"Without the gifts of the Holy Spirit teaching us and bringing us into union with Himself, our PowerPoints, videos, praise music, bands, emails, Internet-chats, blogs—and all of the rest of the digitized revolution we discover ourselves swimming in today—are simply flickering plasma screens and failed Google searches."

Those of us who grew up in the "Baby Boom" generation remember the debates that raged over the advent of the television. Our parents worried over the "vast wasteland" of T.V., a term coined by Newton Minow, and debated whether it would put movies out of business or rot the brains of youngsters who would lose the desire to read and the ability to study or spell. There was even talk that it could be the end of democracy itself. But television, for better or worse (actually, for better and worse) is now an established factor in even our political world. The republic still stands, and TV has made our elected officials more accountable in a multitude of ways.

New worries
There is little doubt that the new communications media are transforming our culture. The inventions of the last two decades—Internet, wireless connections, cell phones, text messaging, personal media devices—present a bewildering array of communication technologies. And with their impact on society, some questions must be asked: What do these developments portend for the Church? How will the pastors of today and the immediate future learn to talk to the new generation and, in time, learn to use the new media effectively in worship and evangelization?

Taking these questions seriously means a paradigm shift in our ideas of leadership and education. We need to realize that the new media technologies, which tend to favor image over text, constitute nothing less than a new vernacular—a new mode of common speech. Just as Luther had to translate the Bible from Latin into German in order to carry his Reformation forward, Christian leaders of today and tomorrow will have to use the new vernacular of cinema, Internet, text messages and all the rest in communicating God's Word. In short, Christian preachers, educators and worship leaders will have to embrace a new conception of literacy, which goes beyond print—that being multimedia literacy.

Yet in doing this, we must always remember that it is God who first initiated communication in the Word. Without the gifts of the Holy Spirit teaching us and bringing us into union with Himself, our PowerPoints, videos, praise music, bands, e-mails, Internet-chats, blogs—and all of the rest of the digitized revolution we discover ourselves swimming in today— are simply flickering plasma screens and failed Google searches.

Nothing new
The development of Christianity has always been intimately linked to changes in communication media. And with the changes there have always been those who resisted. The Catholic authorities of Luther's time resisted the translation of the Bible into vernacular tongues, trying vainly to maintain their monopoly over the presentation and interpretation of God's Word. But their attempt was shortsighted and went against the tide of history. Believing that Scripture is the common property and God-given inheritance of all people, not only of church authorities, Christian reformers went on to translate the Bible into a thousand tongues and carried the new, vernacular Bibles to the ends of the earth.

Examining the Assumptions
So, what does it mean to be a literate person in our present, media-saturated culture? The attempt to answer this question and to redefine the way we think about literacy has brought the University of Southern California to go so far as to change their core curriculum requirements. For the first time at a major research university (but surely not the last), multimedia-literacy courses have been added to the required classes that students must pass in order to obtain their diploma. Dr. Elizabeth Daley, Dean of USC's School of Cinema and Director of its Center for Multimedia Literacy, reminds us that, "To most people, literacy means the ability to read and write, to understand information and to express ideas both concretely and abstractly. The unstated assumption is that ‘to read and write' means to read and write text." This assumption needs to be critically examined.

Arguing that the multimedia language of television, film and the Internet has become "the current vernacular," and that this language—which relies heavily on images—is capable of "constructing complex meanings independent of text," Daley has spearheaded her university's attempt to restructure its curriculum in recognition of the changing media environment. The college students who will be affected by this change are used to gathering information and making decisions about issues in many ways—not just reading text, but processing complex collages and juxtapositions of images. The text-messages that they send on their cell phones are often constructed in a grammar that bears little resemblance to Strunk and White's Elements of Style, but they do get the message across.

Christians will, in the coming decades, have to face the same issues that are now coming to the forefront for those who seek to plan the education of the young at all levels: in universities, high schools, grammar schools and even preschools. What good is Sunday school at any church if those who teach the young cannot speak their language? How much time will be wasted by those who teach Christian principles to young people who cannot help but see their teachers and instructors in faith as irrelevant, simply because of their inability to comprehend, let alone communicate in, the language of today's multimedia environments?

Multimedia Is Not a New Concept
Though current technological developments in this area require our attention, multimedia—understood in the broadest sense—has always been integral to worship. Christians have used visual images along with Scripture since the earliest days of the Church, and the singing of hymns, which fuse words with music, has always been a powerful source of our group unity.

The heart of the good news we preach is the story of incarnate communication. It is a dramatic narrative in which our God, creator of heaven and earth, in the form of Jesus Christ, takes on human form and becomes the ultimate sacrifice required to reestablish communication between God and man. The completion is the great Amen from the cross as Jesus cries, "It is finished!" And it was all done, as the song says, "in the name of love."

The Extension and the Source
The media guru of the 20th century, Marshall McLuhan taught us that modern electronics has allowed us to "extend" ourselves via technology. "MySpace" has certainly proven that point, and it is not just for the youth of society. Over half of the MySpace consumers are over the age of 35. I personally enjoy the free video technology you can download from MSN messenger. It allows me to connect with my son at Cal Poly or my daughter at UCLA instantaneously. Their visual images are immediately transported along with their voices to my laptop screen. Virtual space allows for virtual family as they extend from their dorm rooms into my office.

This can be likened to the connection we have with God through Jesus. He extended from heaven into this world. But Jesus was not simply an extension of God. He was God Himself. McLuhan wrote that Jesus was the only person who ever lived a life in which the medium and the message were the same. There were no gaps, distortions, Ethernet connections, virtual spaces, or inconsistencies between what Jesus said and what He did. He was perfect and blameless. He was, is, and will always be the Word of God.

As we move from the first century sensorium, when Jesus was fully present with His disciples, to our present, we are aware that God's Word has been extended via the medium of language and print. However distant that ancient world may seem, we pray, anticipate and expect our gospel communications to resonate with the same kind of power, authenticity and authority of the first century. When we share the Word with others, it is as if Jesus Christ had spoken it to us at that very same moment. In our communication we actually step into the timeless virtual space. How? Because the same Holy Spirit who initiated the communications revolution on the 50th day after the ascension of Christ into heaven is with us today.

Learn From Mistakes
John Wycliffe, the first translator of the Bible into English, managed to escape Catholic persecution in his lifetime. But the Council of Constance, which met from 1414 to 1418, ordered his remains to be exhumed from an English graveyard and burned—along with his translation of the Bible. The Catholic authorities that burned Wycliffe's bones (and who also commanded the burning of Luther's spiritual ancestor, the Czech reformer John Hus) fought against a historical tide that they ultimately could not reverse. This example shows the strength of the cord that often ties a person's faith, or their understanding of the gospel, to the medium in which they are accustomed to experiencing it. Let us hope that we exhibit more wisdom as we contemplate proposals to translate God's Word into the vernacular tongue of our day—the complex language of words and images that prevails in our contemporary media-saturated world

No one now can foresee what will best serve God's purpose as tomorrow's preachers and teachers choose between— and weave messages that combine—text, speech, song and the visual imagination. But if we do not study and learn from the young, we will certainly have no success in preaching to them.

And one thing is certain: those who attempt to educate this new generation in the principles of the Christian faith without learning to speak in today's multimedia vernacular will fail. If we do not learn to communicate with our youth using images as well as words, we will find, to our regret and to the eternal shame of the Church, that we have no voice at all.

Reprinted with permission from Worship Leader Magazine (May 2006 issue, vol.15, no.3, Chuck Fromm)

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