With Courageous, it was the first film where we really began to pay our cast. Because the church owned the previous films and we started so small, with such small budgets, people were just volunteering on the cast and crew.

I feel like God has intrusted a lot into me and I don't want to sit on it and be selfish. I want to think long term on how we can help this next generation of Christian filmmakers to make a big impact for God.

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.

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.

Jesus communicated parables to the secular people around him and he used stories that were very relevant to their lives, and He was taking heaven's truth and packaging it in an earthly context.

I'm not trying to force something, but I do enjoy working behind the scenes and I do enjoy bringing all of the ingredients to the kitchen so that we can make the movie.