wfn.org | Church must reach out to today's culture in new ways, speakers say

[NewsDesk@UMCOM.UMC.ORG]

Jan. 17, 2001 News media contact: Tim Tanton·(615)742-5470·Nashville, Tenn.
10-71BP{015}

NOTE:  Photographs and a sidebar, UMNS story #016, are available with this
report.

SAN DIEGO, Calif. (UMNS) - Communicators in the United Methodist Church must
become more engaged in today's culture and find new ways to show how God is
at work in a hurting, spiritually hungry world.

Two key speakers emphasized that message during the United Methodist
Association of Communicators' annual meeting, Jan. 11-13, in San Diego.

The church has lost its voice to a considerable degree in today's culture
because it has become disengaged from electronic media, said the Rev. Larry
Hollon, top staff executive of United Methodist Communications, based in
Nashville, Tenn. By telling stories about God's transforming power and using
new forms of media, the church can reach people and change lives, he said. 

"We need to know how to begin to express the faith visually and
electronically and in a culture that is desperately in need of healing and
redemption and transforming, empowering love," he said.

Addressing more than 140 people on Jan. 12, Hollon spoke movingly at times
about the opportunity that communicators have for ministry. Communicators
are called to be where God is at work and to give voice to stories that
offer a transforming vision about how life can be different, how meaning is
possible and how all people are children of a loving and caring God, he
said. 

"Stories can change our quality of life," Hollon said. "We live in a
storytelling culture. For 400 years, we've become experts at telling
stories, primarily based upon print communication. But the world has
shifted. Not that we're living print behind, but that today if we are to
tell the stories that make a difference and that change the quality of life,
we need to be telling stories on the Internet, in digital form, in video and
in other visual ways." In the electronic culture, those are the ways in
which younger generations find and use information that changes their lives,
he said.

"We in the church, with the exception of the people in this room, have not
been particularly skilled at doing storytelling in this new way, in this new
culture," Hollon told the communicators. One reason is that the church lacks
vision, but another is that it made the decision 20 years ago to disengage
from telling stories through electronic media, he said.

"It saddens me because we've lost our voice to a considerable degree in the
culture because we made those decisions," he said. "And more, it saddens me
because I regard it as an abdication of responsibility for ministry in this
culture."

The United Methodist Church has been critiquing the culture without engaging
it, and that's not good enough, he said. Jesus met people where they
congregated, and he listened and told stories that led to a new
understanding of God's transforming love, he said. 

"Where else ought the church to be but in places where hurting and
alienation, insecurity and isolation, exploitation and oppression prevent
people from becoming what God intends us to be? And yet we allow the most
powerful communications tools in history to be employed in ways that I
believe are corrosive and destructive," he said, referring to some types of
advertising and other forms of communication that distort reality.

Hollon said he stood by the theme of the upcoming churchwide media campaign,
"Open hearts, open minds, open doors," which has been criticized by some as
misrepresenting the church and sounding hypocritical. That theme is a
statement for the church to live into, he said. 

"If this church were not open to a young person who thought that the world
had closed him out, I would not be here today," he said. A few minutes
earlier, he had described the ridicule he had endured in childhood, when he
was labeled "oil field trash" because of his background.

Communicators in the United Methodist Church must create a vision of what
life can be and of what God promises it to be, he said. The church must give
a message to those who are suffering and in need: "Do not give up. We know a
loving God who cares."

The Rev. Leonard Sweet, an author and futurist, took an in-depth look at
today's culture during a series of three presentations on Jan. 11. Sweet is
the E. Stanley Jones Professor of Evangelism at United Methodist-related
Drew University in Madison, N.J.

The church must develop ministries that are EPIC - experiential,
participatory, image-based and connective, Sweet said. In today's culture,
people collect experiences, whether they're visiting a shopping mall or
watching "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" They want to experience - "taste
and see, for the Lord is good" - rather than only accept something on a
rational, linear level.
 
In every area of life today, a massive shift is under way from the
representational to the participatory, Sweet said. We live in a "karaoke
culture," he said, in which people no longer rely on something to be
represented to them but actually participate themselves. For example, Sweet
cited Web sites that allow music fans to remix popular songs and burn their
own versions on CD, and baseball fans who take their gloves to the game in
the hope of catching a ball. Discipleship, he said, is participatory.
 
