TheyCallMePastorBryan

ChristianityToday has a great interview with Rob Bell on preaching called “Tying the Clouds Together” that is worth
checking out.  I’ve posted a couple quotes below that I found especially interesting.

What else have you found unhelpful when preaching?

Focusing too much on something in the text that is an issue of hairsplitting debate among theologians. You are assuming that people care as much about the debate as you do. Somebody may be sitting there thinking, “Dude, I’m a plumber. I didn’t know that was a debate, and I didn’t know that it needed to be resolved. I’m just trying to figure out life with God and you spent sixteen minutes letting me know that you understood the origins of this particular Greek word.” Some things just aren’t helpful.

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Your NOOMA video series has been popular. What do you think about the increasing number of preachers and churches using video technology to expand their reach?

It’s powerful but there’s also a dark side. Video is not church. You put images and music on a screen, and people will listen. But it’s also dangerous. You’re playing with fire. I think video technology deserves to be scrutinized heavily.

Go a little deeper. What makes video dangerous?

I don’t think we know yet what the long-term impact will be on disciple-making. In 10 years we may discover what particular kind of Christ follower is formed by video preaching. I see warning lights on my dashboard. It’s unclear what video may do to the ways we conceive of life together.

In the New Testament, there are 43 “one another” passages, and during a Sunday morning service you might be able to practice three or four of them. And as the service gets large, you can probably do fewer. A massive group setting is also dangerous. You can come, sit, listen, and go home and think, I’ve been to church, even if you haven’t practiced any “one anothers.” And with video that only gets more intense. I’m not sure that’s the direction we want to be heading.

We want to be calling people to deep bonds of solidarity with one another. We may gather in a massive group, but from the stage I often say, “This is just a church service. Church is actually about caring for one another, and serving one another, and speaking truth to one another in love. Don’t get the two confused.”

The evidence suggests that video can have a fast and broad impact. So what’s the alternative?

There is something more powerful than simply beaming yourself into other locations, and that is raising up disciples. Over time that will go farther and faster, but right now it will be more work and slower. With technology today it’s easy to spend all of your energies reproducing your own voice, but there is a longer view that says, what if instead of beaming video to those ten locations, we train ten people who can go there and lead? That’s a very basic question that should be in the mix somewhere.

I love his input about the downside to video venues, especially the emphasis on discipleship in leading and leadership development.  I feel like it’s very complimentary to some of my own problems with video venues.

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I’ve posted a few times on Christians and wealth (try here and here and here and here for my most recent).  I had originally planned to put a few more out there, but due to being sick and a realization, I decided that this is enough for now on the subject.

Last weekend, I was reading 1 Corinthians 13 and came to a sharp realization- at points it’s easy for me to move from writing about this as an attempt to be a prophetic voice to just doing it because I like to be a bit of a hellraiser.  So as I read the beginning of 1 Corinthians 13, I came to a realization that there has been something missing, both in what I’ve been talking about and my own personal actions.

1 Corinthians 13 starts with this statement: If I speak in human or angelic tongues, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body [to hardship] that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

I’d sum it up like this: it’s not just what you do, but why you do it. It’s possible to do exactly what Jesus told the rich young man to do and yet have it be worth nothing.  If love isn’t the root of why, selling all you have and giving to the poor is worthless.

If all this talk about money and how we use it is just to try to come up with a new grid to prove how holy you or I are, we’re doing it for the wrong reason and it’s worthless. What Jesus seems to be presenting is not a new systems of do’s and don’ts but an ethic of love. There is never an enough, for enough isn’t really what Jesus is talking about. Instead Jesus presents us a system rooted in love: love of God and love of others. In this system you can sell all you have and give it to the poor and still miss it. And that sort of handling of money and giving to the poor is worthless, if at the heart of it isn’t love.

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I have gone a long time without contributing on the discussion about social networks that I wanted to pursue.  Unfortunately, life has kept me busy and this is the first time in over a week I’ve had a chance to sit and write.  I’m sitting in a lodge in the mountains in Colorado, taking a little break before enjoying the outdoors.

I am viewing this post as a springboard to a long discusion about social networks, spirituality and evangelism.  I’m operating with a few different ideas floating in my head, so I hope to float some of those thoughts out there to give you an idea where I’m coming from.

The first is that I recently read Flickering Pixels: The Hidden Power of Technology to Shape Your Faith by Shane Hipps.  He borrows deeply from McLuhan, especially around the quotes “The medium is the message,” and “you become that which you behold.”  The basic idea of the book is that the technology we use shapes us in ways beyond how it communicates a message.  The very form of the technology shapes how we process.  My personal opinion is that a more accurate statement than “The medium is the message” would be “the medium greatly shapes the message.”

I’ve also been bookmarking and noting some different comments about how the facebook generation processes.  I found this article helpful in that it lays out a few ways that the internet community driven sort processes.  I’ll list a few here, but check out the article for the full list.  Some of the statements I’m finding significantly helpful are:

1. All ideas compete on equal footing
2. Opinions compound and decisions are peer-reviewed
3. Contribution counts more than credentials

Here’s a series of quotes from another article.  ”People tend to come to social media loving the freedom and openness that it provides, along with the ability to empower everyone and to feel like you are giving them a voice. But sometimes eventually that freedom and openness is seen as a liability and threat, and eventually turns to control…When you invite social media to play a large role in your organization, you have to be willing to let go of some of the control as well. This is why I think many churches and leaders are skeptical…because they don’t want to give over control.”

I’ll be back in a day or so with some of my thoughts.

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