The Lord’s Supper binds us not just with people who receive elements but also with farmers and food, creation and creatures. It connects us to the past, the present, and the future: ‘Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again,’ we proclaim with conviction…
But we frighteningly distort and hollow worship. I watched a famous ‘Christian’ talk show where hosts invited viewers to get bread and grape juice from their kitchens so that we would be able to celebrate the Lord’s Supper. Now there are churches experimenting with ‘online communion.’ As Gordon Mikoski notes:
In the digital age, it may be the case that the classical debates about the presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist have been inverted. The question with which we may now have to wrestle is not ‘In what way is the Lord present in the Supper?’ Instead, the question is ‘In what ways are we present?’
-Arthur Boers, Living Into Focus, p. 39
I haven’t even begun digesting the implications of this line of reasoning. Any thoughts? Does this have ramifications for tv church? For satellite churches? For our doctrine of the Lord’s Supper?
Boers commented in a similar way about baptism in that chapter. I think the main issue is that “proclamation requires presence.” When we practice the Lord’s Supper, many things are happening. One of the central things that is happening is that we are remembering for ourselves, and proclaiming to one another, the Good News of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection for the remission of sins. We remember and we give thanks to the Lord. When you minimize presence, you also minimize proclamation. Thus, to celebrate the Lord’s Supper in front of the TV is a small thing, and the question is- WHY are you making it small?
Let us rearrange the situation, and the question. You could ask the same question hypothetically of a man in prison. Let us say this man is in solitary confinement, and that he is given access to bread and water, which he takes on Sunday in a way to celebrate the Lord’s Supper. He isn’t a priest/pastor, his drink isn’t wine (or…grape juice…), and he isn’t celebrating in the company of other believers. Yet your conscience would not fault him, because he demonstrates that his heart is where it should be. His isolation in the Lord’s Supper is not purposeful.
A man who voluntarily chooses to minimize the Lord’s Supper demonstrates a different attitude in “proclamation” than a person who is forced to minimize the Lord’s Supper. This would be true, of course, with any practice. However, the way the Lord’s Supper differs from say, reading the Bible, is that intrinsic within it, is the necessary inclusion of the objective of “presence.” Different goals, at different times, can mean reading the Bible with others or alone. The Lord’s Supper however, always carries the goal of proclamation, and therefore must always carry the goal of presence. Proclamation requires presence, (unless you are one of those poetic types, sounding his barbaric yawp into the infinite…)
So a person practicing the Lord’s Supper in front of a TV is certainly minimizing presence. I can still “remember for myself”, but I’m not proclaiming this Truth to anyone. Which leaves us with a pressing question- why? What has won out over the desire to give testimony? The answer, I think, is simply that this has become an extension of the gnostic narcissism of our day.
Churches and worship services have altered themselves in many ways in order to put the focus more on the individual, than God. Yet loving the Lord with all one’s heart results in loving thy neighbor as thyself. We are not expressing this, when we don’t even care to see our neighbor, much less sit next to him.
Regarding satellite churches, I can speak from personal experience here. A satellite church I once attended used their screen projector to broadcast the sermon, but had their own “campus” pastors, worship team, etc. So the screen was not used when performing the Lord’s Supper. This is an interesting testimony in and of itself, since obviously, having the equipment set up already, they could have more easily conducted the Lord’s Supper via one “centralized” location. Instead, the screen was turned off, and the Lord’s Supper was conducted privately, with all who were PRESENT. (I still think there is some loss in the unified nature of this proclamation by having the church split into several campus’ conducting this service.)
Anticipating a protest here in favor of the semi-interactive circumstances of an “internet church service” where one might communicate via avatar and Skype messages, I should like to point out that Christ came down, and was PRESENT with us. When He conducted the Lord’s Supper He was PRESENT with the disciples. He didn’t say, “hey, I’m getting close to the hour of crucifixion, so I really need to pray. I’m going to go do that. While I’m gone, whenever is convenient for you, take some bread and wine and remember what I go to do by consuming it.”
