Ten Strategies for Preaching in a Multimedia Culture

Rating:
Summary: Good quick-read resource for some fresh ideas in preaching
Review: In a brief and user-friendly way Tom Troeger offers insight to pastors seeking to engage their congregations in creative ways that move beyond traditional concepts of what a sermon should be.

His opening chapter presents a reminder that even the gospels were written with a specific direction in mind to tell the story to a particular community, in such a way that the audience would receive the most benefit and understanding from the Word. As times change, so do the most effective and creative ways of communicating the good news. Stained glass windows, large cathedrals, native language translations of the Bible, hymns written to familiar secular tunes, all are different ways of communicating God's story and responding to the movement of the Holy Spirit.

Troeger gives us ten examples he has used to meet the needs of Christians seeking to hear a story that relates to their world today. He does this by briefly presenting a strategy and offering an example from his own preaching life. In a chapter entitled Assume There Is More to the Story, preachers are encouraged to imagine in greater detail the events surrounding a particular Bible story or passage. He uses the wedding feast at Cana based on John 2:1-11. "And I would like to think that when the celebration was over and the couple left for their honeymoon and the guests had departed, that some friend or family member of the couple, poured the wine that remained into smaller containers and corked them, and when the couple returned, presented them with several crates of wine. 'Here this is the wine the rabbi from Nazareth supplied. I thought you might like to have it for special occasions.'" Other strategies involve playing with a biblical image by creating a drama, writing a sermon like a movie script, playing a game and using the outcomes as a message, and listening for muffled voices in a text, among several others.

There is a brief conclusion that focuses on how to develop your own strategies.

Rating:
Summary: The Master's Tools
Review: Thomas H. Troeger's "Ten Strategies for Preaching in a MultiMedia Culture"
reminds us that we have not always had sound systems or organs or stained glass or even
churches! Before all of these things, in the beginning, was the Word. This Word lives
and fires our imaginations and in his view and we ought to not be afraid to reimagine not
only the way scripture is presented, but the scriptures themselves! We must, as preachers,
"hold the openness of the Spirit and the strenuous work of human thought and creation
together - this is no easy task." (8)
Troeger reminds us that the Word isn't confined to a book. Indeed, putting the
New Testament down in writing had the adverse affect of codifying, solidifying, then
justifying centuries of abuse against women, of promoting slavery and bigotry because
the scriptures, instead of the Gospel, became normative for the Christian Community. So
part of the undoing of this legacy is to move away from Scripture, staying close to the
intent while reimagining the content. After all, even within the Gospels themselves the
Good News was modified to the culture of the hearers of each Gospel. "Far from
rejecting the Bible," Troeger states, "we are becoming more biblical by employing the
creative interpretative process which runs through scripture and the history of the
church." (9)
The way the faith was taught and transmitted also changed over time to make it
contemporary for its hearers. Early preachers learned classic Greek/Roman rhetoric to get
their message across. Preachers in the Middle Ages copied gestures from popular
religious works of art. Televangelists told us to put our hands on the television and feel
the power! "Given that the Protestant Reformation was born of a vernacular Bible and
printing press, how is it possible to be a Protestant in a world in which three kinds of
media (text, audio, and video) are converging into one new mixed genre, multimedia?" he
asks. (13)
And then, like Donald Rumsfeld, he answers his own question with his ten
strategies for preaching in a multimedia culture. The Ten Strategies are:

1. Assume there is more to the story. Take a text an faithfully embellish to
breathe more life into it - see it from a different point of view.
2. Create a parable. Have it enacted, even, in the sanctuary.
3. Play with an image. Use works of art; plays, to jar folks from complacency.
4. Write the sermon as a movie script. "Jesus' parables worked in his culture the
way movies do for us today. They provide a memorable narrative that can be passed on
and retold again and again." (48)
5. Use a flashback. Use the power of remembering and creating new stories with
historical characters.
6. Reframe a sacrament. Look at a sacrament from a different point of view, put
it in a different context.
7. Let a little child lead you. "The elemental simplicities of children open us to
wonder, to faith, to the recognition of how tiny and frail we are before this vastness of
creation." (75)
8. Play a game. The power of play to transform and engage is real.
9. Listen to the muffled voices. Images and stories on TV are homogenous - the
same news stories, the same sound bites, etc. Troeger stops short of naming why
(because most are owned by a handful of big companies that benefit from the world being
seen through their lenses) even though I think he would agree. But before we judge,

remember how we do this with the Bible, too with our use of the lectionary. So put
yourself in a situation to stand with the oppressed to bring it home to people that how the
world is presented to them blinds them from seeing suffering and injustice. The rape of
Tamar isn't in the lectionary. 'Nuff said.
10. Compare translations.

In "South Park: The Movie" we find out that only members of a certain
denomination wind up in heaven. They are shown there with halos and wings and one
says to another: "What shall we do now?" And the other answers "I know, let's put on a
play about how stealing is bad." And they all go off to produce their play. As much as I
am down with Troeger's gutsy stance on moving away from the (received) scriptures as a
primary source of revelation and toward the Word-fired imagination as the new primary
source, this South Park scene sums up my disappointment in his presentation of
alternatives to the tried and true sermon. His sermons and plays and games and all are
well-written and quite moving, but the forms of presenting his reimaginings have been
around for quite awhile. The cover of the book shows microchips, but the forms inside
are more like CHiPs: straight outta the 70's. More spoken words? Plays? Games? It
seems to me that if we are going to preach to a multimedia culture, then we ought to use
multimedia to reach that culture. Where are the computers, the video screens, the
hardware and software tools? Troeger takes his great, multi-media imagination and then
plugs it back into a teletype machine, a disconnect at best.

Rating:
Summary: Using Scripture in an Effective Manner
Review: Troeger provides 10 innovative strategies for presenting Scripture in a contemporary context. These ideas not only are engaging for the congregation as they see them unfold, they also incorporate the congregation in participation with in the Scripture texts. The congregation becomes a part of the Scripture texts as they perform it and engage the text as part of it. These ideas do not cost anything and yet bring new life to Scripture using current issues and concepts.