What's Your Answer?

The year 2017 marks 500 years since Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to a door in Wittenberg. So, what should 500 years since the Reformation mean to the Church? When 500 years have passed, it means it is time for the Church to reexamine its theology and communication structure. What convinced me of this was simply asking why we do church the way we do and what that communicates. However, answering this question left me asking another, and that is one that I will ask you. If it is time for the Church to reexamine its theology and the communication theory behind its structure: What should that mean to a communications major, or really any student, studying to be a church leader at Moody Bible Institute?All of us, as students in this place, have a unique education and role in the church. You have a responsibility to the bride of Christ to consider well every choice you make and to know why you choose what you do. Every consideration begins with questioning. While I am writing directly to my fellow students, these concepts apply to all believers, because in Christ we all are part of the body. Even if you are reading this and are not a Moody student, nor someone who will ever have the responsibility to make decisions for your local church, you have a responsibility to care for, support and challenge those people in your local church body. So, with that in mind, if the saying “history repeats itself” is true, we’d do well to examine ours to see what light it sheds on our present and informs what questions we should be asking about our future. Five hundred years is simply a long time for any idea to go unquestioned and unchallenged. We need to dust off some of the ideas we have and see if they are still relevant to people today, because people today have different life experience than people 500 years ago. Hold that thought, it's important, but I’m going to fill in some blanks and come back to it.Unless you’re a Communications major, you probably have not been introduced to communication theory or thought about what it is or why it's important, so let me catch you up on a few key concepts (even if you’ve had class with Kammerzelt, I’ll just refresh your memory). First, we’ll define communication theory simply as the science that seeks to answer the question of how an idea gets from one person to another. Basic? Yes, but sufficient for now. If the church’s function is to get an idea to people, it’s fair to assume that asking how that happens is something those training to be church leaders should do, right?The first step in this practice of “asking how communication works” is to understand there are in fact theories on such matters, and that these theories differ. What you most likely think of as "communication" is called the transitional model. The view you haven’t thought of as communicating is called ritual. To these theories, add the concept of the interrelationships between social structure, technology and culture (example of what that looks like). When choosing what kind of communication to use, such as transmitional or ritual, or what kind of technology, culture or social structure to cultivate, the church should always seek to make those choices which take into consideration the person to whom it is communicating to, right? After all, “the most important kind of medium used for purposes of communication is the person involved in the communication process" (Kraft 117). The person is what is valuable to God in this process, and people come into the communication process with infinite variables of experience. Now, remember those thoughts while we briefly examine our history. As promised, I am returning to the fact that people today have different life experiences than those who first were impacted by Luther’s 95 Thesis. Five hundred years later, our brains have been rewired and our culture changed. If you don’t know what that looks like realistically, go watch and read any of the following:

• Is Google Making Us Stupid?
• Technology is Killing our Churches
• Growing Up Online
• Digital Nation
• Consumer Culture