How ironic for us to try to celebrate His body broken with an unbodied proclamation. He proclaimed by being present. We are to do the same.
Your last line about the irony of proclaiming his body with an unbodied proclamation is great. I think I am going to base a post on that. That you for your well-reasoned thoughts, they are very helpful.
I have been trying the wrap my head around the mess at Mars Hill in Washington for the past few weeks, and I can’t help but thinking that the satellite/celebrity culture is tied to some of the problems they’ve had. I think you’ve helped me there.
With your experience with a satellite campus, let me ask you this (and please don’t feel like you have to answer this right away, you can take your time): do you have any thoughts on how a church listening to a preacher who is on a screen helps or hurts the impact of preaching or of the mood or feeling or environment of the service?
Please don’t feel like you need to answer this right away, I know it’s not an easy question.
You used the illustration of preachers using a screen as an example of technology changing the entire “ecology” of a church in a previous post. I thought this was a good way to describe the effect.
I attended a church in jr high and high school that used two screens on either side of the stage that blew up the preacher for people to watch. Occupancy at the time must have been around a thousand people per service. In my early 20’s I attended a different church via their satellite campus. In that circumstance, the screens were the only way to view the pastor, at least at the campus I attended. This church also seated something close to a thousand people per service, at each campus. Both churches have grown even larger since I left, all while I have continued to watch small churches in Dallas close down, and get remodeled into daycares or some other facility. The satellite campus I attended in the second screen-church example had been GIVEN their church by an aged church that had dwindled to the point where they decided to close down. They literally deeded over the building to our large church.
There are many ways to approach your question regarding the effects of screens on preaching. I am tempted to simply plug in alot of Boers questions and answer them within the context as best I am able. However, I think instead I will approach this by attempting to highlight some of the targeted purposes of the screen in the large churches/satellite churches by proponents, attempting to note what is being sought, and the effect thereof.
Obviously satellite campuses could not survive without a screen broadcasting the pastor. However, such churches also use screens so that the congregation can zoom in on the dramatic presentation of the pastor on stage. You can see his facial expressions and gestures with far greater clarity. In today’s world, a person who employs a reserved rhetorical delivery is viewed as contrived, whereas the person who “let’s it all hang out” in a sort of raw, unpolished, emotionalism, is viewed as “authentic”. This goes along with the belief that nice clothes should be equated with shallow manipulation and casual clothes (ie:pastor with t-shirt and ripped jeans) is seen as “down-to-earth” and relatable. So in this sense, screens are an extension of the “user-friendly” model of church structure. Dramatic presentation in film requires our ability to see the actors face. This is why screen actors and stage actors practice very different arts. Screens help to support the nuances of dramatically unbridled presentation via facial expressions.
I think screens also are preferred on a more subtle level by people who want to distance themselves safely from the message. It is a body-language issue. Other examples would be walking in a room, where the only seating is a couch, and a stranger is sitting at one end, so you decide to stand. You don’t know the person, and that feeling, causes you to want to stand, even though you could have sat on the other end of the couch, not even coming close to touching the person. When talking to a person, most of us have a requirement for “personal space.” I want you to stand a couple feet away from me. If my wife got in my face and started talking, it wouldn’t make me uncomfortable, I would just think her silly. If you got in my face and started talking I might feel it as threatening. It would certainly be received negatively. I think that screens give us a way to establish distance from a person and their message- a person who we do not feel intimate with. It feels “less threatening” and reinforces our commitment-free culture. Another good example is how in most churches the first 1-2 rows are more or less empty, and when the service begins to pack out, and people are late, they have to walk to the very front to sit because those are the only seats left. Sitting at the front, I can see your eyes, and you can see mine, and I feel like I HAVE to engage with you. I feel like I cannot doodle on the sermon notes or answer a text message. I feel almost as engaged as if we were having a private conversation. If I sit further away, I feel less committed, and if I am looking at a screen I am even LESS committed. [This is not to say that there are not MORE reasons why people avoid the front row at church, merely that this is a strong motivator. Humans are complicated and rarely do things for a singular reason. Let it be assumed moving forward that ALL examples highlighted are given to explicate their possible role in the current subject, not to exhaustively reveal the motives of those particular actions… I can already hear people arguing venomously…] The point again, is that screens allow us to reinforce a non-committed anonymity, that preserves us from a message that might make us feel insecure.
