There must be a stronger foundation than mere friendship or sexual attraction. Unconditional love, agape love, will not be swayed by time or circumstances.

But after about a year praying, there was just this clear direction. The leadership team believed that God was leading us to focus on fatherhood. If God is leading, then God will provide. So we begin to get storyline ideas that lined up with the subject of fatherhood that we're working on and fitting, and we were thinking, okay this is good. At the same time, as we are studying scriptures and we're on our journey as fathers, we are learning about fatherhood every day.

Alex [Kendrick] and I started out the whole film-making journey as a desire to reach people for Christ and try to impact their lives for him.

Excellence means representing the reputation of Christ well. It means doing all things as best as you can...

Love chooses to believe the best about people. It gives them the benefit of the doubt. It refuses to fill in the unknowns with negative assumptions. And when our worst hopes are proven to be true, love makes every effort to deal with them and move forward. As much as possible, love focuses on the positive.

By the time we got to Courageous, we were bringing in more outsiders, so any time we would bring in outsiders, we would offer to pay them, and [as for volunteers from] the church, because they were getting the benefit of the income to all the ministries of the church and the mission, the building program and all those things, they knew up-front that they were volunteering and gladly did so.

With every movie, we will spend a season of prayer just asking God what's on his heart, and we spent about a year, two years, in prayer, trying to figure out the direction for the next film.