In this exclusive interview, Greg Leith, CEO of Convene, sits down with Dallas Jenkins, creator, director, and co-writer of The Chosen — the first-ever multi-season series about the life of Christ. 🎬 The Chosen has become the most successful crowdfunded media project in history, and in this conversation, Dallas shares the powerful story of how it all started… with failure. He opens up about the collapse of a Hollywood film, a spiritual breaking point, and the message God used to transform everything: “It’s not your job to feed the 5,000. It’s only to bring the loaves and fish.” Whether you’re a leader, creator, or simply someone wondering where God is in the middle of your struggle, this episode is for you.
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Watch the episode here
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From Failure To The Chosen With Dallas Jenkins
The Chosen: A Multi-Season Phenomenon
Dallas, it’s great to be with you. Thanks for having us on the set of The Chosen.
You are on the property where most of The Chosen is filmed. I’m glad to have you here in the Dallas area.
Thank you very much. It’s the first multi-season series about the life of Christ. It’s the number one crowdfunded media project in history, which raised $10 million. The largest before that was $5 million. It raised $10 million from 19,000 people. It’s the highest-rated faith film project of all time. Season 1 had 50 million views. Now, 261 million views. It has 7 million app downloads and is watched in 180 countries. For me, it’s real, funny, and fresh. Tell us about The Chosen.
You’ve covered some of the numbers that reflect the impact. You probably got them from me a little while ago.
Give us the latest.
The app downloads are well over ten million. Even me saying that is odd because I don’t focus on the numbers much. They’re just a measuring stick. Honestly, for me, what makes The Chosen what it is is that it’s made by me, who loves Jesus, believes the Bible is God’s word, and has no intention to make any kind of statement that hasn’t been made before.
I’m trying to capture the authentic Jesus and not ever contradict the character or intentions of Jesus in the gospels. However, the majority of the show isn’t from the Bible. You mentioned that this is a multi-season show. There have been movies and miniseries about Jesus, and I’ve seen almost all of them, but there’s never been a multi-season show.
What does that mean? It allows you to take the time to develop the characters and backstories that you rarely see in Jesus’ movies, either because they are strict verse-by-verse re-enactments, like the Jesus film, or some other Jesus projects where almost all you hear is narration. Someone is reading the Scripture, and you’re seeing it acted out. Maybe they’re not that strict, but they still are going from miracle to miracle and Bible verse to Bible verse. You never get to know much about the people that Jesus encountered because the gospels weren’t intended to be a TV show. They were Jesus’s greatest hits to prove that he was the Messiah.
You never get to know much about the people that Jesus encountered because the gospels weren't intended to be a TV show. They were Jesus' greatest hits to prove that he was the Messiah. Share on XWhat we have the opportunity to do is to explore the backstories, historical context, cultural context, and biblical context, and get you to meet these people who encountered Jesus and hopefully be impacted in the same way that they were. We do that by allowing you to identify with and see their struggles, their questions, and their concerns, and then, hopefully, also their answers and solutions.
Where we’ve managed to find, I believe, according to what viewers say, both Christian and non-Christian, is that we’ve found this sweet spot where much of the show is imagined. Meaning, it’s content that is not based directly on Scripture. It’s rooted in Scripture. We include scriptural stories. The majority of the content is based on context and things that aren’t necessarily in Scripture, while also maintaining the spirit of Scripture and the belief in Scripture.
Typically, you don’t find both. You typically see these Jesus projects or Bible projects where someone has some agenda or some statement, and they’re going to imagine what if. What if Jesus and Mary Magdalene had a relationship, or what if Jesus questioned His own divinity? We’re not doing any of that. That’s what seems to have made people like you and me, who love the Bible and don’t want it messed with, comfortable. At the same time, it’s satisfying those of us who go, “I want to know more. I want to get inside this. I want to experience what it was like back then in a truly human, authentic way, as opposed to something that’s more formal or more emotionally distant, like a lot of other Bible projects we’ve seen.” That covers the gamut of what The Chosen is. Two seasons have been released. As you and I talk, I’m in the midst of writing season three.
