Video is no messiah

He looked at me, this multimedia-user-friendly, nationally prominent, always-on-the-cutting-edge preacher and said, "You know, don't you, that any church without a drop-down screen will be dead in a decade."

What? In my mind I immediately began chiseling away the neogothic limestone from inside Duke Chapel in order to enable us to survive into the next decade with video.

Look, I'm no Luddite. I'm writing this response to using video in church (mentioned in LEADERSHIP's last two issues, The Value of Video) on a computer. I go to movies. But really now, the gospel of Christ—having survived Nero, the Inquisition, Mao, the Total Woman, Benny Hinn, and my insipid sermons—will it survive technochurch? Multimedia praise, drop-down screens, TV technology may be the death of us rather than our key to the future.

The virtue of visual media is that they tend to be engaging, stressing concrete images rather than abstract ideas. But they do more than that. Video ...