Leadership Journal

We are entering the third age of communication, according to Andy Crouch, culture guru and director of our Christian Vision Project. The first age was oral communication, when history and theology were captured in stories and shared around campfires and tables. The second age was written communication, when the stories were committed to papyrus and sheepskin and paper and finally mass-produced, thanks to Guttenberg. Now comes the third age. You might call it the age of Spielberg. Andy has coined another name.

"Many centuries after the shift from oral to written culture, we are now well along in the transition to visual culture—where the predominant mode of communication is images rather than words," Crouch says.

"Just as the shift to writing required the skills we call literacy, so visual culture requires its own skills—for lack of a better word, visualcy."

For preachers, whose craft and trade is words both spoken and written, the question is: How then shall we communicate?

Our recent survey of preachers shows the visual revolution is well underway. And this is about much more than widescreen lyrics projected over purple mountain majesties and a few flying-bullet sermon points. The kind of change Crouch and others describe is a large-scale adjustment to people who simply don't get words the way they used to.

Leadership surveyed 515 subscribers who, as lead pastors, preach regularly. Most have entered the visual fray—some signed on willingly, others feel conscripted—but almost all have felt the ground shift beneath their pulpits as technologies, audience expectations, and Game Boy learning styles make new demands on preaching. And on the preacher. The television generation and its Web-wonk successors are changing the way we preach. Here's how:

"If you don't have a drop-down screen, ten years from now your ministry will be dead," Will Willimon quotes a famous TV preacher telling him on the rostrum of a famous TV church. That was ten years ago.

While Willimon was making the case that incarnate words are not dependent on screens and the architecture of some churches prohibits installation of a Jumbotron, Willimon's big-screen goad had a point that in the intervening ten years many congregations have accepted as fact. Some 73% of churches regularly use some kind of visual enhancement.

More than half of pastors (58%) report their use of PowerPoint has increased in the past three years, and 50% are using more multi-media clips from movies, TV, or other outside sources. About one-third of churches are using more personal testimonies (36%), videos made by their staff or members (34%), and props (34%). And one-fourth (24%) are using more artwork. The largest decrease has been in live drama, with 9% reporting they use less drama today than three years ago.

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