From Hollywood Dreams To Humble Beginnings
You know, but our audience may not know that it hasn’t always been the smooth, easy path to success for you. There was The Resurrection of Gavin Stone. I’d love you to share about that. You did a movie about shepherds or about the birth of Christ as seen through the eyes of the shepherds. Things didn’t go as well as they could, and you were in a difficult spot. Now, everything’s great, but God used those times. Maybe you didn’t feel like He was using them at the time. Talk about that.
You say everything’s great, but even before on my way here, I was dealing with multiple issues with the business. God has never let this project be easy, and that’s a good thing.
It’s a normal thing.
The Chosen was born from failure. That’s true. The Resurrection of Gavin Stone was a movie that I did a few years ago. If you haven’t heard of it, that explains the problem.
That explains everything.
I had an opportunity after fifteen-plus years in the business of having some varying degrees of success, but always on our terms. We were an independent company. My father and I had started this company, making movies. We were doing it outside the system, for the most part. We would make the movie and then attempt to sell it to Hollywood Studios.
I had some success, but it was always my goal to be affirmed by Hollywood. I wanted to make it. Making it means that someone else is spending the money for your project. It’s a Hollywood company and Hollywood producers, and you’re, in my case, a director who gets a chance to make a movie. That was especially the case that I had where I was in control of the content, but they were funding it. This was the big time. Some of the producers involved were some of the biggest producers in Hollywood who wanted to make a movie with me. They wanted to do multiple faith-based movies with me. It was the dream scenario.
I made the movie, and they loved it. It was tested by audiences. It got test scores higher than any movie that these companies had before. They were through the roof. We already started talking about what the next project was going to be, so I had movies lined up for the next several years. I was a director with a very bright future. In terms of my ego and confidence, I was more affirmed than I’d ever been because I was getting what I’d always wanted.
Then, the movie came out in theaters. I’ll never forget the day because it was inauguration day in 2016. It was January 20th. The movie completely bombed. Two hours into it, the numbers were clear. This was going to be lower than their lowest projections. In a couple of hours, I went from being a director with a very bright future to a director with no future. They were instantly like, “We don’t understand this business, the faith-based side of things.” They did it respectfully. They weren’t jerks about it, but they were like, “We’re going to go back to doing what we do best. It was nice working with you.”
My wife and I were so confused. Besides being heartbroken, there was this confusion that came into it. During the last few years, there were so many moments that seemed so clearly God-driven. Now that it has failed, you go, well, “God wasn’t in it. We missed the boat. We were wrong. We ignored God’s will and did our own thing. God wasn’t in it.
Now, what’s next? Is my career not something that God is endorsing?” You start to wonder, “Maybe I’m in the wrong business. Maybe I’ve missed the boat.” That afternoon, while we were in the midst of this confusion, at one point, my wife and I were in separate rooms. I remember the reason. I was praying, and she was praying. She came to me and said, “I believe God is pointing me strongly to the Feeding of the 5,000.”
That’s the story?
The Impossible Math of Faith: Learning From Failure
Yes, not her literally feeding 5,000 people. She said, “We need to read the Feeding of the 5,000 story. I also feel like God’s laying on my heart this phrase ‘I do impossible math.’” Whenever you feel like God is leading you towards something, you take it with a bit of a grain of salt because maybe it’s not necessarily God’s voice. It’s your own. You always test it. You always tread lightly because you don’t want to assume, “God spoke to me. Now let’s do whatever he tells us.” You always want to be somewhat measured. She was like, “I felt God had said very explicitly the Feeding of the 5,000, and, ‘I do impossible math.’”
Whenever you feel like God is leading you towards something, take it with a grain of salt, because it might not be God's voice, but your own. Share on XWe read the story a couple of times and noticed a few things that we hadn’t noticed before, even though we’ve heard the story hundreds of times. The main thing was that Jesus knew exactly what the issue or the problem was when all these 5,000-plus people were starving. In fact, he was the cause of it. He led them to the point of hunger where the only thing left was a miracle. He was the one who’d been speaking for three days.
