How sad will I be not to watch this sunrise each morning?
How sad will I be not to watch this sunrise each morning?
"You Christians look after a document containing enough dynamite to blow all civilization to pieces, turn the world upside down, and bring peace to a battle-torn planet. But you treat it as though it is nothing more than a piece of good literature."
Lots of people talking about Lent- what it means to them, struggling to get it to mean something to them, struggling with the whole idea of giving things up... Why give up bad things for Lent? If they're bad- give them up period. Why give up good things for Lent (like Facebook community, etc)- if they are good, why give them up?
"I expect to pass through this world but once. Any good thing, therefore, that I can do or any kindness I can show to any fellow human being let me do it now. Let me not defer nor neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again."
Stephen Grellet, 1773-1855, Quaker Minister
Evergreen is getting ready to take a new step as a community- starting a 3rd gathering, not in a pub space on April 5th, 2009.
It's a pretty bold statement to say that video venues will eventually mean the death of preaching... but I think I can make the case.
In his new book, Flickering Pixels (which I encourage you to check out!), Shane Hipps makes this point:
"Every medium, when pushed to an extreme, will reverse on itself, revealing unintended consequences. For example, the car was invented to increase the speed of our transportation, but having too many cars on the highway at once results in traffic jams or even injury or death.
The internet was designed to make information more easily accessible, thereby reducing ignorance. But too much information or the wrong kind of information reverses into overwhelming the seeker, leading to greater confusion than clarity. It breeds misunderstanding rather than wisdom...
In the same way, surveillance cameras, when there are too many that see too far, reverse into an invasion of privacy."
In other words, what was originally meant to make us go fast now slows us down, what was meant to make us smart now increases our ignorance (well, never our ignorance... just other peoples', right?) and what was meant to make us feel safe now makes us feel exposed.
This is the rule: Technology, taken too far, creates the opposite of what it was intended to create.
Still doubt it? Ask yourself- Email was meant to keep you in touch and ease communication, right? But when you are trying to process 100 emails a day, you don't feel in touch, you feel crushed. You're not communicating- you are wading through spam, forwards, fyi's... Your emails get shorter and shorter, more and more terse, and mis-communication happens more often than not.
Reversal.
So, what about technology in preaching?
First came architectural improvements to increase the range of a speaker's voice. Then microphones to throw the voice even further. Then radio, television, tape and CD ministries, podcasts, vodcasts... and the seed of the video venue, the "overflow room." All with the goal of taking the gift of preaching and extending its reach and impact.
So far, so good, right?
But now, we have all this technology. We're not only recording the sermon, we're video taping it and we have discovered we can send that video, not just to the next room, but to a building across the campus, across town, across the state, around the world...
Now, the preaching gift of one person has the ability not simply to reach the back row, but the next town, state, continent. And we're not just talking about Spurgeon publishing his sermons or Schuller putting his on TV or Driscoll putting his on iTunes...
NOW we're talking about not just influencing local preachers by making the "best" communicators' sermons available... we're talking about replacing those local teaching elders.
Talk about pushing something to an extreme.
The technology that once enhanced the preaching of others, influenced and enriched it? It's making it superfluous. Start up churches and smaller churches that used to have a team of three or four elders (or in our case, seven) who would be called on to teach on a regular basis now have a video screen and a "campus pastor" that gets to preach at most once a month.
The technology reverses on itself. What once extended and enhanced the gift of preaching now effectively begins to strangle it, as fewer and fewer actually get the chance to ever do it.
If we're not more thoughtful about this, soon, every city and town will have the Driscoll franchise... maybe even two or three. And the Andy Stanley, Ed Young Jr franchise as well. Is Joel Osteen too far behind? Hybels, Warren, Groeschel... the market is going to get crowded.
Sure, smaller churches will still exist, but in fewer and fewer numbers as dying churches are replaced not by vibrant church plants full of people forced to build a community from the ground up and so learn all the lessons along the way, but by video venue franchises- prepackaged church-in-a-box. And I'm telling you- there will be fewer and fewer men and women (most certainly fewer women) who ever learn to preach, who ever get the experience of working with others to discern what God is saying to their local body through Spirit and Word and prayerfully struggle through how they can creatively communicate that as well over the course of weeks, months and years of life together.
