For the last few weeks we have been using a projector and screen in worship. For some of you who read this you will be thinking this is no big deal but for others it really is a big deal. Thankfully almost all the comments we have received have been positive. I've heard everything from, "its about time we got a screen," "I've been waiting ten years for this," to "I wasn't sure I liked it at first but I like the way it adds to the service." I even heard that one person thought the screen was a great addition for the hard of hearing as it would allow them to participate through the visuals. Of course the flip side of that was that on Sunday I witnessed the gracious activity of one of our members as they shared the images with a sight-impaired member, it was beautiful to see.
As I placed the screen, a portable 10' screen, in our sanctuary I was acutely aware of Gordon McDonald's great book, Who Stole My Church, and decided to walk carefully into this change. The first people to see it were the choir and I processed it with them. The first Sunday I used a single image from CIVA to set the tone for worship and showed a short video of World Visions work in Haiti. The following week I added the Scripture text and some visuals for the sermon.
I wrote about the screen in our newsletter...
By the time you receive this newsletter, most of you will have seen the change in our sanctuary, the addition of a screen that will allow us to use more electronic media as part of our worship service.
Over the years, even the centuries, the use of technology has been an important part of the growth and development of the church. If you visit some of the old Presbyterian churches in Scotland or Ireland you will see pulpits that stand high above the congregation. This innovation in design was to allow the voice of the preacher to carry throughout the sanctuary in a time before the microphone. Today we take the technology of the a microphone for granted and don't even notice its there unless the volume is far to high or we get feedback from it.
Indeed there are many technological tools that we use in worship and have done so for so many years that we don't even notice them. Take the church bulletin, it is a fairly new addition to the worship service. Until local churches were in a position to purchase duplicating machines that could run a weekly bulletin churches thrived without them.
An older technology that has become indispensable is the printing press. Indeed the invention of the printing press has been said to be the most important tool in the spread of the Protestant reformation. Can you even imagine what worship in the church must have been like for most of its history without any printed material? Yet for most of the history of the church God's people worshiped without any printed material.
What I'm getting at is that everything in the church was, at some point, an innovation, I could write about the introduction of the organ to churches, the development of a separate pulpit and lectern from a single table, the introduction of electric lights. All of which were loved by some and not so much by others.
Today we live in a highly technological, visual time and if we are serious about reaching out to a younger generation and helping them find a place in God's family then we need to adapt to the world in which we live. This was an important insight of the reformation as the reformers sought to bring the gospel to people, not in Latin, but in their native language. Image is now part of the native language of people today, we live in a visual culture. This is the reality of the world in which we must minister if we are to pass the faith on to future generations, which is something I most certainly believe we are called to do.
How do you manage change in you church or organization?
