Media is so important to communication, and it is one area the body of Christ could stand to take better advantage of. Let's start by thinking of three ways you learn something: watching, listening, reading, doing.
Watching is great when you don't know much about a subject. There is tons of information is conveyed per second. Listening, with less visual cues, works well if you're already pretty familiar, but still takes a fair amount of time and attention. I, personally, never really got in to podcasts for this reason.
Reading distills ideas down to their core concepts and is potentially the most dense way to convey information. It requires a certain level of existing ability to understand and abstract concepts that are being built on, but can just as easily introduce someone to brand new ideas. Of course, text is just as easy to scan as it is to pore over, and this is one reason the web is so successful.
Writing has been with us for ages, quite literally. The Bible is text-based. And yet it records an aural tradition of preaching messages and teaching interactively that is quite as old as itself. With the internet's ability to transmit text, audio and video, obviously I'm not the first person to think that the church should get in on this action.
I do think the church can be doing a better job here. For one, we're only really seeing Sunday messages uploaded to YouTube or some church website. The savvy ones have even set up an RSS feed so that you can use iTunes or some other media player to subscribe to their sermons as a video podcast. Okay. That's a start.
But if we're really serious about the message, let's strategically embrace the media available to us. I can think of a couple key advantages of using the internet to distribute.
Publishing media on the web is cheap. Free services like YouTube are becoming near-ubiquitous. All you need is a laptop, video camera, audio interface, a couple mics, some software, a few friends and the skills to make it happen or at least the passion to try.
Speaking of friends, kids are saturated in technology and media know-how and more and more are graduating every year with degrees in Media and Technology. Let's encourage each other to make amateur music videos and little musicals and spy movies in our spare time.
We can keep our messages short, or make it long and in-depth. But going with short and sweet is probably going to be the best for video, with more in-depth concepts being fleshed out in long articles or small books. Although keeping it short does help us to really focus our thinking and squeeze every second for what it's worth. It's important to respect your audience's time.
De-centralize and flatten the church. Chances are there is more than one person out there with more than one good idea. Let's put the amateurs on the air and let the good stuff trickle to the top. Really help people feed each other, sharpen each other, keep each other accountable, deliver God's word to each other. Encourage, strengthen and exhort each other.
Paul write in 1 Corinthians, "What then shall we say, brothers? When you come together, everyone has a hymn, or a word of instruction, a revelation, a tongue or an interpretation. All of these must be done for the strengthening of the church."
Church is for church. The New Testament church met in each others homes not just to hear the disciples teach (though they did do that), but also to eat, to pray, to worship God and celebrate together. As we encourage and teach each other how to feed ourselves in our everyday lives, let's see more corporate activity at our corporate meetings.
So what's to stop you and your Jesus-geek friends from putting together a fifteen minute mini-sermon once a week? Don't worry about the quality, just get started and improve one bit at a time once you start getting the hang of it.
(Alternate title for this entry: Note to self #183.)
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