Another desired effect of the screen is the ability to supplement the sermon with additional material. Alot of screen churches add power-point slides into the sermon that come up as the pastor is talking about a particular quote from the Bible or an author. Sometimes they even show video clips or images to “illustrate” their point. As odd as this would have undoubtably seemed to, say, Spurgeon, were we to raise him from the grave to attend one of these services, it is no doubt easily accepted by people who work in the corporate world.
This leads me to my next point. When you have a church service that is architecturally shaped like a corporate headquarters, creating sermon series’ that have commerical-business-sounding titles like “Thrive” and “Mission 123”, and then conduct each sermon with power-point and screens like business presentations, you will with certainty have an easier time attracting big-bussiness executives, etc. And these churches do. This in turn fills the offering plates generously, (10% of a 6-figure executive is notable), which afford them the budget for all the media technology they employ, etc.
I think it is interesting to note that not only are screens used in modern large churches, but that they MUST be utilized in a way that is similar to modern businesses or else they won’t be appreciated by their business-type patrons, (which means they cannot be afforded.) So I think at this point we begin to see the “greater ecology” at work with employing screens in church services. By using such technologies, we put a strong emphasis on a type of culture we are desiring to create. (Here we adopt the culture of the corporation and the dot com.)You cannot make technology decisions in one hand and then try to talk about culture as a separate idea in the other hand. Yet we do this constantly, and then scratch our heads at the results.
Slightly tangential, rock music is another good example of the culture that typically goes along with churches that use screens. Rock music is very self-focused. The songs are frequently about having one’s glory affronted by somebody else, getting what YOU want, etc. The musicians get up on stage and dress and perform in a way for people to worship them. We’ve imported narcissistic rock music into church services, remaking our modern worship music to have most of its focus on us, rather than God, through both the lyric content, and the style of “performance.” Now we are seeing, (among other things,) all these “Christians worship music stars” come out as gay. Well, if atleast part of the homosexual sin struggle is one of reflective self-love, rather than a desire to create union with the OPPOSITE sex, then it would seem that the greater rock music culture is an excellent facilitator. Yet Conservative Christians want to view homosexuality as an isolated issue, not connected to other aspects of sin, much less desire to discuss how form and function go hand in hand in cultural choices.
Back to employing screens, we see now that they have a reverberating effects in lifestyle and purpose of a church and its members. Chapter 5 of “Living Into Focus” describes the use of technology as a “yellow light issue” (rather than red or green.) Technology, is an issue that requires discernment, which in turn requires an understanding of motive and context. Screens don’t HAVE to be used in the ways mentioned above. I have attempted here to elucidate some of the motives and context that are currently influencing the use of screens in churches.
Most of the time, if you ask somebody to explicate the purpose of a technology, (such as a large viewing screen,) people will not touch the fullness of context or motive and therefore will fail to know whether to “stop” or “go”. They will say something like “screens make it easier to see the pastor” or “it is nice to not have to look up the Bible verse, he just puts it right on the screen.” Yet in saying they enjoy this change, they fail to recognize fully what changed about context. They fail to see their full environment. They fail to acknowledge the interrelatedness of circumstance. Furthermore, they fail to ask “why” they are motivated to have things “easier”, (as is the motive in the aforementioned examples).
