“What a gimmick, Mel,” jibed my friend-critic-fellow pastor, “using all that electronic media in worship. No wonder your crowd is growing.”
I bit my tongue. How often I had heard that good-natured questioning of my liturgical methods and motives. “Just show biz,” he might have added. Or worse, “Just an easy way to keep from preparing a sermon.”
Wrong on both counts. My motive for using electronic media in worship is the same as for every hymn, prayer, or sermon: to lift up Christ and draw his people one step closer to him and to each other. And the method is not a short cut. It is time-consuming and risky. (And never have I eliminated the sermon with media, only supplemented and supported it.) When you spend valuable time, energy, and money to integrate a one-minute film clip only to have an usher trip on the plug mid-screening and plunge the church into darkness, or when the slide bearing the words to the morning anthem pops on upside-down, you wonder if using media is worth the impugning of your motives.
But believe me, it’s worth it. The excitement people feel, the enthusiasm with which old-timers invite friends and family to worship, and the changed lives and renewed spirits can be traced, at least in part, to God’s Spirit at work in and through electronic worship aids.
My wife, Lyla, our director of worship, and our worship team (volunteers with interest if not expertise in media, art, music, and liturgy) integrated two types of media into morning worship: (1) sight (16mm film, 8mm film, video tape, slide projections, and lighting) and (2) sound (records and audio cassettes). For the sake of brevity we must skip over the use of media in the Sunday evening service and the educational or outreach programs of the church and get right down to each medium with a couple of ideas that worked for us in worship.
1. 16mm film. I use very short films in worship. (The new high-intensity lamps and rear-screen projection systems allow for use of media even in churches once thought impossible to darken.) One or two-minute spots, for example, the Franciscan teleketic spots, are wonderful calls to worship, introductions to a hymn or reading, thought-provoking “secular lessons,” perfect sermon setups, or final benedictions. Or, use a brief portion of a longer film, for example “The Ping Pong Ball” parable from Why Men Create (Pyramid Films) or the Crucifixion or Resurrection scenes from a great christological film, for example The Gospel Road (World Wide Pictures).
The problem? You can’t use a film you don’t know about. The resources are limited only by your knowledge of what’s available. That’s why it’s so valuable to get the various catalogues through your local film distributor (or directly from the national film distributors), to visit your local film library to meet and get ideas from librarians, and to appoint a search team of film buffs in your congregation to find the resources for use in worship.
2. 8mm film. Make your own films for worship. Interpret a biblical passage, a hymn, or a great historic moment from the church calendar. Never let Christmas or Easter or Pentecost pass without assigning a class or committee, even a children’s group, to create an 8mm film clip for worship. Our junior high department’s version of Christ’s return to the disciples in the Upper Room after the Crucifixion (they were wearing bathrobes and eating McDonald’s burgers) turned out to be humorous, whimsical, and poignant beyond belief. Brief productions in 8mm featuring your people expressing their faith in literal or impressionistic ways will add a dimension to worship that few professionally produced films can beat.
3. Video tape projections. One of the fastest selling electronic appliances in the nation is the home video projection unit. Soon, portable life-size video projection systems will be available to every church. (We borrow them from families in the church now.) So now you can have all the wonderful advantages of scenes from the great films only available through video. For example, Gospel Films (Box 455, Muskegon, MI 49443) is now renting cheaply such easily adapted films as Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth or Chariots of Fire. Too, with the inexpensive color video cameras popping up in people’s homes, we can produce interviews, testimonies, prayer requests, special music, and drama for worship at almost no cost.
4. Slides. I found our use of slides to be the simplest and most helpful electronic worship tool. We required the photo company that made our church directory to provide us with a slide of every member of the church. We projected slides when a new member was being introduced or when a prayer request for a member was being made. Remember, we have people who have worshiped side by side for twenty-five years and still don’t know one another’s names. To see those pictures gives worth and honor to the person on the screen and helps the rest of us know who it is we’re praying for.
5. Light. I despise house lights on dimmers that go up when we take the offering and down when we pray. But when a single spotlight or candle lights up the chalice and the loaf, or the great pulpit Bible (while the Scripture is read over the amplification system), or a banner, or the cross, it helps people quietly focus and listen and worship.
6. Records. I believe we should use our own people to sing and read in worship. But now and again the Christian recording industry (and occasionally the secular) produces recorded music and effects that are perfect for worship. To discover Ken Medema’s song about the church-“If this is not a place where my tears are understood, where can I go to cry?”-and to project slides of our church at worship, was to have an incredible worship experience. Once I began a sermon by simply standing in the pulpit and playing Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is?” as an opening illustration. Though “secular,” people didn’t forget it or the sermon that followed.
7. Cassette tapes. We can make up our own tapes for replay in worship. For example, my sermon theme was “The Sounds of the Morning” (a look at Jesus’ habit of stealing away before dawn to pray). I asked a young woman with a good recorder to climb the hills above Pasadena and record the sounds of the morning (coyotes, dogs barking, wind in the trees, leaves rustling). For the worship prelude, we played those sounds and projected slides of a sunrise. Unforgettable and appropriate.
Lyla and I don’t do all this ourselves. Our worship committee is invaluable. I wish I could share all the things they did with the themes and texts I gave them two months in advance. Often I would sit waiting to preach and be so moved by what they had done that I had to dry the tears before I could speak. Besides the worship experience they provided us, it was a chance for our people to exercise their gifts in worship. Often people in the pew, asked to be spectators at worship year after year, are drying up, bored and uninvolved, simply because they’ve not been asked to dream. Our worship group, given titles and texts in advance and set free to communicate them amazed us. What they created brought new life, health, and serendipity to worship.
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