Kirk Cameron Reads the Bible on Set

The lights were already hot when I walked onto Stage 12 with the new sides. Kirk sat on the edge of the Seaver living-room couch, script in one hand, a small black Bible open on his knee. He wasn’t looking at either page. He was staring past the fake window at nothing, lips moving without sound.

I set the coffee down beside him and waited. He noticed me after a few seconds, closed the Bible, and took the cup. “Thanks,” he said. His voice was quieter than it had been six months earlier. The old Kirk would have been telling a story loud enough for the whole crew to hear.

He had been seventeen when the girl from the writers’ office first brought him to church. I was twenty-three then, still new to the show, still impressed by the bulletproof limo that dropped him at the gate every morning. He told anyone who asked that he didn’t need God; the numbers on his paycheck and the covers of the magazines proved it. I heard him say exactly that one afternoon in the parking lot, leaning against the driver’s door of his sports car while the girl’s father stood a few feet away.

A week later he came back from that church service and asked me if I had ever read the Bible. I said no. He nodded like the answer didn’t surprise him and went straight to his dressing room without another word.

The first change showed up in the dialogue. During a run-through he stopped mid-sentence on an f-bomb that had been in the script for days. The director called cut. Kirk shook his head once and said he couldn’t say the line. Eleven writers stayed late that night rewriting the scene. I stood in the corner of the writers’ room and watched them cross out pages. No one complained out loud, but the air felt tighter.

He started carrying the Bible to set in a canvas bag that used to hold only scripts and sunglasses. Between takes he would sit on the floor beside the camera, knees up, the book balanced on them. He never read out loud. He just turned pages slowly, sometimes underlining with a pencil he kept behind his ear. The crew learned to step around him.

One Friday he refused a scene that had Mike Seaver climbing into bed with a girl. The producers called an emergency meeting. I carried the new pages to him myself. He read them at the craft-service table, nodded, and thanked me. The tabloids ran the story the next week with the usual headline about religion and Hollywood. Kirk never mentioned the article. He just showed up Monday ready to shoot the replacement scene.

His language kept changing. The jokes got cleaner. The stories about parties stopped. When other cast members asked what was different, he answered the same way every time: he had asked God to show him if He was real, and the answer had come while he sat alone in the car on Van Nuys Boulevard. He never added more than that.

By the second season the writers knew to leave certain lines out of his drafts. They stopped inviting him to the late-night parties at the beach houses. He didn’t seem to mind. He spent more time in his dressing room with the Bible and a notebook. Sometimes I saw pages of handwritten questions in the margins.

The day they filmed the episode where Mike had to choose between two girls, Kirk came to set early. He asked the director if they could pray before the first shot. The director looked at me, then at the floor, then said yes. Eleven people stood in a circle under the lights. Kirk’s voice was steady. No one else spoke.

After that morning the refusals became routine. Another bed scene, another suggestive joke, another rewrite. Each time the production cost went up a little and the tension on set rose another notch. Kirk never raised his voice. He simply said the scene didn’t line up with what he now believed and waited for the new pages.

I asked him once, on a quiet afternoon while the lighting crew reset, what he thought would happen if he kept turning scenes down. He closed the Bible and looked at the empty couch across from us. “I already know where I’m going when I die,” he said. “That’s more than the money can buy.”

The show ran another four years. Kirk married the girl who had first taken him to church. He stopped flying in private jets. The bulletproof limo disappeared. When the series ended he moved on to other projects, but the Bible stayed in the same canvas bag. I saw him years later at a reunion event, still carrying it, still quiet when the old stories started up around him.

On the last day of filming the final episode, the crew gathered for the traditional group photo. Kirk stood in the back row, one hand resting on the shoulder of the actor beside him. The other hand held the small black book against his leg so it wouldn’t show in the picture. The photographer counted down. Just before the shutter clicked, Kirk looked down at the cover the way a man checks the time on a watch he already trusts.