I would finally like to mention one reason why I believe our minds are so bent on this sort of broken method of reasoning. If we are saying that our experience in time and space is formative, (and we are,) then certainly our constant and committed use of computers has a very formative influence on us. It is then useful to examine the nature of a computer. How does it work? What does it do? At its essence, a computer performs “compounding” and “accelerating” functions. A computer takes multiple binary yes’s and no’s and compounds them, at the high speed of electricity. There are no “maybe’s” with computers, no “shades of gray”, and the computation process is linear. This would seem very much to describe the way we are now living in the world. We attempt to compound as many activities together as we can, as muti-taskers. We want things to accelerate as fast as they can. And we think through things in a linear “yes” or “no” sort of way. We treat life like machines treat software. Computers have formed us. Thus, we are more prone to very linear, isolated forms of reasoning such as “They added a screen, and now I can see the pastor more easily. End of story. Nothing else was effected. A + B= C”, we answer this question while trying to do atleast two activities at the same time, and if we are pressed further, we begin to feel an anxiety to accelerate the conversation to completion, all in the name of “efficiency”.
Are there “good” uses of screens in churches? Sure. I suppose you could say that the idea of a screen making it easier to see the pastor, is “good.” It atleast sounds benign when viewed as an isolated, unpacked concept like that. However, it is not isolated, and when we broaden our understanding, the moral value of this idea is taken into a greater context that may change our mind. This is why we have so many things in our life that are the “good being the enemy of the best.” We fail to see the big picture, and thus we only achieve a partial success- and THAT only if the successful part isn’t itself malformed by its relation to the whole.
All this to say, I would not pronounce a “red light” over the use of screens by pastors. I would merely say that given what contexts and motives are currently observable, this “yellow light” should be responded to as an exhortation to “stop.”
Thank you for your well-though-out response. Everything you wrote was helpful.
I am dead-set against screens in church. They drive me crazy. But I have had difficulty trying to explain my position as anything other than a personal preference. I really thought your idea of disembodiment in your original reply was great as well.
I watched a video a while back of Mark Driscoll and James MacDonald having a discussion with Mark Dever about this issue and I didn’t think that Dever came across as fully prepared to debate it. You can see it here if you want to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ukvHuwFzBA
It got me to thinking about how I would have handled the discussion. You just handled it way better than he was able to. The funny thing is, you even repeated one of my own points very well, and I don’t think I would have been able to express it as well as you did.
Driscoll says that he gets nothing from the ‘crowd.’ I am the exact opposite. Lloyd-Jones liked to say that preaching is romantic because it involves a personal dynamic between pastor and congregation. When I, filled with the Holy Spirit, speak to others who are filled with the Holy Spirit, there is, as Boers calls it, a conviviality at work. And this conviviality involves more than friendly looks and relationships and the like: it is life speaking to life, life drawing upon life, life interpenetrating life, it is iron sharpening iron. The church is sharpening me and they don’t even know it. It’s hard to explain, but it is one of my favorite parts of preaching.
Again, thanks for helping me think through this. The ‘ecological’ terminology is probably the way to go here. My debt to Neil Postman continues to grow.
I’m glad what I wrote was helpful. I think most people would find it to be too long-winded, and yet from where I stand there is yet more that could be said. But perhaps that goes back to the Boers discussion on attention.
I think that ideas like “conviviality” are very much at the heart of issues like preaching and big screen projections at church. I think that Boer’s “conviviality” fits within a category of life concepts that don’t transfer well to charts, graphs, and consumer reports. There are probably several such nuances at work with the topic of screens… probably with most issues in life.
This category I am referring to involves things that can be known, and yet not articulated. These are things that can only be gestured at, implied, or suggested. We often label such things as “mystical” due to their ethereal and mysterious nature. Unfortunately fearful and brash anti-intellectualism has lead many Christians to disown such a term due to its association with occultic and otherwise pagan concepts. I can accept using another term, I’m just not sure there IS a more exacting term to use.
