 |  Conditions affecting tomorrow's ministry.
Fall 1999
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Conversations
October 1, 1999
Video is no messiah
He looked
at me, this multimedia-user-friendly, nationally prominent,
always-on-the-cutting-edge preacher and said, "You know, don't you,
that any church without a drop-down screen will be dead in a decade."
What? In my mind I immediately began chiseling away the neogothic limestone
from inside Duke Chapel in order to enable us to survive into the next decade
with video.
Look, I'm no Luddite. I'm writing this response to using video
in church (mentioned in LEADERSHIP's last two issues,
The Value of Video) on a computer.
I go to movies. But really now, the gospel of Christ—having survived Nero,
the Inquisition, Mao, the Total Woman, Benny Hinn, and my insipid sermons—will
it survive technochurch? Multimedia praise, drop-down screens, TV technology
may be the death of us rather than our key to the future.
The virtue of visual media is that they tend to be engaging, stressing concrete
images rather than abstract ideas. But they do more than that. Video tends
to stress image over idea. It is the nature of TV to be fast-paced,
not to linger, to constantly move from image to image.
Not long ago, I watched Bill Moyers's PBS series Genesis. Moyers
is intelligent and thoughtful. Furthermore, he assembled a studio full of
thoughtful, intelligent people to discuss passages in Genesis.
But the programs tended to be frustrating. What we got were sound bites,
pieces of commentary by the individuals, little interaction, almost no
development of ideas once the ideas were expressed. I thought, If Moyers
can't pull off intelligent examination of material on TV, perhaps it
just can't be done.
Video tends toward the superficial. It does a good job of giving the illusion
of experience, of drawing ...
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