Collide Magazine

This is the first installment in an ongoing and open-ended series devoted to convincing you, the church leader, not to use media.

Yes, COLLIDE exists to encourage the use of media and technology in the Church … the proper use. Lately I’ve been thinking about a number of (in my opinion) improper uses of media and technology in the Church. Here goes number one:

Stop using media when you have nothing to say.

In Acts 4, Peter and John were seized by the religious authorities, jailed overnight, and eventually brought before the Sanhedrin. The rulers and teachers of the Law wanted an explanation for how Peter and John healed a crippled beggar. Peter, full of the Spirit, tells them about Jesus, whom they crucified but whom God resurrected. Naturally, the Sanhedrin dudes wanted to discredit Peter and John’s message, but Luke notes there wasn’t much they could say because the formerly crippled, now healed beggar was standing there with them. Yeah, the beggar was present, and he was standing.

After conferring among themselves (as church committees are known to do) the Sanhedrin decided to instruct Peter and John not to speak or teach in the name of Jesus any longer. I love how Acts 4:19-20 articulates the apostles’ reaction:

But Peter and John replied, “Judge for yourselves whether it is right in God’s sight to obey you rather than God. For we cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard.”

Peter and John weren’t speaking to be cool. They weren’t speaking to be relevant. They weren’t speaking to justify their salaries. They weren’t speaking to earn the favor of God or man. Perhaps most important, they weren’t speaking to be seen and heard. Instead, they couldn’t help speaking about what they’d seen and heard.

The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. The miracles, signs, and wonders. The beauty of the gospel. The power of the Spirit. The transformation of lives yielded to and redeemed by God. Peter and John had seen all of it, and they could not help but speak about it. They had a story to tell and, come hell or high water, they were going to tell it. Because they had to. They couldn’t help it. They had experienced God Almighty and they would not, could not be silent.

That, my friends, is a place from which we should use media: when we have a story we can’t help but tell.

If you lack that sense of conviction about the message you’re communicating with media—if, in other words, your story can wait—it’s time to put down the media toys and do something about that. Seek an encounter with God Almighty, seek an experience in which you see and hear things that are truly transformational. Then, pick up your pen and paper, open up your laptop, sign into your blogging client, put a fresh battery in your video camera, launch Photoshop, or do whatever it is you do to communicate, because you’ll have an urgent story to tell.

Until then, stop using media. The lack of conviction with which your media is created (or purchased) and presented may transfer to your audience, or fail to transfer anything at all. Even worse, you’ll be under the impression that you’ve done your job for the week and your audience will be under the impression that what they just sat through is what they can expect from an authentic worship experience these days. For what it’s worth, I think you’d both be wrong.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 30th, 2008 at 8:53 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.