Stop Using Media (Part Three)
This is the third installment in an ongoing and open-ended series devoted to convincing you, the church leader, not to use media.
Stop using media if you’re just trying to impress people.
This ties in with a couple of my previous posts, including Stop Using Media (Part One) and The Problem with an Industry of Cool, but I think this is a slightly different message. Stop using media if you’re just trying to impress people. Trying to impress people is an incredibly difficult proposition in the long run. And besides, it’s not our calling anyway.
Let’s think about how difficult it is for you, the church leader to impress the people that darken your doorways on Sunday mornings or some night during the week. First of all, unless you’re a megachurch with a serious budget, there’s probably a church in your area that is more visually dazzling and better acoustically-engineered than your church. They probably have more staff and better equipment than your church, so their media will typically be more “impressive” (at least on the surface). To compete with them (red flag!) and impress the people who are drawn to that church instead of yours (another red flag!), you’ll need to increase the resources you dedicate to “impressive” stuff such as glossy print pieces, Hollywood-esque sermon teaser videos, and those flat screens in the bathrooms that we all love so much.
If you do manage to acquire the funds for all of that and create something genuinely impressive, the church across town will just raise their game accordingly and out-impress you the next Sunday. D’oh.
Now, let’s imagine that your church is the most “impressive” church in your metro area and you can maintain your king-of-the-mountain status. Guess what? The secular world has the means and motivation to make your operation look rinky-dink. The people you’ve been impressing will go see Hannah Montana or U2 in 3D and wonder why your services are so flat and bland. They’ll go see The Dark Knight in an IMAX theater and wonder why your videos are so ordinary and why their bones don’t chatter when your band is onstage. They’ll go to a Nine Inch Nails concert and wonder why your live experience is sooooo 2005.
See, U2 and Hannah and Trent Reznor want all the entertainment dollars your metro area has to offer, and they’re willing to pull out all the stops to get them. They’re willing to play the “impress” game, one-upping each other month after month, year after year as the crowds (and dollars) flock to whatever is the most impressive at the moment. And that’s all well and good for them. That’s the capitalist system we live in. But that’s not all well and good for the local church.
We don’t exist to compete for ADD-addled eyeballs and entertainment dollars. We don’t exist to win the “impress” race (hint: it’s a race with no end, which means it can’t be won). We exist to connect people with God and each other, to facilitate that connection. The last time I checked, the most impressive laser light show on earth couldn’t accomplish that purpose.
If you feel yourself caught up in a never-ending quest to impress people, consider putting all of your media toys back in the toy box and then only pull out the ones that honest-to-goodness help you connect people with God and others. The result might not be very impressive, but it might be effective.
