This has been quite the summer for movie-themed shenanigans in the pulpit. If it isn’t Saddleback pastors dressing up like Toy Story characters, then it’s a Top Gun-themed sermon. And if not that, then it’s a clown building a bird’s nest on stage, climbing in it, and pretending to eat worms, or worse, hauling a dumpster on stage and climbing into that to preach. The sheer number of churches participating in this nonsense is staggering. But endless.

Life.Church, a ministry of Craig Groeschel and his many, many campuses around the U.S., has been at the forefront of this Hollywood in the pulpit trend this summer. The most recent sermon, a sermon preached by Jonathan Herron, the pastor of the Michigan campus, was a Spiderman-themed sermon where he compared Hollywood movies to Jesus’s parables, claiming that we can learn the same kind of spiritual truths from them.

“Jesus always taught using stories,” he said, “because God has created us, has wired us to connect with stories, each other’s stories, stories we see played out before us and believe it or not many of Hollywood’s greatest blockbusters this year have spiritual truths woven in and so each Sunday this month we’re going to pick a different movie that’s kind of recent and look for the fingerprints of God within the local movie theater.”