How to Do Church When People Don't Read

           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.  

Finding God in the HTML

So, here is a picture of me. For two hours, on January 22, this was my new Facebook Profile Picture. I thought I looked distinguished. Unfortunately, within a few minutes of posting it, Facebook Friend Paul responded and said, “C’mon, John, nobody’s going to buy that.”

An overly dignified John Suk 

Now, I have never met Paul. He lives in Southern California. He once wrote me a letter when I was editor of The Banner. It wasn’t an angry letter. It was funny. So I never forgot it. But now Paul did not like my picture.

Ten minutes later, my sister Janet wrote, “Maybe a little too serious bro. Show some of that Suk charm!” So, only two hours later, I took my new Profile Picture down and put up this one instead.

Reaction was immediate. “Nice to see you, my friend,” said Alejandro, a Nashville book editor I used to work with. “Wow, that is awesome,” said Shelly, a Vancouver pastor. She was referring to my grandson, Taps. Within hours forty likes and comments rolled in. I could feel the love.

Taps and Opa Suk

Or could I, really? As I was watching the “likes” pour in, Irene was also in the living room, also on her computer. We spoke to each other, briefly—about whose turn it was to take out the dog and about who would go shopping the next day. Honestly, however, we were not feeling the love from each other. I was too preoccupied with my 600 Facebook friends, many, like Paul, people I haven’t ever met, or like Alejandro, who I haven’t seen in years. Irene was preoccupied with Search Engine Optimization for her business webpage. We sat together in that room for hours, and hardly had a thing to say to each other until we were in bed together. And this happens more often.

But that’s a Snapchat of social media, isn’t it? We’re there, but then, we’re not. We like people we haven’t seen in years, but don’t love the one we’re with. And it isn’t just social media. Who wants to be disturbed when we’re binge watching old episodes of West Wing or Modern Family? And God forbid that we fail to reach the next level of Minecraft or Titanfall because dad wants to know how our day at school was.

You know what I mean. Honestly. The two-year-old whose gaze is fixed on an iPad. The typical cell-phone carrying new mom who spends six hours a day tweeting with one hand while holding the baby in the other—at least according to a recent article in The Psychotherapy Networker, Irene’s professional journal (“The Rise of the Two Dimensional Parent: Are Therapists Seeing a New Kind of Attachment?” By Ron Taffel, Sept/Oct 2014). And there is the co-worker checking Facebook and Kijiji on the firm’s clock. The date who actually pulls out his iPhone at a restaurant table and places it face up beside the lit candle. The busy exec checking email while the car idles at a red light. And the teen who tragically kills two people in an oncoming car while texting and driving.

What’s going on? Have we lost our minds? Well, in a way we have. Neuroscientists have discovered that human brains are plastic. That is, our brains can be shaped by how we use and exercise them. If we consume a lot of social media, our brains rewire themselves to want even more social media. It is a very complex process. It involves growing new neurotransmitters and the expression of brain chemicals like dopamine or oxytocin that give pleasure. One way to think about what happens is that when our brains are on social media they become addicted to social media—not in the exact same way we are addicted to alcohol or drugs, perhaps—but our need to check-in begins to interfere with our normal relationships. If we stop using social media and other screen-based platforms for any length of time, we may suffer from withdrawal--mood swings, distractedness, even depression.

Another concern is that research demonstrates that watching screens, whether it be an iPad or computer monitor—watching screens not only bulks up our new social media neurons, but watching screens starves the very different and complex neural pathways that get used for reading. It’s a little bit like pretty dandelions taking over your lawn.

As a result, people who are preoccupied with social media read less, less deeply, and with less understanding; they have more trouble listening to linear, rationally organized presentations like a (good!) sermon, and they have more trouble thinking slowly, deliberatively and strategically.

Among neuroscientists, such findings are not controversial. Among teachers with long experience, such findings reflect their everyday frustration with today’s students. But let’s be honest—these findings are hard for most of us to accept. We say things like, “well, my daughter loves to read,” or, “we hardly ever watch TV in our house,” or, “my son still does great in school!” At the same time, this defensiveness suggests, I think, that we are pretty shy of really confronting the deeper issues that surround our social media and Internet use. We are primed to ignore the virtual elephant in our homes, because it is sort of scary.

But it isn’t just that we read less, or follow complex arguments with greater difficulty. Along with the new neural pathways, there is something else happening to us, I think—something I can get at best, I think, if I retell the myth of Narcissus.