In fact, when He was talking to the disciples about how hungry these people were, the disciples suggested, “We send them home to get food.” He was like, “If we send them home, they’re going to faint along the way.” That’s how tired they were. The day before, Jesus could have stopped and said, “You guys look hungry. You’d better go home, hustle, and get some food because we don’t have any. You’re clearly hungry.” He didn’t do that.
We thought, “Even though we’re in this moment of hunger and desperation doesn’t mean that God wasn’t part of the process.” In fact, sometimes, depending on your theology, either He allowed it or He caused it. I know that there are varying degrees on the doctoral spectrum, but let’s say for the sake of argument that He was at least part of the process of leading us to this hunger.
That was reassuring in the sense of, “It doesn’t mean that God’s been absent from this. What can we learn from this? This notion of impossible math, maybe this means that we’re at this place of desperation, but the miracle is coming. With these box office numbers that the industry is saying, we know what happened in the first few hours.
What’s going to happen the rest of the weekend is prescribed. We know how the rest of the weekend is going to look. Maybe God is going to do something miraculous here, and the numbers are going to magically turn around. We’re going to have this great story to tell.” That didn’t happen. We’re like, “We believe God is in this, but what in the world are we supposed to take from this? What is God doing?”
This notion of impossible math might mean we’re at a point of desperation — but it also means the miracle is coming. Share on XI got to a place where I was perfectly content to give up. Meaning, if I’m not supposed to make more movies, that’s fine, but I need to understand what happened. I’m writing out this memo, and I’m sure you’ve done this. Any good business leader has done this, where you do a postmortem. You don’t want to waste this failure. You want to learn from it. I’m writing out this fifteen-page memo of everything that I did wrong and everything that others did wrong, but I was genuinely taking the blame because it was ultimately my project. I’m analyzing, “Two years ago, I made this wrong choice. A year ago, I made this wrong choice. Here’s where I did something that didn’t work.”
I then get this note at 4:00 in the morning out of the blue from someone I’ve never met. It’s a Facebook friend. We talk maybe once a year. He doesn’t even say hi. He says, “Remember, it’s not your job to feed the 5,000. It’s only your job to provide the loaves and fish.” I honestly had a moment where I thought, “Did I tell someone what we talked about? Was my computer recording my wife and me?” I genuinely was like, “How in the world could this guy know what we’ve been thinking, working on, and praying through all day?”
You’re like, “That camera was on.”
It was so weird. I thought, “Who did I tell this to? I didn’t tell anybody. It was just my wife and me.” I go, “Before I respond to you, can I ask you what you’re doing up at 4:00 in the morning?” He says, “I’m in Romania. I’m in a different time zone. I’m visiting my brother.” I go, “Why did you say that to me?” He goes, “That wasn’t me. God told me to tell you that.”
I always get a little emotional telling the story, even though I’ve told it 100 times. I talked to him later. He told me that he was walking home from a grocery store, and God was like, “Tell Dallas, ‘It’s not your job to feed the 5,000. It’s only your job to provide the loaves and fish.’” He was like, “That’s a weird thing to share with a guy I barely know. That’s presumptuous.” God was like, “Do it.”
Remember, it's not your job to feed the 5,000. It's only your job to provide the loaves and fish. Share on XHe was obedient. He could have been like, “That’s not God.”
He could have been like, “That’s weird.” He did it, and it changed my life. Him responding and listening to God changed my life. In that moment, I knew not only was God present, but I believed what He said. It hit me as someone who has always felt responsible for the Feeding of the 5,000 in any project that I do. I’m responsible not only to do it, but I’m also responsible for the success or failure of it. I’m responsible for the execution of it.
Sometimes, it’s not even a business principle. Sometimes, it’s even a ministry principle. Sometimes, we’re doing things for pure Godly reasons. We’re like, “I want to have an impact. I want this charity, this ministry, and this initiative to impact people.” Then, one shows up or it doesn’t happen, and then you go, “God, this was for You.”
We played this out somewhat in episode 2 of season 2. It was the story of Nathaniel, the disciple. We created this backstory for Nathaniel that was similar to my story, where his dreams were completely taken away. He has this moment with God where he is like, “This was for You. How could this fail when I was doing it for You? You’re supposed to endorse it and make it happen.” That’s what I felt.
