Personal: “So This is Where I’m At” Series
October 6, 2008
I’ve started a new little mini-series that I feel accurately describes where I’m at in life through the use of various internet articles. All that really means is I’ve stumbled upon something that I deeply agree with and couldn’t say better myself. I hope it paints a picture of my current positions on faith, politics, and everything in between. Enjoy!
Dear Church: Stop Using Media
Our friends at Collide, a magazine about church and media, have tossed out an interesting ultimatum to the church at large: stop using media. Their premise being that most of the church’s rampant problems getting media right stem from the fact that the church really has nothing to say via those mediums, it is just using them because they are available and seem trendy or, infinitely worse, “relevant.”
We have always slammed the Christian subculture for emphasizing “message over medium,” but what if the central error is the other way around? What if the problem is really the uncritical, uncautious use of whatever hip new media we can get our hands on, just because “the church must embrace technology!” What if commercialized Christianity, in its pursuit of message propagation, has pushed the church toward media for which is has no message? (Or perhaps more precisely, for which the specific people the church has put forward have no message.)
I would say this has manifested itself everywhere, from Christian music to fiction to movies, and that’s not even beginning on inside-church-walls media. Sure, there are church people with a bent toward writing or singing, but are most of them really willing to commit their lives to their art in a completely authentic way? To live a passion for telling stories, not just a passion for telling conversion stories? As we all known, the Christian culture industry has, in its rush to keep pace with the mainstream, often promoted people who have only marginal talent and a shallow interest in their own art (see: everything that happened in the 1990s). And arguably, these well-meaning but ultimately unqualified people have had nothing to say to serious readers of literature, moviegoers, or rock music fans.
To insulate themselves from the messy, difficult business of creation for a cynical, saturated culture, Christians created their own parallel universe—sales charts, celebrities, bestselling authors, movie stars—with the twin purposes of giving the church a way to have fun and a vague hope that it might somehow “reach the lost.” But the separation, the insulation only led to the “also-ran complex” that has paralyzed the Christian media world for two decades now. When you must wait for scraps to fall from the mainstream table (in order to snatch them up and glue a cross on top), you have this inescapable sense of inferiority that compensates with defensiveness and passive-aggressive competition. That is how it has been—the notion is that we must “answer” every cultural trend to maintain our relevance, while circling the wagons against anyone who observes how badly the mimicry is failing.
The only prescription is a new philosophy, and the church is only beginning “get” the correct idea of media and art they’ve been lacking: creation is about inspiration, in and of itself, without obligation to deliver a predetermined result or neatly summarize a message. And being one of those things driven by vision and belief, art (like faith) must ultimately be carried out for a purpose beyond applause or keeping up with the cultural Joneses. As Scott points out on Collide:
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.
His admonition to the church is a good one, and one that we second: go find yourself a story worth telling (or really experience the story you already know), and then we’ll have a talk about media.
http://www.patrolmag.com/scanner/781/dear-church-stop-using-media
