The verdict on television and every
other form of contemporary multi-media has been in for some time. Watching
electronic screens, even infrequently, has a profound impact on nearly
everyone’s desire to read, ability to read deeply, and ability to read for any
length of time. All of it makes us—well, if not stupid—deeply distracted and
increasingly shallow.
I’ve written about how this is so
for years (here, and here, for example) and reflected on this insight as one of
the basic shapers of contemporary faith in my book, Not Sure. I’ve also spoken frequently about how preachers and
worship planners might adapt their approach to a changing audience. I’ve based
some of my ideas on Walter Ong’s insights about how oral audiences—that is,
audiences from the time before most people could read. What follows are talking
points—ten ideas that might have some traction.
One:
Practice Simplicity. Today’s audiences
are made up of people who read less. Many know only what they remember or
Google. They are often not reading scripture either, and almost certainly not
reading much about scripture, unless it is something in the health and wealth
genre. So, when preaching, keep it simple and forget the huge swaths of
doctrine. Augustine said preachers should leave difficult matters to books.
Walter Benjamin says that Berthold Brecht kept a toy donkey on his desk with a
sign around its neck: ‘I too must understand.’” The Bible says that the common
people heard Jesus gladly. And he kept it simple. Think parable, think the
Sermon on the Mount’s proverbs and beatitudes, think of illustrations that will
make children smile. Keep it simple like Jesus did.
Simplicity is not an
excuse to practice shallowness, however. And there lies the great challenge for
most preachers today. And by the way, preaching a ten-point sermon with the
help of a projector is not simple. No one can go home and remember ten points.
If you do this, do it once a year to mix it up, and make sure all your ten
points are really restatements of one core insight.
Two: Don’t shy away
from pathos. Digital audiences respond more to honest emotion than to carefully
constructed rational arguments—which they can’t remember ten minutes later
anyway. Leonard Sweet once wrote something like, “Postmoderns don’t come to
church wondering, ‘is it true.’ They want to explore whether or not it is
real.”
I don’t mean you should
get on the pulpit and cry. Pathos is a seasoning rather than the main course. But
audiences resonate with the authentic emotional life of the preacher. A bit of
self-deprecating humor is good, too.
Three: Be local. Fill
sermons with local color, local personalities, today’s news, familiar memories
and stories. Fill sermons with the everyday stuff that people are going to talk
about after church, no matter what you preached about. Like Jesus did in his
parables. His sermons brought people into their homes, marriages, businesses
and fields. And his audiences were with him.
Four: People whose
memories are not shaped by the patterns written words make, or by the interior journeys
that are so much a part of modern literature, usually do resonate with amazing
battles in the heavens or our mythic cities. This is called agonistic
storytelling. Stories like that of David and Goliath, or Moses and Pharaoh, or Harry Potter, or The Lord of the Rings are heavy on plot and action, miracle and
spectacle, and that makes them memorable to non-readers and readers alike. These
stories can hold a non-reading audience’s attention. Walter Ong says that,
“Oral story tellers played to audiences who wanted action and movement and thus
the stories showed no great command of character drawing.” So make up amazing
stories, or retell them, or refer to them. The Bible does.
Five: Preach as if
the rest of the liturgy matters. Digital audiences love the clutter of multiple
channels of communication—even though this clutter can also get in the way of
focus. Church services ought to be full of song and bulletins, of visuals on
the wall and in the classroom, of liturgical smells and bells as in the Eastern
Orthodox tradition, of processions of laughing children and solemn adults. A
wise old document of the Reformation, the Belgic Confession, notes that God
added the sacraments to the Word because people sometimes couldn’t understand
the Word without signs and seals. Right. We need church that is much more than
sermons made of words.
By the way, this does
not mean church has to be “high,” as in the Anglican or Catholic traditions. It
needs, rather, to be visual and diverse. At Lawrence Park Church, we’ve
decorated the sanctuary as the Emerald City and members came dressed as Wizard
of Oz characters for a sermon based on that book. We’ve done a series of four
sermons on Les Miserables using the
music from the Broadway production as the clothesline on which the rest of the
service was based. We put the words of choir anthems on overhead TV screens and
have a children’s sermon every week.
Six: Practice the
Way of Beauty. Beauty is the Spirit’s favourite path into our hearts. That’s why
Psalms and Songs have always been important; why banners and children’s art and
solos and sermons that are full of aesthetic delight grip people of every time
and era. Sermons should always “make sense,” of course, but to the degree that
they can also be poetic, they should be.
Seven: Preach as if
words matter. Perhaps this is just another way of stating point six. But there
is a peculiar kind of heaviness of heart that goes with sermons preached as if
they were books. This heaviness is predicated on the notion that if a preacher
says it, the audience must listen; but if a preacher says it like a professor
might write it; the audience must listen without smiling, for written words
know little of mirth. Well, while this approach to preaching makes sense in
graduate schools, it makes a mockery of the many varied and rich
and aesthetically delightful ways words can be used to become more than
truth—they can become good news, too. Preachers who preach as if words matter
spend more time writing and editing sermons than they do studying their
sermons.
Eight: Learn from the
ancient storyteller. More on point six. The preaching that works for digital
audiences uses the ancient storyteller’s bag of tools: rhyme and repetition,
assonance and proverb, parallel structure as found in the Psalms, and rhythm.
Rap music was designed, from the ground up, as music for a digital, oral
audience. Preachers can learn from that. Sweet says, “Postmodern storytelling
is a plague on both houses; it is abductive—concurrent, stacked, loopy, nosequential
and image-based,” like ancient storytelling and modern TV, both.
Nine: Preach short. This is related to command one, “be simple.” The
bottom line is that people who watch TV have shorter attention spans than
people who don’t. Too many preachers preach far too long. Give people one thing
to remember, and finish. They might remember. Give them two things, or three,
or four to remember, and they are likely not to remember anything at all—even
though you took twice or three times as long to say it. I try to keep all my
sermons for to less than twenty minutes. Many are fifteen minutes long. It takes
a lot more work on the preacher’s part to achieve this, but I never met a
person at the door who said, “boy, I wish you went longer, pastor!” A few
masters can go longer, especially when their audience is more literate. But I
know my weaknesses in this area. Do you?
Ten: Encourage high
levels of literacy. This is counter-intuitive, perhaps. But the truth of the matter
is that even in our reading-bereft society, deep literacy is a very valuable
commodity. In part this is because historically, the leadership of all
societies since the time of the Sumerians and Chinese has always inordinately
represented by highly literate people. The highly literate control the flow of
information and ideas. Why shouldn’t those highly literate leaders be Christians?
How do we encourage literacy?
Well, great schools are part of the answer. But in my family, we threw out the
television altogether. Not because we objected to what was on TV, but because
of what TV does to our habits of mind when we’re not paying attention.
