To date, the movie has been seen by perhaps more than 50 million people worldwide others estimate as high as 300 million. It has influenced a generation of Christians reared in the 1970s and 80s. The film was released in 1972 and marks its 40 th anniversary this year. If you have seen it, the setting was likely a church basement, a church camp, or some other quasi-authoritative space where the film’s sermonizing might have been accompanied by an earnest youth pastor worried for your soul. The hypnotic rhythms lodged themselves in my brain and there I was, making a piece of toast, with the refrain repeating itself relentlessly.Ī Thief in the Night is a cult classic, where the word “cult” has more than one resonance. Then I turned it off, and I could not get the song out of my head. I watched the first five minutes on YouTube, through the church meeting where an early-era praise band sings “I Wish We’d All Been Ready.” The song, which was one of the first contemporary Christian pop hits, describes the terrible things that will take place during the end times, with a refrain that laments, “there’s no time to change your mind/the Son has come and you’ve been left behind.” As I watched, I could not help but laugh at the film’s campy quality and poor acting. I hadn’t heard the song that opens the 1972 Christian apocalyptic film A Thief in the Night in decades, and my impression of it was: slow, dull, bizarre, not catchy at all.
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