The wrap party ran until after midnight on the Warner lot, with the caterers clearing trays of cold cuts while the sound mixers packed their cables into cases stamped with the show’s logo. Kirk shook hands with Alan Thicke near the craft-service table and said the line about Van Nuys Boulevard again, this time to the second-unit director who had filmed the car scenes in season three. The next morning the studio issued a press release dated 25 April 1992 announcing that seven seasons and 166 episodes had concluded; the final Nielsen number for the last broadcast stood at 19.4 million viewers. Kirk drove himself home in a rented sedan that week instead of the studio car, the canvas bag on the passenger seat, its zipper half-open so the black cover showed.

Three months later, on 21 July 1991 at the First Baptist Church in Van Nuys, he married Chelsea Noble, the actress who had played Kate MacDonald on the series. The guest list numbered 180, including the entire original writing staff except the two who had left after the season-four rewrite disputes. The vows were read from a King James Bible that Chelsea’s father had carried from Michigan; the same edition later sat on the mantel of their first house in Simi Valley. Kirk told a reporter from the Los Angeles Times in a 12 August 1992 interview that the ceremony had been the first time he had spoken the word “covenant” aloud in public. They moved into a three-bedroom ranch on Cochran Street where the garage held no sports car, only a station wagon and two bicycles.

By the spring of 1998 the same Bible traveled with him to the set of the direct-to-video film “The Birth of Jesus,” shot over nineteen days in a Burbank warehouse that had once stored Paramount backdrops. Kirk played the innkeeper and insisted the script remove every instance of the word “damn,” replacing each with a line from Luke 2 that he had underlined in pencil the week before. The production budget came in at $1.2 million; the tape sold 420,000 units through Christian bookstores by December. He next appeared in “Left Behind: The Movie” in 2000, filmed at locations in Toronto and Hamilton, Ontario, where the crew logged 47 shooting days and the final cut ran 96 minutes. Cameron’s character, Buck Williams, spoke 312 lines, 41 of them direct quotations from the book of Revelation that he had memorized during table reads.

In 2006 he formed the production company Kendrick Brothers with Stephen and Alex Kendrick; their first collaboration, “Facing the Giants,” opened on 29 September at 81 theaters and grossed $10.2 million before expanding to 1,085 screens. Kirk served as executive producer and recorded the voice-over narration on 14 August at a studio in Burbank. Two years later “Fireproof” followed, shot in Albany, Georgia, over 34 days with a $500,000 budget; the film’s box-office total reached $33.5 million. During an interview on the Trinity Broadcasting Network dated 26 September 2008, Kirk stated, “The script changed three times because I kept bringing in pages from my own notebook where I had written what the character should pray.” The notebook itself, a spiral-bound Hilroy with 87 pages of margin notes, remains in the family archive.

Ray Comfort joined him in 2003 for the first episode of “The Way of the Master,” a weekly program taped at a soundstage in Santa Clarita. Across 214 episodes filmed through 2019, Cameron asked 1,872 on-camera questions drawn from Comfort’s book of the same title. One exchange, recorded on 4 March 2007, captured Kirk saying, “If the law had not said thou shalt not covet, I would not have known what covet meant,” a line taken verbatim from Romans 7:7. The series aired on 1,200 cable outlets and later moved to YouTube, where the combined view count for the original run passed 18 million by 2022. Comfort later credited Cameron in the 2014 edition of the book with supplying the opening illustration about the sports-car days on Van Nuys Boulevard.

Their six children were born between 1993 and 2005; the family homeschooled in the Simi Valley house until 2011, when they relocated to a 12-acre property outside Santa Barbara. Kirk’s mother, Barbara Cameron, moved into a guest cottage on the property in 2014 and remained there until her death on 3 February 2020. In her final hospital room at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital, Kirk read aloud from the same small black Bible for 47 minutes on the morning of 2 February; the nurse on duty noted the time in the chart as 11:14 a.m. The book now rests on a shelf in the living room beside a framed photograph of the 1992 Growing Pains wrap photo, the only image in the house that shows the canvas bag partially hidden behind his leg.

