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Dear Church: Stop Using Media

David Sessions    Oct 02, 2008    7 COMMENTS    SHARE

Our friends at Collide, a magazine about church and media, have tossed out an interesting ultimatum to the church at large: stop using media. Their premise being that most of the church’s rampant problems getting media right stem from the fact that the church really has nothing to say via those mediums, it is just using them because they are available and seem trendy or, infinitely worse, “relevant.”

We have always slammed the Christian subculture for emphasizing “message over medium,” but what if the central error is the other way around? What if the problem is really the uncritical, uncautious use of whatever hip new media we can get our hands on, just because “the church must embrace technology!” What if commercialized Christianity, in its pursuit of message propagation, has pushed the church toward media for which is has no message? (Or perhaps more precisely, for which the specific people the church has put forward have no message.)

I would say this has manifested itself everywhere, from Christian music to fiction to movies, and that’s not even beginning on inside-church-walls media. Sure, there are church people with a bent toward writing or singing, but are most of them really willing to commit their lives to their art in a completely authentic way? To live a passion for telling stories, not just a passion for telling conversion stories? As we all known, the Christian culture industry has, in its rush to keep pace with the mainstream, often promoted people who have only marginal talent and a shallow interest in their own art (see: everything that happened in the 1990s). And arguably, these well-meaning but ultimately unqualified people have had nothing to say to serious readers of literature, moviegoers, or rock music fans.

To insulate themselves from the messy, difficult business of creation for a cynical, saturated culture, Christians created their own parallel universe—sales charts, celebrities, bestselling authors, movie stars—with the twin purposes of giving the church a way to have fun and a vague hope that it might somehow “reach the lost.” But the separation, the insulation only led to the “also-ran complex” that has paralyzed the Christian media world for two decades now. When you must wait for scraps to fall from the mainstream table (in order to snatch them up and glue a cross on top), you have this inescapable sense of inferiority that compensates with defensiveness and passive-aggressive competition. That is how it has been—the notion is that we must “answer” every cultural trend to maintain our relevance, while circling the wagons against anyone who observes how badly the mimicry is failing.

The only prescription is a new philosophy, and the church is only beginning “get” the correct idea of media and art they’ve been lacking: creation is about inspiration, in and of itself, without obligation to deliver a predetermined result or neatly summarize a message. And being one of those things driven by vision and belief, art (like faith) must ultimately be carried out for a purpose beyond applause or keeping up with the cultural Joneses. As Scott points out on Collide:

Peter and John weren’t speaking to be cool. They weren’t speaking to be relevant. They weren’t speaking to justify their salaries. They weren’t speaking to earn the favor of God or man. Perhaps most important, they weren’t speaking to be seen and heard. Instead, they couldn’t help speaking about what they’d seen and heard.

His admonition to the church is a good one, and one that we second: go find yourself a story worth telling (or really experience the story you already know), and then we'll have a talk about media.

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  1. I heartily agree. Technology seems to be something that churches have embraced without really stopping to ask “why?” I blame it on the hip youth pastors of the ’90s who have since been promoted to senior pastor.

    — Jacob · Oct 2, 07:20 PM · #

  2. “Media” is necessary. It is simply a means of communication. T-shirts, pamphlets, books, and newspapers are all media. Video, the web, and radio are media. The church needs to use media, but they need to use it wisely, and properly. I agree that technology has been ill-used by many churches, but to assume that people in the church who are artists are inauthentic simply because they are in the church is very narrow-minded. It seems as though there are muddled thoughts here that co-mingle media, technology and art, when they are, in fact, separate things. Authenticity needs to be the heart of everything done by the church, but that doesn’t mean that the church cannot use technology well to present an authentic message, or that there can’t be expressive art in churches, or that a message distributed via some form of medium should be discarded simply because some churches have misused or used it poorly. I think the real issue is dealing with the self-centered nature of many of today’s churches. Once we realize it’s about sharing the story with others technology, art, and media simply become means to that end.

    — SVEN · Oct 3, 11:55 AM · #

  3. Many in the church still don’t get what Marshall McLuhan tried to warn; “the medium is the message.” People who don’t understand what he was saying are quick to dismiss it…until we see that for all the attempts to be relevant with the use of different media, we realize that is shapes the way we communicate…and the media has done the shaping – independent of the message contained.
    When we set up the camera and broadcast from the mother site our pretty boy pastor, we call out that we no longer believe in the priesthood of all believers (or something like that – maybe that only the pretty people can interpret scripture) – while we think that we are just broadcasting the same message farther. I think some of the soullessness does come from a lack of genuine art, but then McLuhan also said that the artist was the modern day prophet able to set the message that was embedded in the medium.

    Google Shane Hipps and read his book. He’s certainly put McLuhan’s ideas into a Church perspective

    — Tim Good · Oct 3, 09:52 PM · #

  4. Man, this is exactly where I’m at right now! The hard thing for me is that I’m a graphic designer and I love working in the ministry. So often I offer my expertise just so media things don’t suck. But lately I find myself asking why we’re even doing something if it’s not compelling and completed with excellence? It’s as if we’re just going through the motions. Always looking over our shoulder to compare ourselves with popular culture. I would stop it all in a heartbeat if I knew it meant we could come back to the heart of the message. I actually love Matt Redman for writing “I’m coming back to the heart of worship and it’s all about you.” You can tell they’re not just contrived words but instead something spoken out of conviction and experience. It was real for him first and foremost before it was something he gave to the rest of us.
    I just don’t know how many more failed attempts I can hand from churches.

    — Cale · Oct 5, 12:54 AM · #

  5. @Cale-isn’t it ironic that many churches (and by churches I mean the people in the building) sing “heart of worship” without any conviction but are simply “going through the motions”? And yet that doesn’t invalidate the authenticity of the writer’s heart. Only the individual (and God, of course) can determine their heart position. As a graphic designer myself my work for the church reflects my own heart for meaningful and beautiful communication of a message deserving the best from me. It’s not right to try and abolish the use of media-we need to call churches back to the heart of the message and encourage them to use all media properly.

    — Sven · Oct 5, 08:57 AM · #

  6. @Sven: Neither Collide nor I was suggesting that the church stop using media/technology permanently, just as a temporary exercise until they see where it actually should be used and where it should be left alone. Authenticity is what we are all after, so I don’t think we have any disagreement with you. Of course the church should make use of whatever means are appropriate. But passion, creativity, and authenticity should come first.

    — David Sessions · Oct 5, 04:32 PM · #

  7. I agree.

    — Mark P · Oct 13, 08:04 PM · #

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