Know Your Audience Or Lose Your Audience
Allow me to pull back the curtain a little bit on my personal life. There’s a media application, I promise.
At church, my wife and I are involved with a class for single and married adults in their 20s and 30s. Every few weeks I teach the class, as I did last Sunday, as part of our teaching team. We were in the middle of a fascinating series on Death and, being that it was the Sunday before Easter, I opted to teach on the crucifixion, the death of Christ (the previous two weeks covered Death in culture and Death in scripture). To convey the pain, tragedy, and sacrifice of the crucifixion, I decided to display an image (below) from The Passion of the Christ for our group of 25 or so to contemplate. The passion of Jim Caviezel, even with obviously fake wounds, is sufficiently graphic enough to invoke a grimace from adults. Imagine my horror when a little girl showed up for class.
She was probably four or five and she was there with her dad. He stopped by our class as a special guest to share his testimony about working with a well known non-profit organization before we got started with the teaching. He shared his story while his daughter sat in the corner and occupied herself with a squeaky toy. Then he invited us to consider getting involved with the organization and said he would stay with our class for the remainder of the time and allow people to ask him questions when class was over.
“Oh no,” I thought. “I’m about to put up that image, and we’re about to talk about crucifixion, torture, pain, and death. And that little girl is going to be here for all of it!”
I turned to her dad. “Um, we’re talking about death and the crucifixion today. The image I’m about to show is kinda graphic.” He furrowed his brow and thought about it for a moment. “I think it’ll be OK,” he said as he glanced at his daughter, still fascinated by her squeaky toy. I gulped and started the lesson I prepared. Within five minutes, he’d scooped up his daughter and exited the room. I don’t doubt the appropriateness of the lesson or the imagery I selected because I did so with young adults in mind, but I was reminded of an important lesson: The right image becomes the wrong image when shown to the wrong audience. When you think you’ve found the perfect piece of media to go with your message, make sure it’s perfect for your audience.
Along these same lines, I read an interesting post at ThinkChristian today about a new line of Bible curriculum for preschoolers that intentionally omits any mention of Christ’s death and resurrection. Those idea are just too graphic for young kiddos, the publishers say. Instead, the curriculum apparently communicates ideas such as, “Jesus wants to be my friend forever.” That’s certainly a different take from Mel Gibson’s The Passion, but is it the right approach to take with children who aren’t ready for the events of Passion Week?
Scott – I completely agree with your premise about knowing your audience and being appropriate to that audience. As the father of a 4 1/2 year old, you did the appropriate thing by letting the father know what was coming. I commend you for that.
I have to take umbrage with the Bible curriculum though, it is important that kids, even preschoolers, know that Christ died on the cross for our sins. Certainly, leave out the graphic detail (know your audience), but my children need to know and understand that when they go to heaven, Jesus will be there because he was sacrificed through crucifixion and rose from the dead.
Isn’t that the premise of being a Christian?
posted at 11:37 am on March 19th, 2008 by Chuck