For several years the members of Sherwood Baptist Church have had a vision: "To touch the world from Albany, Georgia."

And thanks to the power of mass media, this church of about 3,000 members—located in a city of only 80,000 or so—has been able to do just that.

Through its media ministry, the church has already produced two feature-length films with an all-volunteer cast and a mostly-volunteer crew. Given their incredibly low budgets, both films—especially Facing the Giants—have been enormously successful, in theaters and on DVD. Both films have also been distributed to over 50 countries around the world in a dozen subtitled languages.

Now the church is putting the finishing touches on its third film, Fireproof, which opens on September 26. This time the folks at Sherwood are working with a budget of $500,000—still peanuts by Hollywood standards, but five times the budget of Giants—and they even have a professional Hollywood actor, Kirk Cameron of Growing Pains and Left Behind fame, in the lead role as a firefighter whose marriage is in trouble.

But one thing has remained constant: the church's commitment to treating movies as ministry, rather than just a safe form of entertainment.

"The movies are one aspect of what we do," says Michael Catt, senior pastor at Sherwood and an executive producer of the films. "We have church on Sunday, and we have discipleship and missions work, and youth and children's ministries, and singles ministries, and the movies never depict all of what we are about. But they are an arm, if you will, of ministry, that is unique within the total ministry of the church."

It all began in 1999, when Sherwood appointed Alex Kendrick to be its new media minister. Two years later, his brother Stephen came on board as an associate pastor. Around that time, the Sherwood pastors went on a staff retreat to Florida and took a day off to visit Disney World. There they talked about the possibility of making movies themselves, as a branch of their ministry.

Catt asked Alex what his passion for the future was and where he wanted to be a few years down the road. Alex—who had made some commercials and other short videos prior to joining Sherwood—replied that he wanted to make movies but didn't think a church would let him. "Why not?" Catt replied, and within a year of that conversation, they were working on their first full-length film, Flywheel.

Produced on a shoestring budget of $20,000, the film starred Alex—who also directed and wrote the script with his brother—as a used-car salesman who swindles a pastor. He then has a crisis of conscience when that pastor, unaware of his treachery, asks God to do for the salesman what the salesman did for him.

Alex laughs, now, when he recalls how inexperienced he and the others were. "We'd drive over to Home Depot to buy our lights, and we'd start aiming them until it looked halfway decent, but Flywheel was very low in terms of production values," he says. "It should not have happened. The movie should not have worked."

But work it did, despite the odd calamity or two. The church had already booked a local theater for the premiere when the hard drive containing all the edits was accidentally destroyed only a couple weeks before showtime. Then the church's music minister lost the music files that he had recorded for the soundtrack. The Sherwood team worked round-the-clock for ten days to put the film back together, and finished the job a mere five and a half hours before the first matinee.

Much to their surprise, the film was a local hit, and played for six weeks in Albany, plus several weeks in other towns. The film proved even more successful after Sherwood released it on DVD, in a two-disc set complete with bonus features. And Sony released a slightly shorter "director's cut" last year through its Provident label, which is geared to the faith-based market.