This talk, which has been edited for publication, was given at a BYU devotional on October 29, 2024. The video recording is available at https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/dallas-jenkins/five-loaves-and-two-fishes/.

Still image from The Chosen. Courtesy of www.wipr.pr.

ABSTRACT: When we face trials in life and encounter seeming failure, the Lord can lift and inspire us in surprising, even miraculous, ways. We learn from the Gospel accounts of the feeding of the five thousand with only five loaves and two fish that all the Lord asks is that we do what we can so he can then multiply our effort, doing what only he can do—the miracle part.

KEYWORDS: trials, personal revelation, trust, miracles

Thank you for welcoming me here. It really does mean a lot. I love talking to students because about twenty-five to thirty years ago I was actually sitting in your seat. I would listen to a weekly or even daily speaker at the college I went to.

I wish I had heard what I want to talk about this morning—failure. When I was a college student, you’re often asked, “What’s your five-year plan?” and “Who do you want to be when you graduate?” and “Where do you want to go?”— and not just careerwise, but ministrywise. And there’s a lot of pressure on you, now and today, more than ever, to achieve, to grow, to figure things out, to solve problems.

It wasn’t until my forties, but I learned that striving and the stress that comes from that is actually a weight and in some ways an idol that needs to be broken. And so I want to tell you my story of how we got to this place today. It’s actually a story rooted in failure. I know that’s not a typical topic. And it’s especially odd maybe coming from the creator of The Chosen because, by all objective measurements, The Chosen is actually quite successful. But the lesson I learned and the thing that changed my life happened at the launch of The Chosen, and I want to share it with you.

I’m going to take you back a little bit, probably to when I first started my career in movies. As you heard earlier, at twenty-five years old I made my first feature film. And when I first started in this business, my idol—my passion, my goal—was legitimacy. You see, in my business you’re measured not necessarily by how good you are at your job, but by how successful you are, how others think you are good or not.

And so I was doing independent films. When I graduated from college, my father had a very successful book series. There was a company that was interested in making that as a film, and so I went to work for that company. Then eventually I went out on my own with my father and made several films, and some of them had varying degrees of success, but they were all outside the Hollywood system.

When you hear the term independent film, that means it was financed and usually distributed by someone or by a studio, project, or company that wasn’t part of the Hollywood system. And that was me for fifteen years, and I really wanted that legitimacy. I used to practice Academy Award speeches in front of my mirror.

I’d like to say that ended when I was a teenager, but it kept going into my twenties and thirties because that’s what I wanted. I wanted to be prepared for that moment when I was legitimized. Now, I’d like to say that I also was motivated by the kingdom. I wanted to do good kingdom work. And I would tell myself that one of the reasons I wanted to be successful was that I would have a platform—a platform to help build the kingdom. Success would give me a voice, and I would use that voice for God. And I think there was some truth to that, but the thing that really got me excited was the possibility of winning awards, finishing in the top five at the box office, and being legitimized by Hollywood companies.

It didn’t happen for fifteen years, and that’s what I sought. Well, I finally ended up going to work back in Illinois. So I grew up in Illinois, went out and lived in Los Angeles for ten years making various films, and I moved back to Illinois to work for a large church in the Chicago area. And I was raising my family in that environment, which was great, but I was there to make movies.

This church wanted to make movies with me and get them out to the world, and they had the resources to finance them. For the first few years I didn’t actually get a chance to make a film. I just got caught up in media stuff that we were doing, and the script that I was working on just wasn’t going very well. And so a few years into it, I said, “Look, I have to make something. I came here to make movies and not just run the weekend services, and so I need to do something.” So I did a short film for my church’s Christmas Eve service. It went very well, and the church really loved it. And then, very long story short, it got in the hands of one of the biggest producers in Hollywood, a guy by the name of Jason Blum. He produced all the most successful horror films you’ve seen or heard about in the last ten years—Get Out, Insidious, Sinister, all these very successful horror films. He was a maestro at taking low-budget horror stories and turning them into big successes—all movies that you haven’t heard of because you’re Christians, right? But he was really interested in the faith market because of the same thing. It wasn’t that he was necessarily passionate about horror films; he was just passionate about success and saw there was an opportunity in the faith market, in the faith audience.

