The Major Media

Ashton Kutcher has nearly two million people following him on Twitter. This means, if I understand the reports correctly, that more people follow him than follow CNN.

I’m not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing. But it seems to make his Twitter account a “Major Medium”.

This causes me to reflect upon an assertion I stumbled upon some twenty years ago. The contention was made then that among the ‘major media’ the pulpit was primary. That is, though little recognized and appreciated, the pulpit is the vehicle through which the greatest impact is made on human life and thinking.

I thought then and I think now that such a view is overly optimistic and tinged with an idealism that borders on the delusional. It ignores the fact that, for example, 1.36 billion Americans passed through the stiles of movie theaters last year. Who knows how many rent them, download them, or catch them on TV.

We get our news and entertainment on-line or on-screen. We are surrounded by schools and universities which shape and mold students apart from whatever Christian underpinnings some of them might have once had. Celebrities dominate our news (and our Twitters) and we drink from many streams of influence. Who can say what the major influences upon public thinking are. Few would include the lowly sermon in the list.

But then again, over three billion Americans passed through the doors of churches last year (take that Academy), so perhaps my skepticism is out of place.

This fact remains: there is no other medium with such a rich heritage and tradition. For 2000 years the Christian faith and life has been passed on by preaching. There have been times when the church has been at a low point, but still there were preachers. There have been times when preachers preached and immediately their sermons were printed, distributed, and read. The role of the sermon has ebbed and flowed, but it has always been there.

And it is unique.

No other medium even imagines that its message possesses a divine origin. Yet every (faithful) preacher who stands in the pulpit is intent upon opening God’s word to his congregation and therefore is seeking to bring a word from God to them. And though many have emerged from the movies or from the concert hall persuaded that their lives had been unalterably changed by what they heard or saw, when Christ is preached, lives are turned from eternal damnation to eternal life, from falsehood to truth, from an empty life to a meaningful life.

And though preaching is an ancient medium, it is gaining in relevance. In a recent unpublished document distributed among a group of pastors to which I belong, the following was noted:

‘One of the interesting phenomena noted by many writers studying the so-called emergent generation, or post-moderns, is that there is, in younger people, a hunger for deeper and more serious and authentic preaching of the Scriptures.
In the book The Emerging Church, Dan Kimball writes: “I sense a renewed hunger for theology and an interest in discussing the mysteries of God. Emerging generations are starving for depth in our teaching and preaching and will not settle for shallow answers. In his chapter on preaching in that book he says: “I know of several churches drawing hundreds and thousands of younger people in which the message is forty to fifty minutes long.”’

I am a preacher, and so I want to think that the work in which I am involved is indeed significant. I can’t claim one million Twitter followers, and only 200 or so visit my blog, and that in a good week, and most of those visit but don’t read. And yet, God has preserved his church and prospered his kingdom and persevered his people through something which seems so foolish, so mundane, so pedestrian, as preaching.

And I get to do it.

Wow.