10 minutes with … Pastor Bruce Wersen

BURLINGTON, Wash. (RNS) About an hour north of Seattle, blue-state Washington becomes Glenn Beck country, literally: the Fox News personality and religious revivalist’s hometown of Mount Vernon celebrated “Glenn Beck Day” and presented him with a key to the city last year. Beck’s childhood friend, Pastor Bruce Wersen, fuses entertainment and mass media formats on […]

(RNS2-OCT27) Pastor Bruce Wersen’s “Route 66: A Road Trip Through the Bible,” is an online video series that presents each book of the Bible as a conversation with hitchhikers in his clunker convertible. For use with RNS-10-MINUTES, transmitted Oct. 27, 2010. Religion News Service photo courtesy of Bruce Wersen.

BURLINGTON, Wash. (RNS) About an hour north of Seattle, blue-state Washington becomes Glenn Beck country, literally: the Fox News personality and religious revivalist’s hometown of Mount Vernon celebrated “Glenn Beck Day” and presented him with a key to the city last year.

Beck’s childhood friend, Pastor Bruce Wersen, fuses entertainment and mass media formats on a smaller scale from His Place Community Church in Burlington.


Wersen, 48, a film student-turned-preacher who founded the evangelical congregation with his father 25 years ago, writes, produces and stars as the hapless driver in “Route 66: A Road Trip Through the Bible.” The online video series presents each of the Bible’s 66 books as conversations with hitchhikers in his clunker convertible.

The video clips, available at http://www.route66bible.com, are paired with sermons and reading guides. Some answers have been edited for length and clarity.

Q: What prompted this project?

A: My training was in film, not seminary, so I approach things a bit differently as a pastor. Other churches have had sermon series called “Route 66” (for the Bible’s 66 books), but we thought, why not take that idea to the next level and actually go down the real Route 66 and pick up characters as hitchhikers?

Q: What’s the point?

A: The books of the Bible are like pearls that have come off a necklace — they’re beautiful and valuable on their own, but you really have to see them strung together as they were intended. With these clips, we try in a humorous way to show something about the theme of each book and the personality of the characters, and it gets everyone laughing.

Q: Where do the actors come from?

A: We try not to use actors from our church, because I wanted people to look up and think “Hey, that’s Moses,” rather than “Hey, that’s Bill.” We open it up to the acting community and they have been overwhelmingly helpful and responsive. It’s all volunteers, because we have almost no budget for this thing.

Q: You used real married couples for biblical couples — was that intentional?

A: With Adam and Eve, we definitely wanted to use a married couple, and we gave him a leaf-covered Speedo and her a leaf-covered bikini. And “Song of Solomon” was just Solomon and his bride making out in his backseat, so that if anybody complained, we could just say, “Well, they’re married in real life!”


Q: Have you found someone to play Jesus?

A: We’re not going to have Jesus, because the videos are silly and fun and kind of bizarre. I didn’t want to balance that with the seriousness of who Jesus is. So, the New Testament will mostly be the writers of the books and who they were writing to.

Q: You’re on a tight budget, and your church is hundreds of miles north of Route 66. How did you film the opening sequence and background shots?

A: One of the office gals went on Craigslist and found a `62 Falcon for $600, so we bought it, chopped the roof off and made a poor man’s convertible. A fella in the church volunteered to put the car on a trailer and drive it down to Arizona. We stayed in a $35 motel that was just horrible, and then we got up early and spent the next day filming the backgrounds. Every time we’d see a scenic shot, we’d jump out and get the car off the trailer. By 6 o’clock that night, we were heading home.

Q: Which has been your favorite book to film, so far?

A: The one that we laughed hardest at was 2nd Chronicles, where it’s just a tumbleweed driving, representing that all the Jews had been exiled. And Haggai is about the prophet who motivated them to build the temple, so we caricatured him as a Matt Foley-type motivational speaker from “Saturday Night Live.” I will never forget the book Haggai now!

Q: What kind of feedback have you gotten?

A: People appreciate that they’re getting these caricatures in their head to help them remember the stories. And we like to laugh! We always say that our church is a fun place to get serious about God.

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