HWJC? How would Jesus communicate today?
On Tuesday, the Bishop of London, the Right Rev Richard Chartres, delivered a lecture at what is known as the journalists’ church, St Bride. His theme was church communications in today’s environment. Here is some of what he had to say:
Too much of the education of ministers of religion is dominated by learning the communications techniques of the day before yesterday in yesterday’s world. We may be able to write treatises to confute Cardinal Bellarmine but the ability to put a message on a blackberry; to enter the nous-sphere of 18-30 year olds; to produce a two minute video artfully shot with consummate professionalism to simulate the naivety and the believability of a home movie; to deliver a “mighty atom,” a message or a story which gets under the radar and reverberates in the inner spaces of people who are programmed to turn off as soon as you say “I take my text from the Prophet Haggai”; to develop the capacity to interpret the signs of the times through art – all these things should be part of the formation of Christian communicators today.
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At a national level the Church with its 1950’s polity and style is constantly convicted of fidgeting and dithering with an in-house ecclesiastical agenda while the real battle is raging elsewhere. We have invested a huge amount of time and effort in elaborating defensive committee based structures which confuse and inhibit communication.
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We continue to teach and communicate our position as a church by producing reports whose precise level of authority is rarely clear; which read as if they were high table conversations overheard; which treat things on the one hand and one the other at considerable length with the inevitable consequence that even church people in a culture in which pictures and jingles are more eloquent than treatises gather the drift of what the Church is teaching from the tiny gobbet which some journalist is able to smuggle past the sub editors. Almost always there is disappointment on the part of the authors at what they see as the distortion of their work but why do we keep on doing business this way?
There is room on the web for genuine growing conversations at considerable length and depth but formal Church pronouncements need a rather different style and one not so different from the communications of Jesus himself.
Read it all here.
For more about the bishop explore from the link above, and check out the London Internet Church.