In that moment, I realized all that I’m responsible for is to make the best 5 loaves and 2 fish that I can. If God deems them worthy of acceptance, like Jesus did of this boy who provided the fish, the transaction is over. My part is done. We don’t overcorrect and say, “God feeds the 5,000. He waves his hand, and all of a sudden, everyone has loaves and fish in their laps.”
God did ask us to participate in the prospect. He did say, “Where do we have food?” They said, “All we have are 5 loaves and 2.” He said, “I got it.” He didn’t create it from nothing. I believe He could have, but He didn’t. When it came time to distribute the food, He had the disciples distribute it. He could have caused loaves and fish to appear.
God’s Partnership: Our Loaves And Fish
The world is wondering how you’re going to do that in season three. Is it not?
Yes, because I am going to tell that story. There is this piece that we’re responsible for. Who knows why? God wants us to participate in that process. It is not my job to feed the 5,000. Imagine if the boy had gone home that day and said, “Mom, Dad, I fed 5,000 people today with the loaves and fish that I brought.” Jesus did that.
I’d be like, “Did you bring home some for us, or did you give it all away?”
The results are not up to us. That is a hard lesson to learn for those of us who are achievers, even when we’re doing it for the right reasons.
The results aren’t up to us — a hard lesson for achievers, even when our intentions are right. Share on XI like to say sometimes, and this is a bit of a juxtaposition of what you said, that if you can do everything on your to-do list in your own strength, with your own talent, and with your own people, maybe God’s not in it. He said, “I’ll do exceedingly, abundantly more than you can ask or think.” If God’s saying, “I can do more than you can think,” no matter how long you think, you can’t design season 4, 5, 6, 3, or whatever the way God might want you to design it, because he might have a completely different idea.
The Kendrick Brothers, who have done half a dozen films, said, “It’s so difficult to have a successful film. There are so many factors that go into it. What we often see is people come up with an idea, and they put together the perfect team. It’s all good, smart decisions, and then they ask God to bless them. We figured the one thing that you can’t quantify financially, the one thing that seems to be the most important, is that God’s hand is on it. Why not ask for that first? We’ll still do our part, still work hard, and still do everything we can to glorify Him, but let’s get that part down first.”
That’s not something I believe I did, certainly not in The Resurrection of Gavin Stone, but at a lot of times throughout my life. I didn’t do that. That doesn’t mean those projects were bad. It doesn’t mean that God wasn’t part of them in some way. I’m seeing The Resurrection of Gavin Stone as having a rebirth in many ways. It’s been on Netflix. People who do watch it like it.
All that to say, I, in that moment, came to a place where I was genuinely okay with never making another movie. I was genuinely okay with doing whatever God wanted as long as it was what He wanted. I surrendered. I broke. I said, “I will do my part, but my part is going to start with what You ask for. When I deliver it to You, that’s where the transaction ends.” That’s why I was open-minded to ideas that make no sense.
A couple of months later, I got the opportunity for my church to do a short film about the birth of Christ and the perspective of the shepherds. I’m doing it on my friend’s farm in Illinois, twenty minutes from my house. It feels like a big step down from a Hollywood movie. I’m doing this short film for my church behind a barn.
Finding Joy In The Unexpected: The Barn Church Moment
Was there a moment when you were like, “What am I doing in this barn behind a church?”
Here’s what’s funny about it. The moment was, “I love doing this.” I’d done others for my church before. I’d done little short films and vignettes of stories of Jesus from different perspectives. I came home to my wife and was like, “When I look over the last few years, I am always most joyous when I’m doing these things. When I was doing the movie, a movie that I loved, there was constant pressure and stress. I’m happy I did it, but the process of it was always so angst-ridden and hard. When I’m doing this, even when things are hard, it feels like it’s my wheelhouse. I’m so in tune with this storytelling. This feels good when I’m doing it, even though I’m behind a barn in Illinois.”
I have a friend, Bobb Biehl. He’s a consultant to executives. He likes to say at those moments that you’re like a semi-truck trailer going down a 24-lane highway with no need for gas for the rest of the journey.
