From the people over at Midnight Oil Productions
A fire and a blanket. Once, this was the technology for visual communication. Important messages could be seen rising above the plains from many miles away, as Native Americans relayed signals with smoke. These signals were of vital importance to the tribe. They could warn against oncoming attacks or be a call for help. Sometimes they were meant to simply convey that everything was normal. Smoke signals were not standardized code, as one might expect. They were instead aimed to transmit secret knowledge between friends or allies.
For many preachers, using images in worship can seem a lot like trying to send and read someone else’s smoke signals. Trained in “literate culture” seminaries, they have a vague awareness that using images in a sermon carries potential meaning. But learning to preach with image has proven to be challenging.
For most preachers, talking is easy. What is difficult is the conveyance of meaning, or communicating with the right combination of syntax and style to make a message heard. Even with the supposedly captive audience of a congregation the challenge remains, as the expectation for communication has risen along with our digital media options. How do we make our words carry weight? The elephant in the room is that preaching is hard, very hard, and few exhibit a command of oratory, both historically and presently. Some have even said preaching is dead, because so few people practice it well. The solution for many is to learn how to mix media in preaching.
While this concept may seem as new as the sudden ubiquity of screens in worship spaces, it is actually a significant part of the Christian tradition. What we call preaching began in a culture of orality with Isocrates and the style of Greek rhetoric – ordered, persuasive arguments that sought to develop and disseminate ideas. By the time of Jesus, amidst the bustle of commerce and new roads in the Hellenistic world, a new medium emerged – the letter. The Apostle Paul saw in letters an opportunity to “mix media” and proclaim the risen Christ using both the established style of rhetoric and the new medium of letters. In fact, some said he was better at new media than old media (Acts 20:9, 2 Cor 10:9-10).
The media mix changed over time. With the rise of the mass-printed book and the scientific method, the spoken word came to be regarded as a modification of the written rather than vice versa. Words took on precise, unambiguous meaning. The written word became authoritative. The art of rhetoric was lost and the sermon became a reading.
Now, many worshipers experience a sermon both by hearing it and reading it. Some preachers use a simple bulletin outline; others reprint large portions of their sermon for the congregation to read. Sermons are structured around doctrines and propositions. Arguments are systematic. Words are precise. In fact, the more wedded to book learning the preacher is, the more likely he or she is to carry angst over individual syntactical meaning. Sound familiar?
The irony is that the speaker is much more concerned with individual word choice than the listener. Largely, listeners today are no longer systematic. The goal is not precision, but individual interpretation. Science is being forced to recognize art.
Many of the best speakers in our culture have discovered, like Paul, the power of utilizing a mix of media. Yet the church seems to lag, continuing to trust what is written more than what is heard or seen. Part of such distrust stems from lack of mastery. It is true that creating powerful images and video for worship is hard. Worshipers are sophisticated media consumers and the expectation of quality is high. (It’s paradoxical, however, that expectations remain high even as production values decline with viral web video and reality television.)
Full Article: Learning to Preach with Image
