Preaching to the Video Generation

Imagining a Sermon by Thomas H. Troeger, Abingdon, $10.95

Reviewed by Grant Lovejoy, preaching instructor, Southwestern Baptist Seminary, Fort Worth, Texas

Rhetoric has served our culture long and well, but vivid images, not logical progression, dominate culture today. Television, movies, home videos, and slick photo magazines represent today's authority.

The video message, however, is disturbing. Its core tenets:

-The fittest survive.

-Happiness consists of limitless material acquisition.

-Consumption is inherently good.

-Property, wealth, and power are more important than people.

-Progress is an inherent good.

The video generation, with both its values and its preferred means of communicating, poses a stiff challenge to preachers, many of whom are from the print generation.

In Imagining a Sermon, Thomas Troeger, teacher of preaching at Crozer Theological Seminary in Rochester, New York, suggests that if sermons are to reach the video generation, they need to become ...