We're talking about the death of preaching in evangelicalism by all but a small handful of Celebrity Communicators who have little knowledge about those they teach from such far distances.
Sound like a bleak vision of the future? Yes, it does. But we don't have to go there...
If the Church will just learn to pay its taxes.
Stay tuned to see what I mean by that...
to be cont'd.
(And since I know it will come up in the comments, let me just address it now: No, I don't think preaching is the end-all, be-all of ministry. I don't think it's even the most important piece of ministry. But I do think it's vital and necessary for the continued health of the Church.)
Some other thoughts on these issues...
I've been predicting for awhile that Mars Hill Church in Seattle would try to plant a video venue here in Portland, notwithstanding the two to four (depending on how you count) Acts 29 planted churches in the metro area.
I said: "Look- not to be a jerk- but there are already three churches here in Portland started by the Acts 29 network. A video church of Mark's teaching is not only redundant (it's all vodcasted, right?) it's kind of an insult to those who have worked hard to plant the churches that this video venue would most likely draw people from.
As someone who has planted and is planting churches in PDX, I can assure you- my problem isn't thinking that there are too many churches in Portland. I'm passionate about seeing as many real churches planted as possible. But a franchised video church with elders who live in another state, 3 hours away? No- thank you."
I have "put together" (read: written, adapted and outright stolen from various sources) a Lent Prayer Guide.
Kendall Payne sang an amazing song, as of yet unrecorded, here at the convention: here are the lyrics- still powerful, even without the tune.
Day one and all is well.
Efrem Smith was great, and Shane Claiborne was pretty good as well. I'm looking forward to hearing Shane in 20 years when idealism, the wisdom of experience and 2 more decades of following Jesus like he is all meet to make him even more rad.
We were bemoaning the loss of Mike Yaconelli even more this year. Love Zondervan and IVP but the farther out we are from YS running this, the less it's focused on the pastor's heart, and the more it's focused on product.
It always had some product orientation... uh, lots of product orientation, but it rested squarely in Mike's desire to take care of, for one week, those who were taking care of the church and so many others the rest of the year. He would speak directly to those who came ready to quit, those who came burned out and angry or hurt... Every year he would say it, and even though it never applied to me, I still loved to hear him say, "some of you came with your wives, and you need to not go to a single seminar. You need to get bottle of wine, go to your room with your wife and not come out till the end if the week. Buy the CDs, and listen on the way home so you can tell the elders you learned something. But you don't need to learn some new minstry technique- you need to save your marriage."
In other words, I always felt like the people who were running things wanted to take care of us first, and sell us stuff second.
Not sure I feel that way now.
But, for all that, I still love being here. Every year I pick up some things that end up being game changers for my life and ministry. Such a valuable time to get outside my context and think in an ever so slightly more objective way about my life and ministry. I'm very thankful tonight for a wife and a Church community that allow me this time away.
Great discussion happening over at Grace's blog on homosexuality. Really good thoughts all around...
The sin in our lives is a symptom of broken, damaged places in our hearts that need to be made whole. We are all broken in areas of intimacy. The underlying sense of separation, rejection, and abandonment is the nature of the curse and man’s original fall. This brokenness can be expressed in many different ways, but it is often expressed sexually. Transformation is a work of the Spirit in a person’s heart. Shame has never been an effective motivation for transformation. In fact, it is often the greatest hindrance to true freedom from the bondage of sin. Our relationships with one another cannot be change-driven, and our relationship with the Father cannot be change-driven. As we focus on the sin in our lives, we become hopeless in our inability to will ourselves to change. Yet as we focus on Jesus, he can bring healing and change in the process of restoring our hearts to the wholeness that He intends for us. I am convinced that it is damaging to identify and label ourselves according to sexual orientation. We are so much more than the product of our attractions and desires. The fundamentalist christian position is repressive about the spectrum of attraction that people experience. Yet the fundamentalist homosexual position is adamant that one must identify themselves and live according to those attractions. I don’t recognize the voice of Truth in what I read from either side."
I'm a firm believer in the atonement of Jesus as a multi-faceted gem...
Oh, how I wish I could show this some Sunday... but alas- blogging it will have to suffice :)
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