That’s a good way to put it. I hadn’t thought of that. Even when it was hard, I thought, “I get this.” That’s when I started to have the idea, “Telling these stories from different perspectives seems to unlock the story even more. It also makes the Bible come to life even more. What if there was a show where it was nothing but that? We could take the time to explore the backstory and cultural context and see these stories from different perspectives. Jesus is the central part of it, but maybe He’s not the main character that we’re seeing the stories through. Maybe there’s a different way to do this.” I had that idea.
I’m coming off a career failure, so it’s not like studios or streaming platforms are lining up around the block to work with Dallas Jenkins on a Jesus project, but I had this idea. Long story short, the short film got into the hands of the streaming platform that was up-and-coming. They loved it. This is Angel Studios. They said to me when they heard my idea, “This is going to be massive. This is going to be worldwide.” They saw it all. Where we’re at, which is still at the beginning stages of reaching people, they saw it was going to happen. I was like, “Come on.”
They said, “We think we should raise the money through crowdfunding.” I was like, “That is so ridiculous.” I genuinely said that. I said, “We’ll be lucky to raise $800,000, much less the millions that a show like this would require. The all-time crowdfunding record is $5.7 million from projects that had huge fan bases already.” It was loaves and fishes. It was not my job to feed the 5,000. I was like, “I’m going to do my best. I’m going to bring this short film. I have nothing to lose. Let’s see what happens.”
When we hit the $10 million mark from 19,000 people around the world, all of whom had been blown away by this little thing I did for my church, which didn’t even feel like 5 loaves and 2 fish, but felt like 1 loaf and 1 fish, it had this explosion and went viral. When we hit the $10 million mark, my wife was sitting next to me at the computer. We see the number hit. She looks at me, and there are tears in her eyes. She goes, “‘I do impossible math.’ That’s what that meant.” God was laying it on her heart again as clearly as He had the first time, like, “That’s what I meant.”
We started to approach the show from that perspective. We were like, “We are going to do everything that we can do. We’re going to do our part, but there’s going to be a point where God is in control of this project, and we’re going to embrace that. We won’t try to overcome it or fight through it. We’re going to approach things from a biblical, spiritual, surrendered perspective as opposed to trying to knock through walls all the time.”
We're going to do our part, but there's going to be a point where God is in control of this project, and we're going to embrace that. Share on XAt every stage of this process, it has been painful and challenging. We’re like, “We don’t know what’s going to happen. The choices that we’re making don’t seem to work.” My wife, because she’s so insightful, calls them Red Sea Moments where we’re at the edge of the Red Sea, and the Egyptians are bearing down. We’ve made every choice we can make, and the only thing left is for God to do something crazy. We’re stuck. There’s nothing left for us to do. That seems to be the moment when He parts the Red Sea every time.
“Get Used To Different”: A Guiding Principle
You have a principle. I don’t know if it developed before or after the quadruple income. It is, “Get used to different.” How do you drive that through your employee group or actor group? Are there people who say, “Different? We need to do it the same old way.”
Yeah. They say that all the time. “Get used to different” is a line from Jesus in episode 7 of season 1, when Simon Peter doesn’t understand why Jesus would call a tax collector in Matthew. Tax collectors were hated by the Jews at that time and were betrayers of their people. Jesus is saying, “You were surprised when I chose you. Why are you surprised now?” Simon says, “I’m not a tax collector. This is different.” Jesus says, “Get used to different.”
As soon as I wrote that, I thought, “There’s something there. That’s a principle not only for Jesus’ ministry, but for us as an organization and us even as believers.” We’ve said that to our audience. We’ve said that to each other. It’s a philosophy that says that we’re not going to think traditionally each time. Sometimes, what has worked in the past works well now. It’s a Godly principle. There have been people before us who have faced some of the same challenges we have and have learned how to overcome them.
As a general rule, we’re not going to approach things from a, “Let’s do it the safe way.” We’re going to approach things from a, “Let’s do it the best way that God wants to do it. We’re going to do what we can, use our expertise, and get us to where we think we need to go.” We’re always going to be open to what’s different. We’re always going to be open to impossible math. We’re never going to try to force our way through walls when we’ve done everything that we already can do. We’re going to go, “God, we’ve done it all. We have no other options. You do the rest.”
