Can a Christian watch a show like Boomerang? BJ Thompson’s answer comes by example rather than by rule. Yes, if you watch the way a good listener listens: notice what the story gets right, refuse what it gets wrong, and let it show you something about your neighbors and your church that is hard to see from the inside. In his conversation with Lisa Fields, the founder of Jude 3 Project, the larger risk is not the Christian who watches too much. It is the Christian who will not listen at all.
What does a show like this actually show?
The series follows Simone and her friends, young professionals in Atlanta. One episode centers on David, a young pastor committed to celibacy who breaks that commitment with a woman he is seeing and sinks into guilt and something close to depression. His friends, most of whom are not walking with God, try to help. They do not know how.
Thompson admits he came to the show hesitant. What struck him first was who it was willing to depict. In his words, it “did not play into the stereotypical view of black culture, which is like this poor, uneducated, kind of like struggling.” Instead, “This was like middle class, upper class black professionals and the issues that they grapple with just real life stuff.”
That observation bears directly on what a church learns by watching. Fields points out that when Christians think about reaching young Black adults, they often reach first for answers to movements like the Hebrew Israelites. Many young Black professionals she knows look down on those groups. Their questions are about church itself: how believers live, how leaders fail, what happens after a fall. A congregation that only hears its own assumptions will keep answering questions nobody in that crowd is asking. A show made for those viewers tells you what they are actually thinking about.
Thompson’s second observation went deeper. He thought the episode told the truth about how sin feels to a believer who means his faith. “I think sometimes we think that people are willfully running into things and they feel so good afterwards,” he says. That is not what he sees in many Christians. Among people in and around the church, he says, “They feel shame, they feel guilt, they feel confusion, and they really don’t know what to do” with that area of disobedience. He was candid that he related to David from his own years before marriage, and he named how rare the portrayal is: “I don’t think it’s often that I’ve seen it displayed on television.”
Here is the first thing refusal costs. The show gave Thompson an honest picture of someone many churches rarely describe: a sincere believer who agrees with what he was taught, has fallen anyway, and has no idea how to come back. If that person sits in your pew, a story like this can help you recognize him.
Isn’t watching a show the same as approving of it?
This is the objection that deserves the most respect. Scripture does care about what we put in front of our eyes. The psalmist says, “I will set no wicked thing before mine eyes: I hate the work of them that turn aside; it shall not cleave to me” (Psalm 101:3). Paul tells the Philippians to think on whatsoever things are true, honest, just, pure, lovely and of good report (Philippians 4:8). A Christian who turns off a show because it is training their imagination in the wrong direction is obeying something real.
Read those passages closely, though. The psalm is about what a person welcomes and lets cling to them. Paul’s list opens with whatsoever things are true. A story can depict wrongdoing truthfully without commending it. The Bible does exactly that. Its narratives describe adultery, deceit and violence, and readers have to tell description from endorsement. So the real question is what a story does with sin, and what you do with the story.
The Boomerang episode is a useful test case. It does not hold up David’s broken vow as freedom. It shows the cost. It also contains more than one moral voice. Fields notes that David’s friends tell him it is not that big of a deal, and Thompson laughs at the remedies they suggest. The show sets that reassurance next to David’s grief, and a viewer has to weigh them. Watching with discernment means doing that weighing on purpose: seeing that the friends’ comfort is kind and also wrong, and that they love him anyway. Jude 3 holds the historic Christian ethic that sexual intimacy belongs within marriage. Watching David’s story does not require loosening that conviction. The episode actually shows why it mattered to him, and why breaking it hurt.
What happens when Christians only listen to each other?
At a dinner with his friends, David, trying to make sense of his failure, breaks into speaking in tongues at the table. His friends stare. Fields, watching as a believer, found it confusing herself.
Thompson reads the scene as a diagnosis of the church more than of David. Some distance between believers and their friends, he grants, comes from real spiritual difference. Then he adds the sharper point: “I think some of the strangeness that we see is we just haven’t practice our faith in real time with real people.” He calls it a bubble. A Pentecostal bubble and a Reformed bubble look different, but both can leave a believer fluent only among people who already share the vocabulary.