And sure enough, there was another company that was interested in this as well. And this is WWE, the wrestling company, World Wrestling Entertainment. They had a film division, which I hadn’t known. And they also understood audiences and niche audiences. They saw my short film and loved it as well. I showed them the script that I had been developing. They loved that. They said, “We want to make movies with you.” And so a horror film company, a wrestling company, and a church in Elgin, Illinois, combined to produce a film that I wrote and was ready to direct.

I had arrived. I had gotten what I sought: legitimacy and approval and interest from some major Hollywood companies and producers. I filmed the movie at my church in Illinois, and it had a great message, a gospel message, in it. I mean, this was great, and they wanted to make more movies with me.

So then we tested the movie. In Hollywood what they do is they grab random audiences and get them together, and they watch the movie sight unseen—they don’t know anything about it. They watch the movie and then give scores and recommendations, and it scored higher than any of the other movies these companies had made.

And the companies were like, “Oh my goodness, we gotta do more.” So we’re going to do five movies over the next ten years, and everything’s very exciting . . . until January of 2017. January 20th, 2017. I’ll never forget because that was the day my movie was released to the world. It came out in theaters all over the country, and everyone was very optimistic.

Hollywood runs on math. You can know within the first couple hours on a Friday what the numbers are from the East Coast as they come in. And it’s a math equation. Within a couple hours you can know if the movie will do well that night, how it will do that weekend, and in many cases how it will do for the next month or two.

And there are, of course, exceptions to that rule, but for the most part it’s a math equation that they know how to solve. In the first few hours, the numbers came in, and the movie was a complete bomb. Lower than the lowest projections. And within two hours I went from being a director with a very bright future to being a director with no future.

Those companies that had been so passionate about me and these projects immediately realized, “Okay, we don’t understand this business, this audience, so we’re gonna go back to doing what we do best, horror films and wrestling.” And I’m going back to nothing. That afternoon I’m home alone with my wife, Amanda, and we’re praying and crying and confused—because God’s not the author of failure. That’s what we’ve been told our whole lives. And I fail. I had thought this calling was so clear over the last couple years. So many things had happened—whether it was impressions from the Lord or whether it was doors being closed and then opened—that had made it so clear that I was doing what God wanted me to do.

And then the movie bombed. So what does that make you do? Well, it makes you question: “I guess I wasn’t hearing from God.” “That couldn’t have been God. I guess that was me.” “I guess I was wrong. I misread the tea leaves, and maybe I’m not meant for this.” And that is a very, very hard pill to swallow, especially for someone like me who prided himself on problem solving and accomplishment and understanding results and making good decisions.

“Choose the right,” as the song said. I thought I’d done that. So I’m very confused at this point. I go into the kitchen and I’m wallowing in my sorrow, and my wife comes in and says, “I don’t know why, but I know that God is putting it on my heart almost as clear as it’s an audible voice: ‘Read the story of the feeding of the five thousand’ and ‘I do impossible math.’ I don’t know what that means, I don’t know why he’s saying that, but I just know that I know that I know.” So we opened up the story of the feeding of the five thousand in the Gospels. We’re reading through it, trying to glean what we can. And as we’re reading it, we see something that I hadn’t really noticed before.

When the disciples come to Jesus and tell him the people are hungry, he’s not surprised. They say to him, “We need to send these people home to get food.” And Jesus says immediately, “Oh no, we can’t do that. If we send them home, they’re so hungry that they’ll faint along the way.” Now, not only was he not surprised, it was actually his fault.

Depending on your theology, he either allowed them to get hungry or he caused them to get hungry. But he’s the one who’d been speaking for three days. He can see them. He knows that typically they would eat at a certain time, and he’s talking through that time, and he got them hungry and desperate. He brought them to the place where the only thing to satisfy their hunger or desperation was him—a miracle. So that was encouraging, and I thought, “Okay, combined with ‘I do impossible math,’ this is encouraging. Hollywood operates on math. So what’s going to happen is, he’s brought us to this place of desperation and hunger. We’re there. All right, now we’re ready to be fed, God. Thank you in advance for what you’re going to do with these numbers this weekend. They’re going to turn around and multiples, multiples, multiples are going to be fed, right?”

