Revdarth.com

Well, its amazing how things come together timing-wise. I submitted my final version of my Doctor of Ministry thesis on Monday morning. The focus of my project was on how seminaries need to integrate multimedia into their preaching curriculum. Many (if not most) seminaries (at least PCUSA ones) are still training their pastors in the traditional 15-18 minute spoken oral- and text-based sermon. And then pastors are going into many congregations where they are asked to use multimedia as a part of their preaching and many of those extremely well trained preachers find themselves at a loss. How to integrate visual, audio, or other forms of media into the word/text-based exegetical process that we were taught in seminary?

Anyway, I was syncing my nano last night and found that one of the key authors that I referenced in my project, Shane Hipps, was preaching at Mars Hill Church in Michigan whose podcast I download weekly. The title of the sermon was the “Spirituality of the Cellphone.” I just finished listening to the message and cannot recommend it enough to take a listen to. Hipps, while covering some of the same ground as his book, powerfully reflects the ways that the digital age is changing how we experience spirituality and experience one another. He is far from a anti-technologist calling for the abolition of the internet, email, IM, etc, but instead holding up a mirror to how it affects us, often in ways that we do not recognize ourselves.

The ultimate point he makes (spoiler alert) is that the prevalence of digital technology today has a paradoxical effect on how we relate to one another. While the vast and powerful tools of digital technology allow us to be connected to people in a long-distance manner in ways that we could not do so previously, they also often have the opposite effect in how we relate to those who are closest to us. We often employ the same methods of communication in the digital age with those closest to us that we do with those many miles away. Which is easier? To get together f2f with someone or to just call them on the cell phone? What about in the office - easier to just IM someone rather than walk a few offices down to talk to them? I know I am often guilty of this.

Ultimately, the point is that Christianity is a religion of presence. It is a faith based on the idea that God is not some distant deity, but the Word became and lived among us (John 1:14). Christ had a physical ministry of presence and even when he was departing this world, as recorded in Matthew 28, he promised that he would never ultimately leave us.

Anyway, a challenging series of thoughts, at least for me. There are two links to the sermon below. The first is to the itunes store podcasts and the second is the archive page. The sermon is from 3-30-08.

Itunes link to sermon (sorry no direct link on their website)
MarsHill.com Archive