In 2008, two young BU alums set out to establish a new evangelical Christian church in the Boston area. David Hill (Questrom’03) and Betsy Hill (CAS’04) are known as “church planters,” a term used to describe those who are part of a movement committed to building new churches and developing thriving congregations of followers.

They soon learned that New England is different from the rest of the country: although more than 33 percent of Americans identify as evangelical Christian, only 3.5 percent of Bostonians do. Battling dwindling funds and struggling to find an audience receptive to their message, the Hills kept going, inspired by their potential future flock. Today, they lead City Church, which meets every Sunday at Brighton Music Hall in Allston.

The story of their efforts to establish an evangelical church is the subject of a new documentary, The Frozen Chosen, which was recently shown as part of the BU Cinematheque series, a College of Communication program that brings accomplished filmmakers to campus to screen and discuss their work. The film was directed by independent documentary filmmaker Elizabeth Gardner, who is also a producer at PBS television station WGBH. Her first film, Our Lady’s, was acquired by Filmmakers Library after it was released in 2004, and she was an associate producer on the award-winning Sundance film My Flesh and Blood, which aired on HBO. She spent eight years making The Frozen Chosen.

Bostonia spoke with Gardner about her film, the challenges she faced while making it, and some lessons relevant to the current election season the film might hold.

Elizabeth Gardner spent eight years making The Frozen Chosen. Photo courtesy of Gardner

Bostonia: Tell us about the film’s title.

The “frozen chosen” is a term I discovered from my initial conversations. It’s very much an insider term that evangelical Christians use to describe people who do ministry in New England, or come to New England to plant churches. The idea is that New England is a cold and unwelcoming landscape, both literally and metaphorically. There are very few evangelical Christians here in Boston. New England, and specifically Boston, has almost the lowest percentage of evangelical Christians in the whole country.

How did you get the idea for the film?

I grew up in Boston, lived in California and London, and didn’t bump up against the evangelical culture very much. I probably met a handful of evangelical Christians in my whole life. I went to a wedding in Oklahoma 10 years ago, and from the moment I stepped off the plane, I felt I was in a different country, with different cultural norms. In the airport I saw three teenagers wearing Jesus T-shirts and I saw billboards saying things like, “If you died tonight, where would you end up?” It was a town of maybe 400 people, and there were five evangelical churches, and one store. The churches were the lifeblood of that community. The bride’s aunt hosted a shower, and she opened the shower with a prayer and everyone stood up and started praying together.

Having grown up here, going to a Catholic church as a child, I had some exposure to religion, but this was so different. I became really intrigued that there was this whole other culture in the United States that comprises a pretty large swath of the country. You could live on one side of that cultural divide and have very little contact with people on the other side for almost your whole life. I wanted to find a way to look at both of these cultures bumping up against each other, then I discovered church planting as a movement, and then I found out New England was a really hard place to break into.

How did you find your subjects, the Hills?

I reached out to one denomination that was church planting in New England, and they put me in touch with other people. I went through word of mouth until I met David and Betsy, and they were a lot more open to the idea than other people, who had a good amount of wariness and skepticism because I wasn’t from the inside. David and Betsy were pretty open, had gone to BU, and they looked at it as an opportunity. We had a good rapport.

When making the film, I actually followed David and Betsy and another family that was church planting. They were wonderful, but when we started editing, we realized we were telling two very different stories and they were hard to reconcile. So we ended up choosing David and Betsy’s story.

How is their church doing today?

They have around 80 members today, and they meet at the Brighton Music Hall. They have a lot of millennials as well as some young families. Boston is a very difficult place to plant a church, but from the view of evangelical Christians, if you are up for the challenge, there is a lot of opportunity here.

What do you mean by opportunity?

In very plain terms, there are a lot of people here—I’m using language that they would use—who have not been saved.

There are also a lot of universities here, and the millennial generation is the most irreligious generation in history—people are falling away from religion in droves. In the United States, the percentage of people who identify as having no religion, called “the nons,” is the fastest growing population in terms of religious identification. Boston is also a place that is thought of as being pretty intellectual, a thought center, so there is this idea that if you can make it here, you have a lot of opportunity to have some cultural influence.

It’s a market that is open, and there are a lot of people here who haven’t heard the evangelicals’ news. Whether or not those people are interested is another question.

How have audiences responded to the film?

One theme that we didn’t spell out in the film, but I hope people get, is the division that exists between secular, mainstream America and Christian, conservative, evangelical America. And during this election season you can see how divided and polarized we are as a nation. I would say that some of that has come up in the film.

In terms of reactions from different audiences, the first time the film was shown was at the Boston International Film Festival last spring, and the audience was mostly secular. People were curious about this world. It can be difficult to watch at times, particularly if you are coming from a secular worldview.

We had a screening over the summer with the faith-based community, with mostly evangelical Christians, and they had questions for me and my editor, Rachel Clark, because we were sort of representing another culture.

You had help from the Filmmakers Collaborative. What is that and what was its role in making this film?

It’s a group of filmmakers in Boston and a place where you can go to get fiscal sponsorship for your film. One of the other ideas around Filmmakers Collaborative is that Boston has a rich filmmaking world, you have WGBH, a lot of filmmakers who are making films for public television, and a lot of independent filmmakers. Your job as an independent filmmaker can have stretches that are pretty lonely, because you do a lot of work by yourself. So I think the idea of Filmmakers Collaborative was to give independent filmmakers a way to meet each other, collaborate, and support each other.

Is there anything else you’d like to mention about the film?

Especially at this moment, with what’s going on in the country right now and the country feeling so polarized, it is hard for people to understand others with different political or religious views. People who identify as evangelical Christian make up 33 percent of the country. It’s a very large swath that is not represented very well in Boston. I didn’t want to make the film with an objective like: we have different worldviews, so before I make the film I know exactly what I want to say. Even if I disagree on a number of topics with David and Betsy, it was a more interesting approach to generate a discussion that felt somewhat civilized, and allow for questions, without resorting to the tenor of the debates on the national stage.

Information about future screenings of The Frozen Chosen can be found here.