And that didn’t happen. In fact, that night the numbers got worse. It was almost as if God was saying, “That’s not the message I have for you right now,” making it very clear.

So now we’re just even more confused because the numbers weren’t getting any better. That night I was up till four in the morning doing what I do really well—analyzation, what we call a postmortem. This is what went wrong. What went right? What can we learn from? How can I make sure this never happens again? Because I don’t know if I’m even supposed to be in this business. But if I am, I’m going to make sure I succeed, and I’m going to succeed by learning from what just went wrong. So I’m writing a fifteen-page memo. I’m on page fifteen of this memo, and it’s good. And to be fair, I was accepting blame. I wasn’t putting it on anyone else, which is rare in my business.

I was saying, “You know what? I made mistakes, I made bad decisions, and here’s where it went wrong.” I was going to send this memo to all the people that I’d worked with. And as I’m working on it, a message pops up on my computer screen. It was from someone that I’d never met. We were Facebook friends, and it came through Facebook Messenger. We’d spoken maybe once a year. It was a guy named Alex. He didn’t say hi, didn’t say hello, didn’t say he’d heard about my movie. He just literally said, “Remember, it’s not your job to feed the five thousand. It’s only to provide the loaves and fish.”

I honestly looked around for a second because I wondered if my computer had been recording what my wife and I had been saying that day. Whom had I told? Amanda and I had been talking about this and wrestling with this and trying to figure out what the feeding of the five thousand is about for us, and I hadn’t told anybody. How did he know?

So I responded. I didn’t say hi or hello either. I just said, “What are you doing up at four in the morning?” And he says, “Well, I’m actually in Romania. I’m in a different time zone. I’m here visiting my brother. God has been, you know, working in me, and I decided to open my computer, and I saw that your movie didn’t do well.” And I said, “Can I just ask you before I respond why you said that to me?” He said, “Oh, that wasn’t me. God told me to tell you that.”

I found out later that he had been walking home and had looked up the movie. He had liked it but saw it was a disappointment. And God put it on his heart as clearly as he put it on Amanda’s: “Tell Dallas it’s not his job to feed the five thousand. It’s only to provide the loaves and fish.” And Alex said, “No, I barely know Dallas. That’s a pretty condescending thing to say to somebody when they are going through a big failure.” And God said, “Tell him,” and Alex just kept saying no. And finally he said, “Okay, well, it’s four in the morning over there. He won’t get it anyway.” So he sends off this message and of course gets an immediate response.

And that moment changed my life. In that moment I knew that God was present. I knew that God was looking over this. I knew that God had probably brought me to that place of failure. And he did indeed have something in it for me. And I wasn’t going to find it by writing a fifteen-page memo or by using any of the tools I’d learned in college or at business seminars. I wasn’t going to be able to solve this and figure this out on my own. I still didn’t know what “impossible math” meant in this case because success wasn’t on the horizon. But in that moment all I cared about was God’s will. So I surrendered. Probably for the first time in my life.

I broke down, and I thanked Alex. I put aside the memo. And I got to a place where I was truly okay with whatever God wanted for me. And so I decided to write something different, something that I want to read to you now. And I posted this on Facebook. And typically in my business, when you have a movie or a TV show or whatever that’s not doing well, you do what a politician does—if the polls are bad, you always put on a brave face.

You always say, “Well, we understand, you know, the polls may be telling you this, but actually we’re doing much better.” And it’s the same thing in my business. “Oh, the numbers aren’t good, but people are loving it and you need to go see it” and yada yada. It’s how we do things. And I said, “You know what? No more of that, no more trying to impress or trying to convince. I’m just going to be honest.”

So I posted on Facebook something different than what you’d normally post when your movie’s out. I wrote this, and I think there might be something in it for you.

