Preaching by Faith and by Sight
How oral communicators are joining the visual revolution.
The Leadership Survey reported by Eric Reed
July 1, 2007
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 ...
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