Wingmen

Mart Green

Mart Green wouldn’t be your first choice to be the driving force behind a movie, much less two of them. After all, until just a few years ago, the 42-year-old retailing magnate had never even been in a theater! Mart Green Green grew up in a conservative Christian home where movies were shunned, though his parents could’ve bought the local theater—or a whole chain of them, for that matter. His father, David Green, founder and CEO of Hobby Lobby, is listed among Forbes’ 400 Richest Americans with a net worth of some $1.2 billion. A product of that retail world, Mart Green is now founder and CEO of Mardel Christian and Education Supply stores—so he’s also got a few bucks to spend. Several years ago, he decided to spend some of it promoting the Bible in a nationwide marketing campaign similar to the “Got Milk?” blitz. He’d even chosen the slogan: “This Book Is Alive.” But that idea got sidetracked after Green heard Steve Saint, son of one of the 1956 missionary martyrs in Ecuador, speak at a missions conference with Mincaye, one of the Waodani Indians who’d killed the martyrs—including Saint’s father. Soon, Green’s Bible blitz idea took on a different shape—in the form of a feature film about those 1956 events: “Instead of doing a 30-second commercial,” says Green, “we ended up doing a two-hour movie about the power of God’s Word.” He formed a production company, Every Tribe Entertainment, and hired some pros to make the movies—including a big wheel who left Sony Pictures to helm the project.