So, what do you do when something you poured yourself into just doesn’t land? I won’t mince words. The Resurrection of Gavin Stone [that’s the movie I made] had a very disappointing opening weekend, and an even more disappointing day yesterday.

Yes, we’ve gotten good feedback from those who’ve seen it, and it’s had tremendous impact on multiple churches and individuals, and that’s the main reason we do these movies. But to be able to make more movies, your movie has to perform, and people on a mass scale need to want to see it. And as much as I can point to multiple factors that impacted the box office, I can’t play the blame game.

Something I created and believed in and thought would work simply didn’t connect on a measurable level. People didn’t want to see it in a theater, and I thought that they would, period. So what do you do when that happens in any career path? Certainly sadness is a factor. My wife and I have dealt with that over the last week for sure.

Questioning yourself, the future, et cetera, it’s all part of it.

But Amanda and I did something that has sustained us through this time. We pursued God and sought to hear what we could from him. And he made it 100 percent clear to us and through others who felt led to share something with me that I’m only to bring my five loaves and two fish and the rest is up to him.

And I can honestly say I’m better spiritually right now than I’ve ever been. For the first time in my life, I would be 100 percent fine if I couldn’t make another movie. That’s actually a great place to be in. In my speaking engagements, I often quote my friend, an unintentional mentor, the great Phil Vischer. He’d created VeggieTales. And he had a similar fall from grace, or at least a disappointment. He said something in a speech when I heard him, and he said that where you’re going to be in five years is none of your business. And now I’m fully living that out. I have no idea what’s next. I have no idea if I’ll make another movie.

While that’s no fun careerwise, it’s truly enriching spiritually. I’m serious. I feel a sense of comfort and peace and contentment and, yes, joy that you wouldn’t normally expect after the biggest disappointment of your career. And that’s what a relationship with Christ does. Joy regardless of happiness. Freedom regardless of opportunity. Don’t hold on to things too tightly. Realize you’re not as smart as you thought you were. It feels good. Trust me.

So I posted that on Facebook, and of course it became the most engaged-with and responded-to post that I’d done. Any of the other projects that I’d posted about paled in comparison to what I said in this post, and a lot of people mentioned how much it resonated with them because they’d gone through something similar.

So there I was, still left with an uncertain future. So I went back to the drawing board. I had written a script with my cowriter, Tyler—a short film about the birth of Christ from the perspective of the shepherds—but we’d put it on the shelf because I had this big Hollywood opportunity. We’d written it about a year and a half before.

I went to the church and said, “You want another short film for Christmas Eve?” And they said of course. And so we went in the middle of June in Illinois and filmed on my friend’s farm, twenty minutes from my house, right behind a barn, the story of the shepherds on the day of Christ’s birth and the night of Christ’s birth.

It felt like a significant step down from what I’d been doing. It didn’t even feel like five loaves and two fish; it felt like one loaf and half a fish. I’m doing this little short film for my church on a farm in Illinois. But while I was doing it, I never had felt more in my zone. Everything was feeling natural and right. I loved how I’d done a couple other short films in my church about Jesus from different perspectives.

And while I was making that short, the idea for The Chosen came up. And I thought, “You know what, in twenty minutes in this short film about the birth of Christ, I feel like I’m learning more and engaged more in this story than I ever have. And even just by telling it, I feel like it’s coming alive, alive to me more than ever.” I thought, “Man, that’d be interesting.”

You know, while there have been movies and miniseries about Jesus, there’s never been a multiseason show where you can take this time to develop the stories, instead of going from miracle to miracle, Bible verse to Bible verse, and never really connecting with the people who were touched by Jesus.

And seeing Jesus through their eyes becomes kind of a reenactment. And that can be good. Your church has done it. It’s been done many times, just reenactments of the Bible verses. Some of them have been done very well, and they have a great purpose. But I would contend that most of the time you don’t have an emotional connection; you don’t quite identify with the people.

And I thought, “I think that’s something we’re missing in artistic portrayals of Jesus and his followers.” So I had this idea for a Jesus show, but of course I had no way to make it. There weren’t people lining up around the block to do a Jesus project, and certainly not with me, someone coming off of a significant failure.

