A recent editorial ("Why johnny Can't Listen to the Sermon," MINISTRY, May, 1981) suggested that in comparison to television's appeal the weekly sermon may well end up a distant second best. "Not so," argues reader Robert J. Versteeg, a United Methodist pastor who in addition to preaching each week has a Master's degree in television and motion pictures, has directed a campus TV facility, and has acted professionally. The humble preacher, he maintains, Kas some things going for him that more than matches television's supposedly superior attraction.
Here, then, is the other side of the coin (or as they say in television—equal time for opposing viewpoints). —Editors.
When the giant television industry looms up before him, the humble preacher may indeed feel like David facing Goliath. But David beat Goliath.
Likewise, the humble preacher's weekly sermon may be more effective than television's most sophisticated efforts, in spite of the recent MINISTRY editorial to the contrary. "Pity the poor pastor who has to try to convey the Word of God in mere words," it wails. As a matter of fact, however, we have at least as much evidence that the sermon can come off far out in front of TV's impact.
Why do we tend to assume that because people like and watch television, they therefore do not like and cannot listen to a sermon? Why do we imagine that TV must be more effective than preaching?
For one thing, we admire TV's self-vaunted technology and know-how. But if the technology works so well and if the programmers know so much, why do they have to scuttle half the programs in their series every season?
Maybe we should take a closer look at the seemingly awesome arsenal of TV gimmickry and then compare the power of "mere words."
It is generally true, as the "Why Johnny Can't Listen" article says, that on TV "it is the visual that always contains the most meaning," with the result that TV "isn't suited to conveying ideas" (at least, some ideas for which words are more suited). In other words, TV is TV; it presents what pictures can present.
How then, can "mere words" hope to compete against pictures, one of which, according to the Chinese proverb, is worth a thousand words? (The proverb, you will note, comes down to us not in pictures, but in mere words!)
Broadcasters do try to know and use the strengths of their medium. No less, preachers should know and use the strengths of the medium of words.
Words are ambiguous symbols, not specific pictures. As such, words engage listeners on many levels. Words may allow the hearer to respond with a mystical experience, an emotional insight, a concrete recollection, psychological release, unforeseeable cross-references, or any number of responses. Each individual hearer, because his lifetime history of associations with words is unique to himself, responds to words (the same words) with his own personalized meanings for that instant. It is this great richness and potential for simultaneous personalization of response that makes words, as compared with pictures, a mighty medium, a chosen medium for the Lord.
Words hoard our past and therefore much of our sense of identity. Words are the lodes of our culture as of our personalities. Rather than envying or joining civilization's disintegrative tendency to bury words in cartoon balloons, preachers of the gospel can mine and refine the riches of language as a source of spiritual treasure. But since pictures are ready, if debased, currency, don't they circulate more easily and drive out good words? True enough. With TV "the medium is the message." But that TV's message is all the message that people desire or seek is another assumption that needs to be tested.
TV's incessant hawking of products does indeed appeal to and conspire in worldly values. But that does not mean that we, too, must surrender to the principalities and powers of this world in order to compete. People come to our churches (instead of watching television) because they hope to find more satisfying values than those portrayed in commercials. In our sermons we can offer them what television cannot. What not even television preachers can offer them. What? Yes, because by the very fact of appearing on the tube, TV preachers incur TV's liabilities—liabilities we will discuss shortly.
We are told that TV has an advantage in appeal because its commercials wrap things up in a hurry. But does that mean that TV viewers (or sermon listeners) are therefore rendered incapable of sustained attention, provided there is something worth attending to? Even large TV audiences have been willing to watch extended broadcasts of Roots, Shogun, Masada, and other series.
Why should we envy a medium because it feels free to set up situations in which problems are solved in twenty-eight seconds? Not only is such speed offensive to common sense in real life, but also the assumption that the objective of preaching is to solve problems reflects a limited idea of what sermons can be. Not all sermons should be problem-solving sermons. "Thinking" may not always be what sermon listeners should be doing. There are other, equally weighty, matters of the Spirit.
But TV beats preaching, says the "Johnny Can't Listen" article again, because TV successfully panders to sup posed miniscule attention spans by changing shots and angles at a rapid pace (at an average of three seconds says the article, but surely that is recognition time, not the average length shot). It is equally true, of course, that a listener-looker can and does change the focus of his sermon attention in corresponding ways. The preacher also can appropriately vary viewpoints and approaches at the same time that he provides visual variety in gesture, facial expression, and body position, and aural variety in vocal rate, pitch, quality, and volume. A human being is more flexible than a camera and capable of far more infinite variety.
TV offers caricatures of the world and thus enjoys freedom from the demands of reality, the editorial complains. Someone sympathetic to TV might suggest that those caricatures provide means by which the viewer may establish emotional control in an uncontrollable world. But in contrast to TV's caricatures, preaching can lift up the Bible's vision of what the kingdoms of this world can become when Christ controls.
Thus we see that some of the apparently impressive weapons in the arsenal of the television Goliath turn out in fact to carry their own encumbrances, and by contrast call attention to the alternative opportunities available in the "mere words" of preaching.
But even more than all of this, television broadcasting as we know it at this moment suffers certain definite liabilities.
Commercial television cannot escape—indeed, must keep blazoning—the basic premise of its existence, namely, that it is there to make money. And therefore at some level the viewer is continually aware that he is in a selling situation in which caveat emptor applies and taints the entire phenomenon.
Furthermore, the very slickness that we fallible preachers envy in television may in practice erode its credibility even more. It is too good to be true. Human beings tend to be wary of slickness and glibness. The preacher in his pulpit may have to struggle to get his point across, but, quite apart from the fact that struggling rivets attention, the very unpolished nature of his delivery may make his message seem more believable to his hearers.
Another inherent liability of television is that, with the exception of some phone-in situations and the CUE system (which is by design oversimplified and limited in its own right), television is largely unresponsive. The television set doesn't know your life, doesn't read your body language, doesn't respond to your questions. If you raise a question to NEC, chances are NBC will not come up with a "special" about your question next week. The preacher may. The preacher can respond to the real-life situations and questions of his people.
It follows that people may perceive television as being irresponsible as well as unresponsive. After all, the broad caster has to look only into the camera lens, not into the viewer's eye. The viewer can't hold him to account. Regulations, as applied, give the broadcaster immense latitude in what he can "get away with." Your local TV weather forecaster just rattles confidently on as if he had been right yesterday.
But to my mind, television suffers one major, fatal weakness that makes it extremely vulnerable in a contest with preaching's most compelling strength TV comes over a set; preaching comes in person.
No matter how elaborately television contrives to create an illusion of reality and presence (love those "hidden camera" commercials!), it is trapped in its own box. It is a thing. Perceptually, whatever appears in it becomes part of that thing. We all know that what comes to us "live" on TV is not live at all, but a succession of flashing and fading phosphorescent dots. The gospel is that the eternal God is a live person and Christ is a live person who loves and lives in living persons. For the encounter with such a God, lively preaching "the truth expressed through personality" in a person-to-person meeting is vastly superior.
Any advertiser would cheerfully, greedily, pay ten times what he pays for prime-time TV commercials to have what the Christian church has: a gathering at least once each week in every neighbor hood in the country in which people are brought into personal and continuing contact with enthusiastic users and endorsers of his product to sing the praises of his product, to sample it, to share it freely, to experience its goodness, to ask for more of it, and to learn how to get unlimited quantities of it without price!
Pity poor David?
