Multimedia Church

Last Sunday I did the sermon in our once a month 'All Age' service (when fewer families turn up than any other service of the month even though it's supposed to be principally for them) and decided to do the whole service on powerpoint with our video projector rather than everyone having to rely on the various printed service sheets our church uses week by week. Henry - our parish priest - was great and supported me all the way even though he knows better than I that there is a degree of resistance to these new fangled gadgets in what is essentially an old-fashioned and traditional congregation.

Surprisingly it was a big hit with young and old and there was a clarity and direction to the service which is not always apparent, despite the fact that we were using pretty much the same words and responses throughout.

It struck me that the 21st century church needs the visual aspect of it's corporate worship life now more than ever before. We have had a worthy, but I think detrimental, emphasis on words in church and in our thinking about faith for too long, and it's about time we got back to using visual arts and imagery more, especially given the huge emphasis on this in secular society driven by technologies such as television and the internet.

The early church didn't have printed prayer books or even Bibles and the medieval church often worshipped in Latin which most people didn't even understand. The great majority of people had to rely on religious iconography, plays and storytelling as the principal means of communication about their faith, how did we get caught up in this obsession with words? I wouldn't dream of doing an hour long presentation at work without loads of visuals (but then again I do work in telly!), why do we assume that people will put up with that at church?

Let's use the tools we have available to us now to make our worship relevant and exciting, not get hung up on the correct form of words or whether we've said the prayers in the right order.