Food for thought
On their blog, Out of Ur, the editors of Leadership Journal recently posted a conversation with Shane Hipps, author of 'The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture.'
Q: Speaking from a specifically church-based context, what kinds of messages are well-served by video or other visual media?
A: Any messages that demand sustained concentration and intellectual participation or engagement are not well-suited to a video medium. For example, the kind of abstract theological reasoning found in the letters of Paul is extraordinarily difficult to express and depict in visual imagery, since video and images offer impressions and evoke emotions.
So, if the content that you want to communicate demands any kind of complex reasoning, images and video will actually work against your best efforts. This is one of the reasons that in the Middle Ages, when literacy rates plummeted and the dominant means of communication was stained glass windows, Paul's letters disappeared in the church. And it wasn't until after the print revolution that Luther 're-discovered' the epistles and basically elevated them above the stories of Jesus.
The question that we have to ask as leaders in the church as we consider using video and visual media is this: Are we inadvertently facilitating the disappearance of Paul again?
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