TheyCallMePastorBryan

You may have noted I’ve been referring quite a bit to Marshall McLuhan lately. I’m going to add to that a bit more, with a series of posts based on some quotes I highlighted while reading The Medium is the Massage.

The line, the continuum -this sentence is a prime example- became the organizing principle of life. “As we begin, so shall we go.” “Rationality” and logic came to depend in the presentation of connected and sequential facts or concepts.

For many people rationality has the connotation of uniformity and connectiveness. “I don’t follow you” means “I don’t think what you’re saying is rational.”

Visual space is uniform, continuous, and connected. The rational man in our Western culture is a visual man. The fact that most conscious experience has little “visuality” in it is lost on him.

Rationality and visuality have long been interchangable terms, but we do not live in a primarily visual world any more.

McLuhan rightly noted that the ways we organized things around us reshaped how we think of rationality.  As the printed text became our primary medium, the sequential became the basis for rationality.  In terms of the Myers-Briggs typology the dominant trait would be Sensing over iNtuition.  The intuitive has had a tentative place, because their ability to draw connections from seemingly unconnected places is viewed as irrational by those accustomed to needing everything presented in a sequential manner.

As an illustration of this, in seminary I had a class where the professor would not offer outlines and would teach by facilitating dialog rather than going through from point a to point b and so on.  For the more intuitive inclined, like myself, this approach was refreshing and helpful to how I learn. Yet to more sensing types this style of teaching was perceived as almost irrational, and at least unhelpful.  Why is this so? Because for the modern era, we have been shaped by the medium of the printed text and its sequential manner.

In the broad sense, this is the illustration of McLuhan’s statement “as we begin, so shall we go.”  What we start with will shape how we continue to understand. That means for those of us who have grown up with television and the internet, that this is being reshaped.  In The Medium is the Massage, McLuhan states that the television is leading to us having a much more eastern, connected sort of approach to how we see the world.  At the least, the prevalence of the internet and television is reordering how we perceive the world.  I sense that this movement is towards a more intuitional approach of viewing information, as both internet and television thrive on juxtaposition of objects that don’t necessarily belong together.

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I love this quote from Walter Brueggemann:

“If you are a coward by nature, don’t worry. We can still use you. You can get down behind the biblical text. You can peek out from behind the text saying, ‘I don’t know if I would say this, but I do think the text does.’”

It’s a great thought on reflecting about our relationship to scripture as Christians, and how to approach it as a pastor.  For a great reflection based on this quote, check out Bob Hyatt’s post “The Cowardly Preacher?“

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If you have had much exposure around me, you probably already know that I am pretty opposed to video venue, multi-site style churches.  One such example is a church up the road from us in Seattle.  Mars Hill Church in Seattle, and their Pastor Mark Driscoll have been big advocates of the video venue approach. (Actually as I typed this I paused to look, and found that there is a group on facebook advocating a Mars Hill video venue for Portland)(I also want to add that this isn’t an anti-Mars Hill thing, I respect a lot about that church even though I have theological differences)

I once again want to say that I think it is a terrible ecclesiology, and although there are probably more eloquent pastors out there with good critiques of the video venue approach, I think it’s important to speak about it.

I grew up in a pentecostal tradition that inherited very Wesleyan ministry values, and as part of the double emphasis was the idea that the Spirit works through everyone, and while there are people who are anointed, it is wrong to limit it to them being the only people that are allowed voices.  As I look at video venue, multi-site approaches, one of the things that horrifies me is that it travels in the opposite approach.  It emphasizes the gifting of one person and places them as somehow on a higher pedastal, and it makes the focal point of the church service out to be the sermon.

I think a McLuhan, “the medium is the message” sort of approach at looking at video venues leads us to ask some interesting questions about what exactly is being spoken. In this case, part of the medium is the implication that no one else is talented enough to be speaking to these churches.  And out of that implication is another like it, that the idea of sermon or talk during church is reliant on talent.  While indeed talent is important, and no one wants to be submitted to boring sermons week after week, it is not so important as to justify beaming a pastor into multiple churches and multiple cities.

