary, including himself.
Different denominations. Different political persuasions. Different races, genders and sexual orientations.
"How could we share the same space together without any casualties?" Stokes said in an interview with FOX 17.
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In addition to meeting at each other's churches "at least once a month," the pastors together attended three retreats over the course of a year where worship, activities and discussions were led by Gulker and The Colossian Forum.
"Vulnerability is not a weakness. Vulnerability is not a choice," Gulker said at the beginning of the documentary, reading from a book in a rural cottage. "The only choice we have as we mature is now we inhabit our vulnerability."
When differences in opinion and worship style welled to the surface on the first retreat, Reverend Molly Bosscher, a rector at St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, thought about abandoning the documentary: "Lots of times where I thought, 'Oh my gosh.' Where I had to say to myself, 'Molly, don't show exactly what you're feeling on your face.'"
A self-described theological conservative and political liberal, Bosscher wears her heart on her clerical collar. Still, she returned for the second retreat, choosing to live in the tension of disagreement.
If she had left, her life "would have been less for it."
In the midst of discussions about sexuality, race, class and other societal issues, Bosscher made a friend: James Stokes.
"A month without James is not a good month," Bosscher said. "Relationships are really what hold us together. It's not what we think. It is the way we interact with one another."
The two pastors' Grand Rapids churches sit less than two miles apart. If not for Leap of Faith, though, they say their paths likely would have never crossed.
"Most of us go to churches with people who worship like us," said Stokes, referencing Martin Luther King Jr, who called Sunday mornings "the most segregated time in America."
Now, Stokes calls Bosscher "the coolest pastor I've ever seen."
"We all were able to sit and talk and listen," Stokes said. "Not just tolerate, because I don't like that word, tolerate, but we really embraced each other."
"We're commanded to love each other, but we learn to like each other," he said.
Leap of Faith will continue its theatrical run through Thursday, October 17 at Celebration Cinema Grand Rapids North and South.
