Jeffrey T. Howard
"Electronic Media and the Past-Future of Christianity" in Mediating Religions [1]In this article Peter Horsfield looks at the phenomenon of declining membership of mainline churches. What is missing from the discussion is the role of the structures of media communication within the culture on the shrinking church.
Horsfield is correct in his observation that the church has resisted change in the structures of communication. The early church started in a culture of oral communication and resisted the change to a written faith. They developed a system whereby the author would record a story and a teacher would decode it as ethical teaching and remembered ritual. This system has benefited the church through two thousand years. But today as postmodernism takes hold this whole system comes into question. Now different teachers can have different interpretations. We are deconstructing old interpretations to find new interpretations that are relevant for different groups. As a result the meanings of the words we use to communicate faith are changing. One reaction of the church is to simply deny that all of this is going on. The church continues to try the communicate using the words that once worked to build faith but now has little effect.
The church should follow the example of Jesus. Jesus spoke his message in narrative stories that his audience would understand. Many of these stories are either now unintelligible or understood in a way different from what Christ intended. It is important therefore for pastors to study the original languages and context to try to discern as much of Jesus' original meaning as they can. Then the ideas that Jesus was trying to communicate have to be translated into contemporary language that will continue to communicate the original intent. To do this, pastors will have to learn as much as they can about the language of the contemporary culture. It is vital therefore that pastors talk with the people they trying to communicating to. This entails listening to music, reading blogs, seeing movies, using text messages and participating in culture as much as possible.
All of this will be difficult for pastors who have been brought up believing that popular culture was "worldly" and therefore should be avoided. A separation between the church and the world will only lead to a divergence in the language each uses. The church and the world will simply stop communicating with each other. But if the church learns to communicate its timeless message using the language of popular culture it will be able to communicate religious truths more effectively.
Horsfield has given the church a much needed wakeup call. We no longer have the privilege of communication religious truth as we once did using words that have an accepted and nearly permanent meaning. Rather we are living in a time when meanings of words are being deconstructed and reconstructed in new ways. We have to be cognizant of these changes and use the new language in such a way that the truth of the gospel is still communicated. To keep up on the new language we have to constantly study the works of popular culture and the proclaim the gospel in terms that the consumer of popular culture will understand.
[1] Peter Horsfield, "Electronic Media and the Past-Future of Christianity" in Mediating Religion ed. Jolyon Mitchell and Sophia Marriage (New York: T&T Clark 2003) 271-282.
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