Azusa Pacific Draws 1,300 for 'End of the Spear' Pre-Screening
AZUSA, Calif. – Azusa Pacific University hosted a pre-screening of the movie End of the Spear , drawing 1,300 students, faculty, and staffs to watch the well-known missionary story enacted on the silver screen.
On Wednesday night, the Christian university in collaboration with Every Tribe Entertainment hosted a pre-screening of End of the Spear two days before its official release in theaters nationwide. Many students at Azusa Pacific expressed that the story of the five missionaries killed in Ecuador by a tribal group touched them personally.
Carl Volkhardt, 22, a senior at Azusa, told students, faculty, and the movie’s producer why the movie was especially meaningful to him during the commentary time following the pre-screening.
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“The movie has a personal connection to me because I grew up in Ecuador and met three of the missionary wives and Steve Saint (the son of the missionary pilot and one of the main characters in the film),” said Volkhardt. He also spoke about how Elisabeth Elliot, one of the slain missionary’s wife, had personally impacted his life through saving his nanny’s life when she was a child.
In addition, students identified with the story through their own experience in short-term missions, with almost everyone at the discussion session raising their hand when asked if they had experience with short-term missions.
End of the Spear centers around the deaths of five American missionaries in the east rainforest of Ecuador in January 1956. The five men were speared to death by the Waodani tribe – one of the most violent tribes ever documented by anthropologist. The Waodani tribe later converted to Christianity after the wives and children of the missionaries came and lived among the Waodani to continue evangelizing them after the deaths of their husbands.
Bill Ewing, the president of Every Tribe Entertainment and producer and co-writer of End of the Spear, commented that making the movie as well as showing the movie was a spiritual warfare.
“This movie is a spiritual warfare. Satan doesn’t want us to make this movie. Satan doesn’t want it out,” Ewing said. He noted that the crew twice encountered claymore mines, with one fearfully close-call, while filming in Panama at “Bunker Road.” The filming site was formerly a munitions bunker.
End of the Spears will be in theaters on Friday, Jan. 20.