As an example, consider many of our large successful churches. If people at Mars Hill know that Mark Driscoll isn’t going to preach on a Sunday, do they still show up in the same numbers? I know Redeemer Presbyterian has had that struggle when Tim Keller isn’t missing. How much is this the problem in the sort of one speaker churches that are embracing video venues? And if people will only attend when certain preachers are there or being beamed, we have to ask the question whether we are developing disciples to Jesus or whether we are developing disciples to Mark Driscoll, Tim Keller, Rob Bell, etc?

In the past I’ve written about how I think that the video venue approach also fails because it divorces the sermon from any sort of pastoral function.  It is similar to thinking about radio preachers. I remember ten years ago, hearing pastors and theology professors and so on saying how the local preacher is never really allowed to preach like that, because the radio pastor has an amorphous congregation where as the local pastor always has people who he knows much more intimately.  This pastoral function of preaching is easily robbed, particularly when a video venue approach begins to take a multi-city stance in its operations.  The video venue preacher is in effect the new iteration of the radio preacher.

I also worry that the video venue approach gives away too much to the consumeristic impulses we are given every day by our culture.  My friend Paul Metzger says that consumerism is the impulse “to give consumers what they want, when they want it, at the least cost to themselves.”  In his book, Consuming Jesus, he outlines how embracing this mindset in how we do church has led to a church that whether or not it wants to be diverse, won’t be.  This is because the church embraced marketing techniques that segment people rather than bringing them together.  He paints for us a way forward that allows the church to proclaim a message that is very counter to this consumeristic impulse.

While Metzger’s book outlines the outcome of the church capitulating to marketing techniques, doesn’t video venue do something similar? Primarily, isn’t the idea of beaming a powerful speaker into a community about “giving the consumer what they want, when they want it, at the least cost to themselves?”

Much as the embrace of marketing(and its blind spots) has inadvertently led to a segmented church, I fear that it’s very possible ten years down the road we will be looking at video venues and wonder how we got to where we are.  But I came across this idea in The Medium is the Massage, by McLuhan, which I think shows the importance of us critiquing these sorts of ideas: “There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.”  That is, if we can look at this thing and ask us where it’s going before just embracing it, we may be able to reshape the path and find redemptive ways to approach video venues.

For what it’s worth, I do think that there are some ways to effectively use video venues in a local context, particularly for churches that have blown up and are wanting to branch out in multiple groups.  But I think that my approach is more to view video venues as a stop gap on the way to something better, rather than as an ends in itself.

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In a comment from heffe on my last post, he quoted John M. Perkins, who said “we have overevangelized the world too lightly.”  I think that this idea is really important in thinking about whether or not proselytizing is spam. Perkins emphasis on overevangelizing too lightly is helpful, because it helps us realize that we can turn the Christian message into spam.  Many of our contexts are at least vaguely aware that the church is about this story of Jesus dying on a cross, and resurrecting, and that because of it we can be born again.  What I find helpful about Godin’s stance in the quote from my previous post is that it helps us to realize that if we take a spam sort of approach to the Christian message, we risk trivializing our message.

Marshall McLuhan famously coined the phrase “the medium is the message,” and it serves in this case to help us understand something about the way we convey our message.  There is another phrase which is very different than McLuhan’s, which is “the methods change, but the message remains the same.”  If McLuhan is right, this second phrase is incorrect because the methods reshape how the message is understood.  So, the impersonal, no context with a person approach to evangelism actually sends a different message(whether or not it is intended) than a relational, contextual approach would. The stance that we take when talking of faith shapes our message, if we are aggressive or being peaceful or even just allowing the other to dog our beliefs.

Now this is true not just of religious proselytizing.  Advertising is proselytizing as well, and maybe a good reflection for Christians is to look at advertising and products and ask which sort of approaches to that seem most faithful to the way of Christ. Although somewhat tangentially related, blog friend, Jason Coker, has a great post on thinking about the church’s use of media and some critiques to keep in mind.

To sum up the question of whether or not proselytization is spam, my response is that it depends. I am unwilling to say that it is, but I think a non-personal, non-relational approach very well can be.

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