Faith Works 2-13-21

Faith Works 2-13-21

Jeff Gill

Thinking like a community

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If a worshiper hears one thing from the pulpit for sixty minutes on Sunday and then gets a completely different message from twenty-seven hours of media consumption at home and on their devices, there's an imbalance that's hard to fight.

But the message of a ministry, the good news however you frame it — the Christian gospel, the call to faith of Islam, the noble truths of Buddhism, the rationalism of atheism, even — is often at odds with the surrounding culture. I am a Christian, by upbringing and by adult conviction, and I know much of what I believe is ultimately true about life and death and eternity is regularly contradicted by the culture in which I live.

One of the tensions of recent years is that we had a few decades where people of my faith perspective could expect the surrounding culture to mostly affirm our beliefs, and rarely if ever challenge them, let alone contradict them. This is a secret advantage minority beliefs had in the Twentieth Century: they never assumed for a minute that classroom instruction or popular media would do their work for them. If they wanted children and families and newly convicted adults to come to their understandings, they would have to teach and reinforce them on their own. Christians, especially Protestant Christians, got . . . well, we got lazy. And took for granted that Hollywood and TV news and Miss McGillicuddy in the third grade would do at least some of our work for us. When the overarching culture got crude and profane and agnostic at best, anti-theistic at worst, it not only has been a shock for many, it also has laid bare how our assumptions have not served us well in teaching and forming faith into adulthood.

But there's another challenge today: for a congregation of 100 people in, say, 1970 there were three TV networks, and you generally watched one or another, let's say Walter. There were three news magazines, and your house got Newsweek. You subscribed to either the morning Columbus Citizen-Journal or the evening Dispatch, along with the Newark Advocate. At church, your minister promoted the denominational publication, which was generally a monthly, often mailed in bulk to the church and distributed at the door with the bulletin. There were still a few movie theaters downtown, but each was a single screen, maybe rotating a pair of movies per week at most. And the discussions about politics and culture people had outside of church were largely defined at workplaces and in neighborhoods. There's your whole media environment.

Today, a congregation of 100 people has 1000 different ways to consume media, with tens of thousands of programs and channels. My 1970 predecessor could at least be conversant and generally aware of the entire incoming information environment, or close enough to speak to it all in general, with their interpretation of God's Word for the day. A preacher today cannot even begin to be certain what images, ideas, or impressions have bounced off of the imaginations and intentions of their congregation just in the week since they were last together.

A hundred years ago, ministers really were, and were expected, to be one of the best informed people a church member would meet, and their suggestions, let alone pulpit proclamations, about what people should read or reflect on or even to think about had the weight of respect and status behind them. If you were a thoughtful farmer or factory worker or even local professional person, the minister's reading and knowledge was taken as one of the best and most reliable guides you could rely on.

Today, we find we are often just one more opinion in people's ears. They don't mean to be disrespectful or dismissive, but trust me (see what I did there?) we feel it. A passing blog post can sweep away a point we've been building up carefully for weeks; a TV commentator's vast generalization pushes past a very personal message we've been trying to share.

Is there an answer for preachers and ministers in this misinformation age? I think so. Come back next week, and we'll be in Lent, a good time to reflect on this very question.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been thinking a great deal about media and ministry this past year. Tell him what you're thinking at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.