Essentially, these articles describe how we relate to one another, what we hold in common value, what we worry about has all been impacted. But more on that later. For now, understand that our very brains are wired differently by the types of technology we use.   Yet, while our brains are being rewired, the structure of the church is stagnant, and what’s worse, what change there is hasn’t been intentional.The Reformers, with Martin Luther at the forefront, were the last church leaders (who also happened to be students) to question how church was done. This questioning caused the first significant change in the structure of the church since Constantine declared Christianity the official religion of Rome. The reformers questioned the role of monasteries, the mass, pilgrimages, clergy hierarchy, the Pope, confession and the councils of bishops in the church. They implemented new ideas of baptism and communion, music and hymns, and the role of Scripture and the sermon. When taking the role of Scripture and the sermon for a closer case study, it is easy to see how for an illiterate people, the change was to engaging them intellectually by teaching orally the content of Scripture in their own language (MacCulloch 15-30). What the reformers did through their changes to the structure of church was inviting believers to participate and to be involved. Ultimately, these changes honored the individual's ability to think for themselves and aided them in their seeking for meaningful faith. It invited them to understand their faith in a new and personal way.If that is what the structure of the church communicated 500 years ago, what is it saying today? Consider, for example, a modern church. What do you think of? When you walk in, there is a large room with rows of chairs facing a stage. First, a few songs are played while the offering is collected. Then, during the prayer the band transitions off the stage, someone does announcements and the majority of the time is spent listening to a sermon. When the sermon is over there may be another song and a reminder of “upcoming events” for members to attend. People then file out, some leaving the building directly, some loitering and talking to one another for even as much as 15-30 minutes. This is the typical structure of a modern church, but other Protestant services aren’t drastically different. In the songs and music, the sermon, role of art, baptism and communion, the theology and social structure described can be traced to what was designed during the Reformation.Another concept of communication theory is that every medium we use (print, television, architecture etc.) is naturally biased to communicate in a different way. Neil Postman gives the classic example of the difference between how a printed book is biased toward education and television is biased toward entertainment in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death (which is a highly recommended place to start studying communication theory). Over time, the structure of the church has unintentionally absorbed the technology and cultural changes.Remember back to my statement that our brains are wired differently now than people’s 500 years ago? (If you didn’t do so above, you really, really should go read this article.) See, the rewiring of the brain mentioned has to do with the bias of the different mediums, or technologies, we use. The iphone has a tendency to isolate, to turn the individual toward themselves. Consider the high trends of suicide, social anxiety and depression we have seen in recent generations. Such trends are the result of the interrelationship between the technology, culture and social structures of our day. When you look at the church, you might ask how sitting in chairs and staring at the backs of people’s heads helps engage the believer relationally with other believers. The field of marketing and advertising has taught us to be a culture of consumerism: To consume is to use based on convenience and personal preference and then throw away when no longer convenient. Corporations like Apple and Starbucks are asking the question of how to get an idea across to people and the idea is the marketing of identity. When you look at the church, you can see how an hour a week of attending and consuming the information from a sermon isn't a structure that lends itself well to being a place where people can be known, and in being known by the children of God be taught what it means that their identity is a child of God. Why trade what the broader culture identifies with for something that is equally unsatisfying? These are some specific examples of how the mentality of church as a “service” has a natural bias toward making the 2017 believers passive consumers of their faith instead of engaged participants. Our current church structure is influenced by consumer culture and is one that does not engage the believers well intellectually or relationally. If this is true, then why have we not changed the structure of the church? Should not the church be the most adaptable social structure due to servant leaders instead of those who seek to maintain power? Media theorist Marshall McLuhan suggests a theory that shows that the structure of the church isn’t even something we, church leaders or believer, can even see. Our environment is invisible to us. Don’t follow? Consider how we use the word “church.” We imagine the specific building and the “service” mentioned above. You may even have heard of someone who missed church instead listening to the Podcast of the sermon as though that somehow qualified for their once-a-week (use of) church, suggesting that we consider three songs and a sermon in isolation church. Yet, we know the opposite of this to be true. The church is not a collection of communication mediums in a set pattern. The definition I'd suggest instead is that the church is ‘the gathering of believers under the leadership hierarchy described in the New Testament.’Postman states the concept we see at work here with poignancy when he says,  “when a method of doing things becomes so deeply associated with an institution that we no longer know which came first-- the method or the institution-- then it is difficult to imagine alternative methods of achieving its purposes” (Postman, Technopoly 142-143). The truth is, most of our "methods" have only been around for 500 years. They can and should be altered when they are no longer best serving the bride of Christ, but the institution was instilled by God himself to communicate the truth of who he is to his creation.    The structure of the church is the most significant and most overlooked communication tool Christians have. Nearly all of the New Testament is devoted to describing principals behind what the structure of the church should and shouldn’t look like. The theology of the church directly informs its structure. Note how during the Reformation, the theological claim “Sola Scriptura” put the Bible at the center of the church pulpit. Theological presuppositions and communication bias in church structure have an unavoidable interrelationship. Which should leave us asking, How does God communicate with people? This is a question church leaders should never cease to be asking or attempting to answer, but a very simple, basic truth is that God always values and engages the hearts of individual people. From the Father walking with Adam and Eve, to Jesus turning away the large miracle seeking crowds, to the Holy Spirit indwelling believers, the Triune God’s primary concern in communication is always the heart of the individual person. God communicates in such a way that a person has to seek, question and thoroughly involve themselves in the process. In other words, “the most important kind of medium used for purposes of communication is the person involved in the communication process (Kraft 117).” Remember? That idea is why we needed the brief history lesson to begin with, because it is something we've forgotten. When looking at the history of the structure of the church, one thing should be clear: It was carefully designed to speak to people living in the year 1517, not the people of 2017. So while we celebrate our past next year, we should take care in considering our future. In the past, how did the Reformation begin? With Martin Luther’s personal experience. When Luther’s experiences didn’t align with what he saw, he began questioning the church’s theology and structure. When he voiced this, other people could identify because they had similar experiences (if you have had class with Kammerzelt you’ll recognize the “me too” moment concept here). Their questions revealed truths about how God had created people in relation to himself. This informed how they structured the church. Certainly, anyone who has studied the reformation knows that mistakes were made, but tragic as they are, these mistakes join with those in the Old Testament and those that will be in 2017 and together they tell the story of the faithfulness of a perfect God to depraved humanity and that should dispel our fear of failure and free us to ask and answer as we seek to better know and communicate the character of our God. My own answer to the question raised at the beginning of the article is this: Our responsibility to the bride of Christ as Moody students, church leaders and believers is to ask questions before the God who has the answers.  So now, the most important question is left: If the above is my answer, what’s yours?

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So, what could this look like practically?

Provided here are links to examples of Creative Nonfiction work, a medium that shares true stories of individual's experiences. These stories raised the questions below:Why has Apple and Starbucks spoken louder to people about their identity than Christian theology?  -Emma McCashen Why are believers more invested in the Cubs game than the church? -Lisa Burnham What do you say to a believer who is suicidal?  -Austin SavageWhat should my relationships with other believers look like? -Lisa BurnhamWhen I end up in dark places, was I not listening to the Holy Spirit? -Laura PiperNow, that you’ve seen some examples, I’m asking you to do the same. Consider your own experiences, your own struggles, dissatisfaction with life or the church, your own doubts and form them into questions. Ask those questions of one another and imagine what the answers could mean to the way we do church.Moody Students: Right outside of Sweeting 410 there is a place for you to post your inquires and contribute to Moody's very own 95 Queries.Once you’ve done so, engage in conversations with others about your experiences, your questions and ask them theirs.

Bibliography

Fortner, Robert S. Communication, Media, and Identity: A Christian Theory of Communication. Plymouth: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007.  

Kraft, Charles H. Communication Theory for Christian Witness. Nashville: Abingdon, 1991.

MacCulloch, Diarmaid. The Reformation: A History. New York: Penguin Books, 2003.

McLuhan, Marshall. The Medium is the Massage. N.p.: Penguin Books, 1967.

Ministry Media Matters 

Postman, Neil. Amusing ourselves to death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York: Penguin Books, 1986.

Quiggle, Greg. "The European Reformations." Moody Bible Institute, Class notes, Spring 2016.

---. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. Toronto: Knopf Doubleday, 1993.

Rookmaker, Hans. Modern Art and the Death of a Culture. N.p.: Crossway, 1994. Print.

Postman, Neil, and Charles Weingartner. Teaching as a Subversive Activity. New York: Dell Publishing, 1969.