If we don’t believe in things that cannot be known in a logical, cognitive, articulate sense, then I’m not sure what we are doing professing faith in God. He certainly isn’t boxed up neatly within that category alone. I’m not sure that people who do not engage in some sort of activity that encourages this kind of experiencing (like aesthetic art,) are capable of picking up on ideas like “conviviality” very easily.
Alas, when you come across a person who “gets it” like Boers, he goes off and prays to icons…..”The world is like a drunken peasant. If you lift him into the saddle on one side, he will fall off again on the other side. One can’t help him, no matter how one tries. He wants to be the devil’s.” -Martin Luther “Table Talk”
Polanyi said that all knowledge is tacit or rooted in the tacit. Ineffability is a fact, even if it can’t be described. But, when you want to engage people, it helps to find ways of expressing things that are hard to express. C.S. Lewis was especially good at it. That’s one of the reasons I appreciate him so much.
As far as the icons. Aside from the whole ‘second commandment issue,’ I wonder, if we set the second commandment issue aside for a moment, if an icon is really any different from a movie screen in church(?). It would seem that ‘visual aids’ are not really what he is pushing for in the book, but it is, as if out of nowhere, dropped on us in the form of icons.
Also, on p. 82, he opines that screens serve (like windshields) to separate us from something. What is the difference between a screen and a picture? Plus, in the last paragraph on p. 82, he randomly drops in a story about a Mystic being possessed by Christ and then experiencing further mystical experiences. I really could make zero sense of why he included that story there. It didn’t seem to advance any point he was making. Was he saying, ‘if you focus on Christ, you will be possessed by Christ?’
Anyway, as you said, just some bones to spit out. I’ll take the meat.
Ah yes, “tacit” is another good word for getting at part of what is necessitated in achieving discernment of tech “advantages.” I like “ineffable” too. I don’t use that word enough.
I think icons ARE different from a movie screen in church in that there is already a physical form to concentrate on when listening to a sermon and the screen just separates you from that form. With iconic prayer, there is NOT a form to train the mind upon, and the icon is presumed to provide this.
Furthermore, an artistic rendition can provide a window of sight into something that its normal form even doesn’t provide. When an artist paints a picture of you, they inevitably FOCUS on certain characteristics of you to bring forth. This trains one’s thoughts in a way that simply looking at you would not. In this way, people talk about artist’s “capturing” someone’s soul in a picture. Screens do none of this.
This idea of an artist providing a specific focus can of course be dangerous. What if the icon causes you to focus on the wrong thing? Or something entirely false? However, the same could be said of all religious artwork.
The word used in most discussion of icons is “veneration.” The Lutherans seem to take a fence-sitting stance on icons, if I understand them, (or perhaps a “yellow light stance” would be a kinder way of saying it,) which distinguishes between the type of appreciation given only to God and that which we give when we do things like respectfully treat an image of the Cross or a Bible. You don’t worship the Bible, but you also don’t kick it down the hall as you walk to Sunday School. (I actually used to do that…) You don’t burn crosses. This is the “veneration” the Lutherans believe in, and it is different from the Orthodox, and (I believe) the Catholics as well.
I steer clear of icons personally. There is alot of controversy surrounding them, and I just DONT NEED THEM, so I avoid them. I am willing to admit that I don’t have an exhaustive knowledge of the topic, and that there are men I respect greatly that council abstention, and therefore I seek to submit myself to my elders in this sense. I am very wary, these days atleast, of the hubris that would be involved in standing in defiance of all the saints of the Reformation. Further exploration could be interesting however, for the afore mentioned reasons.
I agree with you that he dropped the mystic-possessed-woman and the idea of icons like bombs in the middle of his writing. I read back over those sections when I came across them to make sure I wasn’t adding an abrupt element into his writing due to my own bias. No, I think it was very abrupt, and brings into question motive, among other things. I just spit out this part of the meal, because I wasn’t sure what on earth it was I had just bitten into- bone or meat or otherwise, and he didn’t give me much to go off of. It was abrupt and anemically explicated.