i completely agree with gill’s thoughts about posting sermons on youtube – why?!
i remember a term from one of len sweet’s books – categorical imperialism – i.e. imposing the categories from one world/media into a new one rather than understanding that new media change everything. i’m also thinking about this marshal macluhan quote :
official culture still strives to force the new media to do the work of the old media. but the horseless carriage did not do the work of the horse; it abolished the horse and did what the horse could never do
Jonny, I remember you thinking along similar lines about the advent of podcasting.
I agree with you and Gill. I lik Gill’s analogy ‘like building a large Victorian church in an Indian fishing village’. Why do people think the average YouTube user would want to watch a video of someone talking for 5, 10, 20…. minutes? Have they seen any of the videos on YouTube?!
I like those terms… very accurate, I guess simply “using” the new media to do the same things is much “easier” than thinking creatively about both media and message… and there is a deifinite phenomena within institutions which have existed/operated for some time where the method and the message become intriniscally tied in some unbreakable way in the psyche of the institution and it’s members… The Gospel and Preaching (the sermon) is a prime example!
i think i probably said exactly the same thing about podcasting – i knew it was familiar!
It is just simply band wagoning and not exercising creative muscles that are so atrophied. It is the ‘easy’ way where no thought has to be exercised. So sad to me. Adele
Excellent quote and thought. But does that mean we ought to have abandoned the visual and spoken word after the printing press? I don’t think that did us much good. Can’t we do some of both?
Yes, and look what the horseless carriage is doing to us all now. I don’t disagree that trying to lever a largely spoken-word presentation into a visual configuration is rather clunky. But I sense a subtext in this critique which is the assumption that the sermon is no longer valid. As a communicator the sermon writer certainly needs to pay constant attention to form and function, preachers definitely need to keep learning from the best of other spoken-word performers like stand-up comedians, lecturers and politicians, and adapting. But the horse wasn’t abolished and isn’t obsolete; and the sermon is not invalid.
Sermons on YouTube … why? The answer surely is “why not?” Like John I think there is a time and a place for sermonizing – as with all forms of communication. I remember Doug Gay and I having a conversation about sermons about ten years ago, and he quoted his then PhD supervisor as saying that they might have a “ludic function”. This was very prescient. Sermons can be thought of as a kind of game, where everyone listens to a performer, passing quiet judgements in their own head – which I think is the way it’s always been. I think it’s possible to think of sermons as a form of performance art, partly communication of ideas and contentions, partly play, partly stimulus through entertainment. The problem is not the medium, so much as what we conceive the medium to be about. If it’s merely communicating information through words, books have been doing that better (at least for the literate) since before the time of Christ. Sometimes hearing and (more importantly) watching a preacher adds so many more dimensions than merely the stream of ideas. So YouTube scores much higher, in my book, than a mere podcast. Then the question as to whether the preacher is a good or bad performer comes to the fore with greater precision.
I’m curious whether you’ve been following ‘The Show, with Ze Frank’? It’s hilarious (if outrageously rude stuff) but occasionally there’s no escaping the feeling that what he’s doing is precisely what a good sermon does, the way that a car doesn’t set out out to be a horse & buggy but sometimes still delivers you to the front porch.
Try, f’rinstance:
http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/archives/2006/11/112206.html
http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/archives/2006/12/121406.html
Come to think of it, one of the show’s slogans is a good tongue-in-cheek description of a sermon: ‘The Show, with Ze Frank. Thinking, so you don’t have to.’
Great reading the thoughts being aired – specially the points/arguments from Matt, John and Paul.
John – there is no suggestion in this critique that sermons are no longer valid. The whole process for preacher and listener can be an amazing source of learning, feeding, challenge.
A sermon can also be a real turnoff, depending on a variety of things – and context or preconception are among them.
Has anyone ever watched the American comedian Dane Cook? To my mind he is preaching through comedy. I think some ministers could learn a lot from his comedy routines about creativity and the cognitive. Paul I appreciated your comments.
p.s.- Just for the record, I hate sermons on tape and you won’t ever find my searching Y.T. for sermons.
Yeah, it was interesting how quick churches started using RSS technology to feed their sermons and called it podcasting….i guess it is a good show of how even terminology is often confused and hijacked(not used in an new and interesting manner..I would have said hacked if I meant that) by the church as an attempt to seem “hip”.
Yeah watching a sermon on youtube would be drag. But I think if the right people tried to communicate through these methods in ingenius way’s, making full use of the incarnation (part of our being is creativity not plagarism) through involving new media methods to communicate the gospel some really cool things could happen.
thanks all for your thoughts. echoing gill i wasn’t trying to say that sermons are bad and welcome the idea that they could be a lost art form. thoiugh i have written my thoughts on re-imaginging preaching separately – see article in right hand side bar. but the point is about new technologies and imagination. i think it’s entirely valid to suggest that many people try and re-construct the old world in the new as though nothing has changed and it often doesn’t work. it’s a different environment that requires communication that fits the new.