Emerging Lutherans

I recently read an article about a number of congregations in St. Louis that are incorporating texting into their worship and preaching.  Because Emerging Churches tend to be a bit more quick to adopt contemporary media and communication forms (and be criticized for it), I thought I would bring up the topic here.

I encourage you to read the full article, which can be found here at STLtoday.  The article is generally about congregations that are encouraging congregants to text questions and comments to a mediator who directs them to a laptop in front of the preacher in the middle of the sermon.  Preachers claim that this improves their preaching by putting them in dialogue with the congregation.  Congregants like it because they can ask questions about the sermon and the fact that they don’t have to publicly ask “dumb” questions.

While I can see the advantage of such a dialogue with members, I have a few reservations about the practice, which are as follows:

1) One of the pastors interviewed in the article said, “It gives me a little more of a teaching role,” he said. “It gets back to Jesus Christ and the Sermon on the Mount where I picture Jesus having a conversation with the people. With texting, it becomes much more of a dialogue.”  My greatest concern is that our preaching becomes more teaching than preaching.  While this might help pastors reach the majority of worship attendees do not attend educational opportunities outside of worship, I still think that teaching is fundamentally different than preaching.  Teaching is the time when we learn about things we don’t know, when we ask the questions, and wrestle with things from different perspectives.  On the other hand, preaching is the time when we listen to God’s word.  The preacher’s role is not to do a Bible study, but to tell the people their own stories in a way that they begin to see God’s living presence in their own lives.  It should be less analytical and more experiencial.  I also question what this approach does for the fluidity and focus of a sermon, and what people hear in it.

2) An obvious concern is the reality of distraction.  How many of the people are actually truthfully texting about the sermon?  More importantly, I feel this makes us more apt to talk rather than listen.  Typing on a phone requires some concentration, which is taken from the content of the sermon, removing people from the experience being shared by the preacher.  Rather than spending our time listening to what God has to say to us, we are the one’s talking, expecting God to answer.  By no means am I saying we should never ask questions, but that there are more appropriate times for that, and that the sermon is a time to listen to God’s Word.

3) I imagine that this form of asking questions is preferred by a lot of people because they feel ashamed of their questions.  Although it is important that people feel comfortable asking the hard questions, prompting people to ask them in this manner encourages this feeling and behavior, rather than helping people know that the Gospel calls them to ask these questions and confess their deep-seated struggles with it.  A lot of the difficult questions that people ask come from profoundly important experiences, and without knowing who asks, it is more difficult to know how best to answer it (or whatever question/issue is really looming beneath it).  This method of questioning removes the relational quality of our faith that is so highly valued among emerging churches, and is means of God’s presence in our lives through one another.

So, in summary, I think it is a nice idea.  I’m glad that churches are trying to engage people and get them to think about sermon, as well as giving people permission to ask the hard questions.  However, I’m not convinced that it is the best way to do it.  I think the much more faithful and meaningful (as well as difficult) approach is to challenge the culture in our congregations and our world that prevents people from doing this naturally through human interaction.  Perhaps the use of text messages would be best left to other areas of the church (as briefly mentioned in the article), such as sharing announcements and reminding people about events, as well as staying in touch while not gathered together.  I welcome your thoughts and comments about this practice of using texting in church.

~Mike