Kathie Lee Gifford Says She Feels Called By God To Share Faith Through Entertainment
By Cooper Dowd, Staff Writer
Emmy award-winning television presenter Kathie Lee Gifford says that she believes God called her to make movies that reach audiences with Christ’s love and redemption.
“I felt the Lord’s calling on my life to write a movie for people who don’t know yet that God loves them,” Gifford told The Christian Post. “I didn’t know why I thought that was a strange thing for Him to say to my heart. But I have many, many, many friends, more nonbeliever friends than I have Christian friends actually in my life, people that I share my faith with and they respect it, but they’re not there yet.”
The television entertainer–known for her roles on the TODAY show, LIVE! WITH REGIS AND KATHIE LEE, and some movies–hopes that her entertainment career would show people the love of God.
Movieguide® honored Gifford with the Visionary Award at the 28th Annual Movieguide® Awards Gala and Report to the Entertainment Industry earlier this year.
In her new movie, THEN CAME YOU, Gifford says the plot demonstrates how we can love like Jesus, despite some of the flaws in the church.
“I think the Church has failed nonbelievers in many, many ways through the years and one of the biggest ones is that we haven’t loved them into the Kingdom,” Gifford said. “We have created an atmosphere of self-righteousness at times and an attitude of condemnation towards them. I don’t think that’s what Jesus ever planned; we’re supposed to love people like Annabel and Howard (characters in the film), and just be a witness to them.”
In THEN CAME YOU, Gifford plays a widow, mirroring her own life. Gifford’s husband, Frank, died in 2015.
“If you live long enough you’re going to experience that kind of loss in life and that kind of grief. For me, ‘losing’ my husband. There’s a line in [Gifford’s song] ‘He Saw Jesus’ that says, ‘No, I didn’t lose him/I know right where he is/He was never really mine/He was always His,'” Gifford said.
“So as believers, that’s why I could hold my dead husband in my arms and rejoice. I knew where he was. It was not a tragedy, it was a triumph of eternal life,” she continued.
Gifford is incredibly vocal about her faith and her calling to use her platform to share the Gospel.
When she accepted the Visionary award, Gifford said:
All these years later, I’m writing movies, I’m producing movies and, by the grace of God, now actually even directing movies in Israel to the oratorios that God has been blessing me to write with some of the greatest writers in this world. I simply cannot believe God’s grace and bounty in my life. I will forever praise him and thank him and, hopefully, make many, many, many movies to come.
… In Him I live, move, and have my being every nanosecond of my life. I don’t split it up. That’s not the way God wants us to live our lives. I’ll never believe it, ever. There’s no joy in that. My joy is not negotiable.
Check back to movieguide.org soon for the review of THEN CAME YOU.
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