What do these three have in common? I think they're likely to be nearly extinct in the next 10 years. It's easy to agree on the first two. The last is a more recent epiphany for me -- one I'm eager to explore for holes and implications. So here goes...
A couple years ago, Josh's home megachurch in Louisville created satellite churches with all their own community features except the sermon is a video feed from the megachurch. It has been hugely successful.
Why? I think it's because nowadays, we don't go to church for the lecture (aka sermon). We can hear or watch thousands of great sermons, catered to our tastes/needs/schedules online or by podcast. Many are likely better than what we can hear locally. Tim Keller, John MacArthur, Dave Stone, Andy Stanley, Beth Moore, Max Lucado -- our church could never attract/afford them full-time, but I can listen to them on the subject of my choice while I'm exercising or washing dishes. Even if I could attend their churches, I might not want a community that big.
Which brings up the reason we do go to church: community. We need the fellowship, the shared experience. If we all go through the same experience, the same content, we grow together. That doesn't require a live lecture. In fact, it may be more valuable as a video feed, book, or blog (if the teaching is better).
What does require a live speaker is an interactive experience tailored to the realtime needs of the audience. That could mean...
1) Some form of Q/A: asking live, submitting questions/subjects to be addressed next week, or staying after to answer specific questions.
2) Using the space and senses to make physical presence important, as they've done at my brother's church: everyone taking off their shoes one Sunday, arranging seats in-the-round another, passing out visual aids, or turning out the lights for a special audio presentation. Each was part of creating an overall experience that would make a point as clear, relevant, and memorable as possible. Musicians have been doing this in their concerts ever since recorded music was invented. Surprisingly, churches often catch flack for being too much like a concert, as if entertainment, education, and worship were mutually exclusive.
Which brings up the most important aspect of this whole discussion: How do we learn best? What kind of experience has the most impact? I cannot imagine the traditional church service is the answer. It's anonymous, impersonal, easy to tune-out, and disconnected from the way we learn and behave in every other area of our lives. Even when I was studying education--before texting and the Internet boom--all the research recognized that students learn best when a concept is presented in a multi-sensory way that challenges them to directly engage and apply it.
Some friends of ours visited a local church's Sunday morning service and realized when they reached their car (almost 2 hours later) that not one person had spoken to them the entire time they were there. And this was a young, vibrant, fairly small congregation. The traditional service makes interaction awkward at best: Who wants to introduce themselves to strangers after a lecture ends?
Finally, in a post-Christian society, the more a church service's format diverges from the rest of our experiences, the higher the cost of entry. If we cling too hard to past styles of communication rather than just clinging to the content of God's Word (delivered with the most effective methods), many will never hear and understand that Word. Church becomes for the churched, and eventually, just for the aged churched.
This is all part of a much larger discussion about the purposes and methods of today's churches. I've seen many references to it lately (#3 on this Church Tech blog , or this conference on church communication are the tip of the iceberg), and I don't know anyone who has it all figured out. But I do think it's going to take some time and loss for many denominations to make the adjustments necessary to stay relevant to their audiences - and more importantly, to those they haven't reached yet.
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