Elizabeth Gardner

The Editorial

For the past seven years, independent documentary filmmaker Elizabeth O'Brien Gardner has been filming a young evangelical church planter, David, and his wife, Betsy, in Boston – a city Gardner says the evangelical movement calls ‘The Preacher’s Graveyard.’ Her 72-minute documentary, The Frozen Chosen, follows the journey of David and Betsy as they build a congregation of fellow millennials looking for salvation. We meet a young ballet dancer who struggles with his homosexuality and looks to the church for guidance, another young man who is a seeker of sorts, baptized by David and born-again in a dramatic scene of speaking in tongues and what looks like physical possession, and a cast of other millennials in search of community. Many of the youth live around the Fenway and Brighton areas and meet regularly. In a time when fundamentalist religion dominates our news cycle and the country seems more divided than ever, Gardner’s documentary takes a neutral look at how evangelicals are growing their following while asking us to consider how this differs or is similar to the dogma of other movements or building of dreams.