Powerpoint and worship

When I tell people that I work at the intersection of theology and technology I often get these sorts of comments:

• How should we get PowerPoint into our worship?
• So, at the end of all of this study you’re going to build web sites for Jesus?
• Our church/organization needs a web site, what do you recommend?
• What do you think about EFT-POS machines for offerings and donations?
• How can I set up a prayer e-mailing lists?
• How might we computerize church membership management?
• What media and internet technologies are best for marketing, teaching, evangelizing…?
• Other stuff about online shops, blogs, and wireless internet in church

There are a lot more comments and questions, but each of these come up fairly regularly. What I find is often missing in the discussion that follows about technological application within the church environment is a sense of context. There is the underlying assumption that the use of these sorts of (digital) technologies in inherently good, or at least something that needs to be done in order to keep up with the world around us. Reflection upon the nature and role of the church and its call to worship intersects with these technologies doesn’t seem to be on the agenda at all.

The Powerpoint comment is a good example. If presentation software and other audio-visual material used in worship, then I think that important questions that need to be asked include: how does its presence in the worship environment change that environment? What are the ongoing positive and negative effects of reshaping how the people of God structure and represent their worship of God using digital technology? And how is a community’s underlying ecclesiology shaped by the changes?

Certainly, the introduction of printed material into the local church, such as hymn books and pew bibles, reshapes people behave in worship. Likewise, changes in the musical environment reshape what things are considered essential to the heart of a worshipping community. How so then digital media? (I’m still searching for the definitive article that reviews how the overhead projector reshaped Christian worship.)

What is missing, I think, in much of the adoption of digital media in church worship context (which conveys messages through both content and style), is the critical application of that technology. Sometimes digital technologies like presentation software are an extremely powerful and helpful tool within the worship context. At other times they aren’t. For example, sometimes a notice, event or sermon example can be illustrated well using a video clip, and at other times the flesh and blood testimony of a person involved might be best. Discerning the appropriate time to use these different media and modes isn’t always present, though.

Following a link off swords to plowshares I came to the following article in The Christian Century (July 25, 2006) about just these sorts of questions.

See The Christian Century - PowerPointless: Video screens in worship by Debra Dean Murphy. She comments,

And so questions beg to be asked. In regard to the increasing use of PowerPoint in churches of all shapes and sizes it is worth pondering: What understanding of the purpose of worship does it assume? What are the personal and communal tendencies it encourages? What sort of culture does it create? What kind of people does it produce? If Christians believe that the church and the worship it offers to God ought in some ways to counter the norms and practices of the surrounding culture, then what does it mean that after spending so much of our time each week in front of computer monitors, cell phones, and sports bar TVs, we come to church on Sunday and happily position ourselves in front of the biggest screen of all?

Like Murphy in her paper, I’d like to see the technologists and those wise in worship leading to be working together in this. The critical and theological understanding of those who seek to bring the people of God into a place and attitude of worship combined with technological aptitude seeking glorify God.

I’m not against the use of digital technologies in worship and the church, just the assumption they’re inherently good, and their uncritical application.

Related links:

• Greenflame · Presentation software and rules
• Greenflame · PowerPoint Is Good/Evil