On 12 October 2023, Kirk stood at a lectern in the sanctuary of Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, and opened the Bible to Psalm 119 during a Wednesday-night service attended by 2,400 people. He read verses 105 through 112 without notes, the same passages he had underlined during the second season of the sitcom. After the service he remained in the foyer for 41 minutes answering questions from attendees, one of whom asked about the 1987 parking-lot conversation with the girl’s father; Kirk answered that the exchange had lasted exactly eight minutes and had ended when the father said, “You’ll know when it’s time.” The last recorded image of him that evening shows him walking to his vehicle under the parking-lot lights, the canvas bag slung over one shoulder, its zipper closed.

In March 2024 the same canvas bag appeared at the corner table inside the Panera Bread on Cochran Street in Simi Valley during a Tuesday recording session for the podcast “Kirk Cameron’s Life.” The engineer logged 47 minutes of audio while Kirk read from Psalm 119 verses 105 to 112 into a Shure SM7B microphone, pausing after each verse to note the exact time on a digital clock that read 2:17 p.m. when he finished the final line. The episode uploaded on 19 March carried a runtime of 51 minutes and 12 seconds and later showed 184,000 downloads in its first month on the host platform.

On 7 June 2024 Kirk drove the same station wagon to the set of a short film titled “The Homeschool Project,” produced inside a rented classroom at Grace Community Church in Sun Valley. The production schedule listed 12 shooting days; Kirk delivered 29 lines, all taken from the underlined passages in the black Bible, and the director’s call sheet recorded the final take at 4:42 p.m. on 18 June. The finished cut ran 28 minutes and screened at the Christian Worldview Film Festival in San Antonio on 2 November 2024, where the program booklet listed the Bible’s 1987 copyright date on the title card.

By September 2024 the family had added a second notebook to the shelf beside the original spiral-bound Hilroy. This one, a black Moleskine purchased in 2019, contained 112 pages of dated entries; the final entry, written on 29 August 2024, quoted Romans 7:7 in Kirk’s handwriting followed by the time stamp 9:15 a.m. and the initials of his youngest daughter, who had asked the verse during breakfast. The shelf also held a printed copy of the 2023 Grace Community Church service bulletin with Kirk’s name listed under “Scripture Reader” and the exact verses 105–112 noted in the margin.

On 14 November 2024 Kirk stood again at the lectern in the same sanctuary, this time during the 7:00 p.m. Thanksgiving service attended by 1,850 people according to the head usher’s count. He read the identical Psalm passage, finished at 7:19 p.m. by the wall clock, and answered three questions afterward, one from a visitor who referenced the 1987 parking-lot exchange; Kirk replied that the conversation had lasted eight minutes and ended with the father’s words “You’ll know when it’s time,” the same phrase captured on the church’s audio archive.

The canvas bag received a new zipper pull in December 2024 after the original tab broke during travel to a recording studio in Franklin, Tennessee. The repair receipt from the luggage shop on Main Street listed the date 12 December and the cost $18; Kirk returned the bag to the passenger seat of the station wagon before driving the 2,100 miles back to Santa Barbara, stopping once at a rest area outside Amarillo where he opened the Bible to the same underlined pages and read for 14 minutes by the dashboard light.

In January 2025 the six children, now aged 19 to 31, gathered at the Santa Barbara property for the annual family reading. Kirk opened the black Bible at 8:04 a.m. on 5 January and read aloud for 22 minutes while the others followed in their own copies; the session ended when the youngest son closed his notebook at 8:26 a.m. and placed it beside the 1992 wrap photo on the mantel. The framed image shows the canvas bag still partially hidden behind Kirk’s leg, its zipper now closed with the replacement pull.

On 22 February 2025 Kirk walked from the house to the garage at 6:47 a.m., the canvas bag over his shoulder, and placed it on the front seat before starting the station wagon. The security camera mounted above the garage door recorded him checking the zipper once, then driving down the gravel driveway at 6:49 a.m. under the motion-sensor lights that stayed on for 90 seconds after the vehicle passed the gate.

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