The myth is told and retold in many versions from both ancient Greece and Rome. It basically goes like this. Narcissus was an extremely handsome and athletic hunter. One of his parents was an Olympic God, so he was half-divine. Anyway, one day, while hunting, he leaned down to drink water from a pool. Doing so, he caught a glimpse of his face. It was, as I said, beautiful. He stopped drinking, so that the water would stop rippling, and he looked at himself again. Absolutely drop dead gorgeous. And as he looked, and looked, he found he could not tear himself away from his reflection. He stayed there, on his knees, for days, totally in love with that image of himself, absolutely taken by how his beauty made him feel, unable to respond to the love overtures of the beautiful nymph Echo who sat by and watched. He stayed there, by the pool, gazing at his face, until he died of hunger and thirst.

Of course, we get our word Narcissism from this story. Narcissism is defined as an unnatural preoccupation with our self and our image, a preoccupation troubling because it interferes with our relationships to those nearest to us.

The reason it kills us to be interrupted while we’re lost in our laptops or monitors is that Social Media—the texts, the tweets, the emails, the likes, the selfies we endlessly post—all of it is a way of focussing attention not on our neighbours, but on our own inner need for fleeting affirmation. We get a little high every time someone suggests, electronically, that we are pretty special, handsome, beautiful, funny or whatever. We enter into an implicit pact with our electronic friends—I’ll notice you if you like me. We may lose ourselves, and lose track of our neighbours, and the families we live with under the same roof, all because we cannot tear ourselves away from the electronic mirror we gaze into, hoping without even realizing it, that the mirror will tell us just how special we are.

Look. Many theologians and philosophers, including the philosopher I’m reading now, Joseph Needleman (What Is God), make a big point out of the fact that one of the greatest ills that humans suffer through—often without realizing it—is that we never actually wake up to who we really are and the shocking gift of a life to actually live. Instead, we live our lives half in a daze. We go along to get along. We are swept away by cultural fads and wants and ads and artificially induced needs and passions. We are running like crazy in a rat cage, never getting anywhere, just trying to stay even with the bill collectors and responsibilities and obligations. And our preoccupation with social media satisfies our need for affirmation just enough so that we slumber on, focussed on our nagging little need for a ping or a poke; we never step forward, seize real life, or real learning, or real commitments on behalf of people that might matter to us if we did. So even as our brains are changed, our souls slowly waste away, and we and our neighbours become shades of the person we could or should be. We have found god in the HTML and it is us.

I know. There is an important other side of the story. And I don’t want to totally loose track of that. The truth is, few of us can live without engaging social media or the Internet. I would be wrong to fault people here for spending the odd evening learning how to play a new video game. And sure, there’s nothing wrong with answering a few texts during the course of a day or checking your status update at lunch. My life, for example, is truly enriched by hearing regularly from colleagues and friends around the world, as we discuss things like faith and music and worship and writing books.

So, I don’t want to be heard here as someone who says, “no, this social media and Internet stuff is no good, you should stop it.” Not at all. But I am saying that there is a body of scientific research—and our own experience, if we’re honest with ourselves—that teaches us that social media is like fire. There is a place for it, in the hearth. Only then—only when it is controlled, properly contained, and behind an ember screen—only then can a fire offer warmth and serve as a gathering place for family and friends. We need both fire and social media—contained and thoughtfully controlled.

But I also confess that in my own life it is sometimes hard to contain that fire and to leave it where it belongs. I know my own struggles to read as much as I really want, to stay focussed on writing a sermon, and to not be distracted by my various social media accounts.

In Romans 14, the apostle Paul says that followers of Jesus ought not conform themselves to the world. That is, we ought not mindlessly and soullessly live for and do what everyone else is doing, just because they’re doing it. Instead, says Paul, we ought to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. And what I think is true for me, as it is probably true for many of us, is that when it comes to the grip that social media and electronic entertainment are always trying to exert on us and our neurons, we could all use a little less conforming, and a bit more transformation. We could, and should, really choose to live in the world rather than settle for the pixel lands.

One more thing. The people most affected by social media are children. They suffer when we engage in distracted parenting—a growing problem, according to the same Psychotherapy Networker article I mentioned above. And their young brains are at greatest risk of not learning to read deeply and with pleasure by overexposure or much too early exposure to social media, or to its older cousin, the TV screen.

So parents, parent. Take control not only of your own consumption of Internet entertainment, TV, and social media, but of your children’s. Neil Postman once said, “With the Second Commandment, Moses was the first person who ever said, more or less, 'Don’t watch TV; go do your homework.'” His words could easily be applied to Internet and social media use as well. Similarly, that high priestess of contemporary pagan culture, Camille Paglia, once called for “the enlightened repression of our children,” by which she means rigorous word-centered education to the near total exclusion of electronic media, if we want our kids to become all they can be—if we want them to wake up to real life, rather than live in the shadow land of virtual reality.