Image is everything today, in a world where the word was once king, Sweet
said. Christians should feel at home in an image-based world, but the church
still wants to cling to words.

In discussing connectiveness, Sweet said the individual cannot be original
and different without the sustaining support of a community. "Me needs we to
be," he said.

"Anything that's working today is EPIC," and anything that isn't working is
not, Sweet declared. "We have an EPIC gospel; Jesus had an EPIC ministry."
 
He held up Methodism's founder, John Wesley, as another example. "I think
God raised up John Wesley more for the 21st century than for the 18th,"
Sweet said. 

"Ministry in the 21st century is more like ministry in the first century
than ministry in the 20th century," he said. " ... It is an exciting time to
rediscover the apostolic understanding of ministry." People like Wesley,
Martin Luther and John Calvin understood that and rediscovered the
first-century gospel, he said.

However, he said he sees no future for denominations as they exist today. He
sees a great future for the United Methodist Church not as a denomination
but as a tribe. That means the church must "tribalize" its identity around
ritual, music, images, brands. It must change from being a denomination that
regulates its members to a tribe that provides resources, he said. In a
tribal organization, people know one another's stories, and they share
rituals, rhythms and a connectional identity more than one built on
structures, he said.

Wesley didn't connect people to structures but to other people and to
ministries, he said. "I believe John Wesley was closer to Jesus than anybody
else in the history of the church," he said.

"In many ways, the world is forcing us to come to terms with things that we
have lost in the modern world about what the gospel is," Sweet said. "It's
not about a set of propositions, it's about a relationship with the very Son
of God. Christianity is not about rules and regulations; it's about our
relationship with a Redeemer.

"The recovery of Christianity in the next millennium depends on whether we
can carve ... our ministries into EPIC shape," he said.

Sweet also challenged the communicators to move from a mentality of carpe
diem, or seize the day, to one of carpe manana, or seize the future. The
future is the major time zone in which we live, he said. 

The church, however, is in a catch-up and put-down mode toward today's
culture, when it should be getting ahead of it. "I'm so sick and tired of
catch up, put down, catch up, put down," Sweet said. "What would it mean for
the church of Jesus Christ - as it has in the past - to get ahead of the
world?"

Doing that means reaching out to what Sweet calls the "native culture,"
people born after 1962. Older people, who grew up in a vastly different
world, represent an "immigrant culture," he said.

The native culture is wired differently, he said. "They're not learning like
we learned. Their brains are wired differently than ours." Their brains are
wired by digital technology, through game learning, team learning,
electronic learning, interactive learning. They can't do the
"lecture-drill-test learnings" that were traditional with previous
generations.

"Some of those kids look like they fell into a tackle box," he said. If the
church, which follows a Savior who had pierced hands and feet, can't reach
kids "who have pierced everything ... [then] what's wrong with us?"

"What I hope you're hearing from me today is a call to the church to reach
out to the native culture," he said. People in the immigrant culture must
unlearn some things and relearn others, he said. For example, the immigrant
culture should quit imposing its traditional ideas about learning on the
native culture, he said.

Pop culture is becoming the global culture, but the church has been
unwilling to deal with that and unable to connect with people. Sweet said he
is amazed that the church, which has "the greatest story ever told," has a
problem telling its stories. "The story is absolutely essential," he said.
"The future belongs to the storytellers and the connectors."

One way in which the United Methodist Church is reaching out is through the
new churchwide "Igniting Ministry" campaign. The communicators were given a
presentation on five different concepts that will be used in the media
campaign, which will be rolled out in September.

"It represented the first time the church outside UMCom has seen the five
different expressions of the central theme of the campaign," said the Rev.
Steve Horswill-Johnston, director of the four-year initiative. Last May,
General Conference approved nearly $20 million for the effort.

A planning kit for the campaign will be available in Cokesbury stores and on
the Igniting Ministry Web site (http://www.ignitingministry.org) in March,
he said. The Igniting Ministry Planning Kit will include the advertising
materials plus resources for training local churches on how to be welcoming
congregations.
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