So I didn’t think it would happen, but I thought, “Whoever gets a chance to do this is going to look smart because I think this is going to work.” Well, long story short, a friend of mine got the short film in the hands of a company actually here in Provo: Angel Studios. At the time they were called VidAngel, and they were looking for new content. They saw my short film and loved it, heard my idea for the show and loved it, and said, “We want to do your show.” I got really excited until they said, “We want to raise the money through crowdfunding.”

I got really depressed because crowdfunding rarely works. It’s usually what you see on social media. Someone’s trying to raise money on their birthday and the bar never actually quite gets to the end, where their goal is. And then the all-time crowdfunding record was $5.7 million from projects that had big fan bases. And I had no fan base. I had this little short film that I did on my friend’s farm in Illinois.

But loaves and fishes, man. It’s not my job to feed five thousand. So these were my loaves and fish. I said, “All right, I’ve got nothing to lose anyway.” We put this short film out online, and I did a pitch at the end of it, kind of telling people how they could invest in this project.

And something special happened: it went viral. In January of that next year, I’m sitting at the computer finishing up a live stream, and my wife is next to me. We passed the $10 million mark, shattering the all-time crowdfunding record from sixteen thousand people all over the world. Some of them might actually be in this room right now. And I hear my wife sniffling, and I look over and she’s got tears streaming down her face.

She says, “‘I do impossible math’!” And just as clearly as he had said it to her a year before, he said it again, and then he said, “That’s what I meant.” And so in that moment it was very easy to realize that this isn’t us. This is impossible math. This is the kind of math that God’s part of. It’s not the math equation based on numbers and interest. This is what he does. He takes the small, the broken, the surrendered and makes something out of it. And so in that moment we knew even more than ever that if God was going to take us on this journey, it was going to be his journey and not mine.

In the last seven years since then, The Chosen has grown through many challenges, but now it’s one of the most successful shows in the world, one of the most translated shows in history. It’s in every country, every corner, from prisons to government buildings. We’ve now finished in at the top of the box office. We’ve gotten awards. All this at the time when I stopped caring, which is awesome.

And now what’s interesting is we have success. And now God speaks to me still, and he says that same phrase: “It’s not your job to feed the five thousand. It’s only to provide the loaves and fish.” But it’s in a different tone of voice. See, the first time it was very encouraging and kind: “It’s not your job to feed the five thousand, Dallas. It’s only to provide the loaves and fish.” Now it’s “It’s not your job to feed the five thousand. It’s only to provide the loaves and fish.”

Whether in failure or success, the message is the same. When you make your five loaves and two fish—and he does ask that of us—he could have just waved his hand like I am in front of you right now, in front of thousands of people, and the loaves and fish could have appeared out of nothing. But he does demand for us to participate, for us to do the thing that we don’t necessarily need him for, so that he can do the thing that only he can do—the miracle part. So he does involve us in the process. Isn’t that so gracious of him? Whether it’s asking for the five loaves and two fish, or whether it’s telling his disciples to roll the stone away when Lazarus is raised, or whether it’s telling Moses to camp out at the edge of the Red Sea and strike the rock so the water would part, he does ask us to participate.

But I’m telling you, students especially, whether in failure or success, when you hand those five loaves and two fish to him and he deems it worthy of acceptance, the transaction is over. You are not more loved if you do seven loaves. More people are not fed if you do three fish. It’s the five and two principle: You bring what you have, you give it to God, and let it go. You get to that place where you don’t care about the results or what people say. Right now you can look on YouTube and find dozens of videos calling me evil and dozens of videos calling me the greatest thing ever. Neither one of those things is true. And I can’t try to avoid the former or seek the latter.

And so I implore you, starting now, don’t wait until you’re in your forties for God to break you down and bring you to your knees in surrender. Starting now, get to this place—this superpower, actually, that comes from giving that up to God. It is not your job to feed the five thousand. It is only to provide the loaves and fish. I love you. And I hope that you can learn that earlier than I did.