Tag: Overnighters

This is the final post in a series discussing my reactions to the director’s cut of the documentary, The Overnighters.

I was privileged to be able to see a screening of the documentary when Jesse Moss, the director, was personally present for a question & answer session after the viewing.

Here is one the questions asked, which is as close to a quote as I can recall:

Why don’t the oil companies, who are making billions of dollars from all the oil, do something to take care of the homeless in Williston?

The questioner wanted to know essentially how there can be any homelessness in Williston with the huge amount of profits made by the big bad oil companies.

I chuckled.

Continue reading “Thoughts about the Director’s Cut from The Overnighters documentary – part 7”

This is the sixth and next to last post on my thoughts after viewing the director’s cut. Just a few more ideas before concluding with my reaction to a question asked by a person at the screening I attended.

Role of the newspaper

I think I’ll hold off for another day the role played by a reporter brought into town and the editor of the city paper.

One idea is the appropriate boundary between reporting a story of public interest on one hand and becoming part of the story or creating fear on the other hand.

Continue reading “Thoughts about the Director’s Cut from The Overnighters documentary – part 6”

One final lesson that those of us in leadership at local churches or parachurch ministries can learn from the documentary The Overnighters. Previous lessons learned are visible here and here.

Hurting people hurt people. Alan and Paul turned on the pastor. They were quite angry with him and their outbursts were caught on camera. Comments in the director’s cut help me understand that they struck out in anger because of the hurts in their lives. Continue reading “Thoughts about the Director’s Cut from The Overnighters documentary – part 5”

Two more lessons learned that leaders in churches and ministries can pick up from The Overnighters documentary. The first three lessons are here.

In this post:

• Your sin will find you out.
• People lie.

Continue reading “Thoughts about the Director’s Cut from The Overnighters documentary – part 4”

This post continues my reflections on a documentary describing the overnighters program at a church in Williston, which provided housing to people looking for work when sufficient housing was not available in the area. First of three discussions on lessons learned from my perspective as one of the leaders in my congregation.

Lessons learned

From the perspective of leadership training in the local church, there are many lessons to be learned from the documentary. Here are six for your consideration:

• Beware the Lone Ranger mentality.
• Don’t keep secrets.
• Set proper boundaries.
• Your sin will find you out.
• People lie.
• Hurting people hurt people.

The first three:

Beware the Lone Ranger mentality. While I loved that TV series as a kid, that show contains a poor model for adults. Ministry in both a local church and a parachurch organization requires teamwork. Continue reading “Thoughts about the Director’s Cut from The Overnighters documentary – part 3”

Update 7/17/17: Welcome to those checking out the page. I have some followup on The Overnighters documentary:

• Part 1 – documentary streaming on Netflix in July and showing on many PBS stations
• Part 2 – agendas and biases
• Part 3 – other articles and lessons learned

The PBS pages set up to talk about The Overnighters documentary have a lot of information. PBS aired the documentary on June 29.

There is a 19 minute interview with Jesse Moss. Most of the comments there will be familiar to anyone who’s read lots of posts on my blog or watched the documentary. If you weren’t aware of what is happening in the North Dakota oil fields before watching the documentary, that interview would be a great way to get up to speed.

Here is some update on the characters and then general goal of the documentary.

Background and follow-up of the main subjects of the documentary

The “About the Characters” page gives some background of many of the people the documentary focuses upon.

The “Film Update” page follows up on several of the people.

Continue reading “Where are they now? Followup on people you saw in The Overnighters documentary.”

Keith Graves is awaiting trial in North Dakota on 10 federal counts which includes 7 allegations of human trafficking. He is a main player in The Overnighters documentary. I have discussed his situation on my blog several times.

His trial was scheduled to start July 13. Continue reading “Keith Graves’ trial postponed to October 19, 2015”

I recently watched the director’s cut of The Overnighters. Many things come into focus after listening to the interview.

This will be the first in a series of posts reflecting on the director’s cut. I would like to get these posted before the middle of July, which is the scheduled start of a federal trial of one of the participants in the documentary.

My previous discussions of the documentary can be found here.

The limit of my vision is not the limit of the world

That is a perceptive comment I came across a few years ago that helps me understand many things. There is far more going on in the world that I can see or perceive or understand or even have a clue that exists.

Assuming that nothing exists beyond what you or I know about is a serious danger.

Continue reading “Thoughts about the Director’s Cut from The Overnighters documentary – part 1”

I watched the director’s cut last night. Want to add some more data points to the timeline. Eventually I will integrate all these comments into one large post. In the meantime, I am building the story one post at a time.

8/12/13 – director’s cut – This is the date on the letter from the zoning and planning commission directing the church to close the program within 30 days.

At issue is violations of city code.

The ironic thing is Jay Reinke states in the director’s cut that the Fire Chief did a walk-through of the facility a year earlier knowing what the program involved and said it would be okay to continue the program. A year after the walkthrough? Time to shut it down.

9/12/13 – director’s cut – This would be 30 days after the city’s letter and therefore approximately the day the program closed. Continue reading “More info on the timeline in documentary “The Overnighters””