What Hollywood Dreamers Want Churches to Know

If your church is in the LA area, you have people in your community and likely attending your services who are pursuing work in the entertainment industry. The industry can feel like a different world, with vastly different standards for work hours and success than the average 9-to-5 career. While parts of it can be glamorous, many of us pursuing work in entertainment experience it as an isolating and discouraging uphill battle. As we navigate the murkiness of Hollywood’s waters, we long for church communities that understand what life can be like for us. Here are a few of the biggest things we want you to know if you want your church to be home for Hollywood dreamers. 

We Need Flexibility 

One of the hardest parts about this world is how unpredictable our schedules are. For a lot of types of work in Hollywood, work is gig-based and inconsistent. We can go days or weeks without getting a gig, which means we take what we can get. 

In the film industry, for example, plenty of people do work as an extra, often for income and experience as they’re getting started. The majority of time we get booked the night before, and are only given a call time and location. We have no idea if we’re going to get kept for 3 hours or 16 hours. This makes planning our social calendar extremely difficult. We often feel like fickle friends, but have no control over our work hours other than having to turn down a gig, which means losing an entire day’s pay.

This can definitely be a barrier to integrating into a church. Because we have no control over our work hours and are often desperate for whatever gigs come our way, we’re probably going to be inconsistent with attending regular services, making it to small group meetings, and volunteering. We are also desperate for a community that will be understanding of our messy lifestyles as we do our best to function with limited control over our schedules. 

We need church staff that won’t hold it against us if we can’t commit to a fixed volunteer schedule, small group leaders that won’t be upset if we don’t make it to every meeting, and a church community around us that won’t make us feel judged for spotty attendance. 

Most of Us Work Multiple Jobs

To stay afloat in a gig economy, where we might go weeks without getting booked, a lot of us are taking whatever side jobs we can get that work within our unpredictable schedules. For some of us, especially those early into our careers, our main income might not even come from the entertainment industry. The question, “What do you do?” makes a lot of us squirm for a few reasons, one being that the answer isn’t simple. You’ll find people pursuing a career in the industry who are also baristas, servers, bartenders, freelancers, or substitute teachers.

When careers come up in conversation, it can feel embarrassing to talk about our messy job situation when most other people can answer with one simple word. It can feel like most people have their career all figured out and settled, while we do this balancing act to make ends meet, not even knowing if we’ll ever ‘make it’ in the industry. We crave understanding and support from people as we wrestle with the shame we often feel. 

It can be especially important to be sensitive to think about this with programming. Some churches try to organize small groups or discussions around work, organizing people into groups by career field. Volunteer applications might ask you to list your career or employer. Consider ways you can be sensitive to the wide range of people who don’t fit neatly into one category. 

It’s a Slow Climb Up the Ladder

One of the first questions a lot of actors get when they share what they do is, “What have you been on that I’ve probably seen?” A lot of people don’t realize that for most of us in the entertainment industry, it often takes years to work our way up to notable projects, if we ever make it big. Questions like this just add to the sense of shame we have about what an uphill battle it is to try to make it in Hollywood. 

We would love to have our church community help encourage us in whatever stage we’re in, celebrating the little successes that might not seem that important to other people. For a lot of us, little successes are all we’ll get for years on end. Get excited for the musician who got booked for a coffee shop gig, the stunt performer who got to double someone in a student film, and the choreographer hired for a small community theater production.