Fields, who grew up in Black Pentecostal churches, agrees from her own experience. “I do think that church can make you lose touch with the rest of the world,” she says. Each tradition builds its own lingo, and eventually “you get entrenched in your world and you think everybody’s arguing about what you’re arguing about and nobody really cares.”
This is the second cost of refusing to listen, and the bigger one. David’s friends step back from him, Thompson notes, because they do not know how to enter what he is going through, even though they love him and want to help. The willingness is on their side. The gap is on the believer’s. Stories written by people outside the bubble are one way to hear how the faith sounds from across the table, and a Christian who never hears that sound will keep being surprised by blank stares.
Paul, speaking in Athens, quoted the city’s own poets to make his point about God (Acts 17:28). That passage describes what Paul did. It does not command a media habit, and it does not oblige anyone to watch television. It does show an apostle who knew what his neighbors’ storytellers were saying and could speak into it.
Can a story from outside the church tell the truth about it?
The most pointed moment in the episode, for Fields, does not come from David. After he sleeps with the woman and goes silent, she sends him a long text. One of his friends tells him she is probably devastated, because he was supposed to be different. He was the Christian guy. Fields stops on that detail: “this is a friend that’s not even a believer saying this to a guy who’s supposed to be a believer.”
She draws out the lesson. When leaders are immature in relationships, real people get hurt, and the damage often goes untended. Her counsel to young believers, leaders or not, is to “be cognizant of the damage you’re doing to people in the process of self discovery, in the process of trying to understand your faith.” Thompson presses the same point toward the pulpit: “You can have the name tag, but it does not equate the maturity.”
A Christian could hear this as an attack and turn the show off. Thompson hears something else. “People don’t like hypocrites. They love the church,” he says, and he sets that beside Jesus’s warning: “why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?” (Matthew 7:3). A critique does not become false because a non-Christian voices it. When outsiders notice the gap between what believers say and how they treat people, the faithful response is to look at the beam.
Thompson offers a line about David’s fall that applies to the whole question: “it’s relationships that reveal issues, they don’t create the issue.” The broken vow exposed an immaturity already there. A well-made story can work the same way. It does not invent the church’s blind spots. It can bring them into view where they can be dealt with.
When is it wise to turn it off?
Nothing in this conversation says every Christian must watch every show, and the case for abstaining is stronger than a caricature of fearfulness. Habits form people. Attention is limited, and an hour spent on one story is an hour not spent on Scripture, prayer or a neighbor. Paul’s teaching in Romans 14 still applies: what one believer receives with a clear conscience may harm another, and no one should be pushed past what their conscience allows. Someone who knows a certain kind of content pulls them toward sin is wise to avoid it.
It is also worth being honest about the limits of the evidence. Thompson and Fields discuss one episode of one series. Their reading shows that a secular show can depict Black Christian life honestly and give believers something worth talking about. It does not show that all secular storytelling does. Each show, and often each episode, has to be judged on its own.
Where abstaining goes wrong is when it becomes a whole strategy for engaging the world. Thompson warns about believers who read the promise that old things are passed away (2 Corinthians 5:17) as if conversion removes every immature habit at once: “I think we think there’s a magical wand over our maturity.” He was talking about spiritual growth, not media. But the warning seems to me to reach further. A church can treat keeping the world’s stories out as if it also kept the world’s problems out. David’s story suggests otherwise. The problems were already in his heart and his church before any camera showed them.
So watching well is less about a rule and more about a practice. Ask whether the story tells the truth about people, even when its characters are wrong about God. Weigh its moral voices against Scripture instead of absorbing the one that sounds kindest. When outsiders in the story describe Christians, ask honestly whether the description lands. And talk about it with someone. Thompson’s counsel to people carrying shame is that “It is not okay to suffer in silence,” and the same instinct helps with whatever a story stirs up. What gets said out loud can be examined.
The question underneath all this is not really about television. It is whether Christians are willing to be understood by the people around them, which means first being willing to understand how those people see us. Refusing to listen does not protect the church’s witness. It leaves the church speaking a language its neighbors never learned, and wondering why no one answers.