Muddy River Media

One thing I enjoy is teaching workshops. There are a number of them I've done over the years, some are hand's on, skill based workshops while others deal with ministry philosophy.

My hand's on workshops include Gospel Illusions, Balloon Twisting, Video Camera Technique, Video Post-Production amongst others. Some of my Ministry Philosophy workshops deal with Children's Ministry, Youth Ministry, Handling Volunteers and Being Culturally Relevant.

Last weekend I had the privilege of leading a workshop on Incorporating Media into Church Services. This was at the Fellowship Atlantic Regional Convention in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. I thought I would share some bullet points of my ramblings.

Why Use Media?

• It incorporates an additional method of learning... SIGHT.

  According to studies after 2 weeks a person remembers...

  • 10% of what they read
  • 20% of what they hear
  • 30% of what they see
  • 50% of what they see and hear
  • 70% of what they say
  • 90% of what they do

  Most church services are designed to teach us using our ears, but adding related visuals will more then double the impact of the message. Of course it should come as no surprise the ultimate method of learning is by doing. Churches need to figure out how to challenge people to get involved with what they've just been taught.

• Helps create a unified theme to the service, making the impact greater.

If the message theme is expressed in the music, the bulletin artwork, the still and motion backgrounds, the sermon notes and anywhere else possible, there is a much greater chance that theme will be understood by a person.

• Offers new avenues of service for believers with different gifts and abilities.

  Pastors should not be the ones searching for and creating the visuals for a service... they should empower others to do that. I firmly believe every church (other then those darned Amish congregations) have somebody who is interested and able to find or create graphics for the pastor's sermon.

  Pastor, however, keep in mind that artistic, graphics-type people don't want to be informed of the message title and theme a couple days before the service. Plan your messages out and let the graphics person know a month in advance, and then watch what visual magic they can create or find for you. I could and probably should do a whole blog post on just this topic alone.

• Helps the Church be culturally relevant.

  In today's society visual media is the baseline method used to teach, challenge, entertain and encourage. Schools and universities understand this, as do advertisers. Visuals is the language today's society speak and understand.

  Postmodern culture hears with it's eyes and thinks with it's feelings." - Ravi Zacharias

  When a pre-Christian arrives at your church, they will be able to relate more to the visuals in your service, to the projection screen, to the medium being used, much more than they will relate to the worship music, testimonies or speaker on the platform. That's not to say we get rid of bands, preachers or testimonies, but we must realize visual media helps a church take people from the KNOWN to the UNKNOWN.

There are many more reasons why churches should use media in their services, but I felt these four are very important ones. In a future blog post I will share with you some interesting thoughts about what the Bible has to say about using culturally relevant tools, such as media, to share the good news.