Overcoming Discouragement: Providing Loaves And Fish
Looking back at a discouraging moment, whichever one it was for you that is standing out, where you were discouraged, you were down, and things weren’t working, what would you say to the person who’s reading who says, “I’m in one of those moments right now. I don’t see God’s hand in this at all. I’m in this Resurrection of Gavin Stone moment.” What do you say to them?
I say what that gentleman, Alex, was led by God to say to me. “It’s not your job to feed the 5,000. It’s only to provide the loaves and fish.” Here’s the key part of that. There is that piece of you providing the loaves and fish. That does come from, “Is God asking for this from me? If so, am I willing to give it and then let that be the end of the transaction?”
There are times when I believe we provide loaves and fish when God didn’t even ask for them. There’s that moment when Jesus says, “Is there food? What do we have?” The disciples went and looked. Sometimes, we’re at a barbecue, and we bring loaves and fish. People are like, “This is a barbecue. We don’t need fish or bread right now,” or, “I’m gluten intolerant. I can’t have loaves,” whatever it is. Sometimes, we say, “I’m going to bring loaves and fish because I think everyone needs to eat loaves and fish.” Sometimes, God’s like, “I didn’t ask for that. I don’t need that. We’re good.”
We do need to question, “Did God ask for this? Is this something that God breathes?” That comes in those early stages where you’ve got an idea. Sometimes, you need to run it past your spouse or your pastor. You need to pray. You need to go, “Is this still sticking with me? Is this still niggling at me a week or two after it came?”
Make sure that it’s something that you believe God is part of, and then you take those next steps and say, “I’m going to take it as far as I can.” You have to surrender. You do have to go, “Am I okay if this project fails? Am I okay if the project continues, but only at a tenth of the goals that I set for myself? Am I okay with giving up on this ‘five-year plan’?” That is something you always hear at business conferences, which I used to believe in.
Phil Vischer, the creator of VeggieTales, who has a similar story to mine, wrote an extraordinary book called Me, Myself, and Bob. I believe it is 1 of the top 5 business books, even though I don’t think he intended it as a business book, that I’ve ever read. This is another thing that he said that I try to follow. He said, “Where you’re at in five years is none of your business.” I try to live by that. If you can get to that place where you are truly okay with letting it go after you’ve done what you can, it’s a superpower.
We have to reach the point where we recognize that the evidence of God’s hand on something is often found in our personal relationship with Him. Share on XThe Chosen, as “successful” as it has proven to be so far, also has difficulties and challenges every single day. Every single day, I’m publicly called a heretic, a blasphemer, an idiot, or leading people astray publicly by discernment bloggers, people with YouTube channels, or people who are making comments on YouTube. I’ve gotten to the place where I genuinely don’t care what people think, positive or negative. I want to see the impact. It’s always moving to me when someone tells me their life has been changed by the show.
I’m not motivated by the praise that I get any more than I’m motivated by the hate that I get. I genuinely want to be in God’s will. I want Him to be breathing in this project. I’m okay with what happens as a result of it. It is a spiritual superpower. If you can get to that place, it makes those critical moments less devastating, because you go, “If it stopped now, I’d be okay. I want to do what You want me to do.”
God’s Smile: Impact Beyond Sunday
Thank you for using the talent that God gave you to make something beautiful and impactful from Monday to Friday. We think of the gathered church, where it has to be something that happens in that hour on Sunday for God to smile, but I say to you that God is smiling on what you’re doing from Monday to Friday as you make this film. It glorifies God, even if it wasn’t about God, and it is. It’s making a huge impact. Thank you very much.
Thank you for that. That’s very kind. We have to get to that place where we realize that the evidence that God is breathing on it is oftentimes your personal relationship with Him. That’s what He wants from you more than anything. He has used people to do great things for the world, and He has also used people for His relationship with Him. It doesn’t have to be a huge success by the world’s standard. Either way, thank you so much for your support of it. Hopefully, in a few years, when we talk again sometime, we’ll have a different lesson that God has been teaching me through the process.
That’s it. Thanks for taking the time.
Thank you.
