This is the 5th Anniversary of the first time my documentary Lead With Love was screened publicly, after I had carried around the truth of this story (as well as all of the hot media takes, death threats, and letters of support, from folks who weren’t there) privately for half a decade.
I remember, at the time, feeling like I needed to release this film in order to survive. All the projections, all the misinformation, all the hate, and all the love — it just needed to be informed.
Thank you to Revry for believing in this movie enough to stream it out to over 250 million homes in the years since. And thank you to the people from this film who ultimately took down the hateful Mars Hill Church and ideologies from the inside. It’s been gone for many years now and the world is entirely better for it.
Those of you who followed me while I was doing community work for Portland’s Q Center between 2010-2014 are most likely already familiar with the story of my Inter-Community Dialogue Project between the LGBTQ Community and Mars Hill Church…or, at least, you might think you are familiar.
I have been sitting on a documentary I made over the course of those years, but with everything going on in the world right now, it feels important to finally let people know what REALLY happened.
One major note that’s not captured in the film, is that Mars Hill Church members from our group subsequently denounced the teachings of their former leader and disassembled all of their congregations after we shot the final scenes.
Here is our story…
Watch “Lead With Love”
ABOUT THE FILM
What happens when an out, gay musician befriends an anti-gay church leader?
Notoriously anti-gay conservative evangelical megachurch Mars Hill landed in Portland, Oregon in 2011. The public reacted swiftly in protest of the arrival of these unwelcome ideals and the media picked up the story of their purchase of “the castle” immediately.
“People have been telling the story of what happened between me and Mars Hill Church completely wrong for years,” Lynn says about the controversial inter-community dialogue project, which he created. “I gave up correcting strangers and the media half a decade ago, but I also made this documentary as it was all happening so that the truth could someday be told. That someday is now.”