For most of the year, our church sanctuary is empty of ornamentation, a spare space that reflects the traditional Protestant suspicion of Roman Catholic iconography and a desire to focus the worshiper's attention on the Word of God. At Christmas, though, the usual austerity goes out the window as wreaths, banners, Nativity figures and decorated trees enter our worship space. Quite suddenly, our services are filled with color and visual stimulation. This transformation is always rather eye-popping, but I believe it can be justified because we Presbyterians, like other Christians, believe that God made himself visible at Christmas in the form of Jesus.
 
But aside from the sights of this particular season, I've noticed a striking new trend in Christian worship in general: It is gradually becoming more and more visual, and far less word-centered. In contrast to the days when spoken services were punctuated only by hymns, and sermons challenged the congregation with complex concepts and intense concentration on "the Word," growing numbers of Protestant churches are now using PowerPoint presentations -- complete with music and dramatic slides -- to illustrate sermons and capture some of the wandering minds in the pews.
 
My friend Sue Brantlinger, a member of Christ United Methodist Church in Fairfax Station, tells me that her church has two large screens at the front of the sanctuary, which the pastor uses to show movie clips at the beginning of his sermons and allow the choir to project close-ups of singers. The screens also display lyrics so that people will look up when they sing -- instead of gazing down into their hymnals. "The first week I was there, it felt really different," says Brantlinger, who grew up attending a traditional Lutheran church in Ohio. "But it grew on me, and now I really like it. I feel a closer connection to God in the service." Like so many congregations that have begun to use contemporary worship -- including religious dramas and projection technology -- Christ UMC is a young, growing church with packed Sunday morning services.
 
By emphasizing the visual over the spoken, churches are undoubtedly attracting more members, and I celebrate this growth. But at the same time, a flashier form of faith does threaten to distract people from the voice of God -- a voice that speaks most clearly in the quiet stirrings of the heart. While I am not opposed to the use of visual aids, I worry when high-tech worship leans more toward entertainment than toward encounter with God. On the positive side, pictures can evoke powerful emotions and deepen understanding. "Multimedia in worship is much like the stained glass windows of the churches of the Middle Ages," says Peter Young, a member of Fairfax Presbyterian who leads a team that now provides monthly contemporary worship at our church. "The windows added color and painted a picture of the scriptures that worshipers could focus on to learn Bible stories." He reminds me that if a pastor wants his sermon to be remembered, he needs to appeal to all the senses.
 
Multi-sensory worship. What a shock this would be to Protestant reformers such as Martin Luther, who stressed that "faith comes through hearing." Luther was deeply critical of the icon-filled Catholic Church of his day, which he believed failed to proclaim the message of the Bible. He translated the Bible into the vernacular so that people could hear the Gospel for themselves, and he emphasized the important role of preaching in leading people to faith. In many ways, this Lutheran approach has governed Protestant theological education for centuries, and it certainly shaped me in the early 1980s. I took numerous seminary courses in the Bible and preaching, but none in the use of images or multimedia in worship.
 
Luther notwithstanding, the Roman Catholic Church has consistently affirmed the value of art in Christian worship. According to J. Wilfrid Parent, vice rector of Mount St. Mary's Seminary in Emmitsburg, Md., many Catholic churches contain statues, paintings and other beautiful objects because "we believe that when God became a human being in Jesus Christ, he revealed to us that there is something fundamentally good about human sense experience." For Parent and others, religious art does not get in the way of a personal relationship with Christ, but helps worshipers relate to someone who walked the earth as a flesh-and-blood human being.
 
Protestants are beginning to appreciate the value of religious art -- Wesley Theological Seminary, a Methodist school in the District, now has a working art studio -- and this is a sign of healthy convergence with Catholic Christians. But at the same time, there is a negative side to this issue that should not be ignored. Expensive visual art takes money that could -- and often should -- be used to help the poor. This is true whether you use church offerings to buy hand-carved statues or high-tech projection equipment. I also worry that too many video clips and spinning PowerPoint presentations can turn worship into a spectator event, instead of an activity that encourages personal involvement with God. The jury is still out on whether visual aids increase or decrease the attention span of people in the pews, but I'm concerned that listeners are losing their ability to stay focused through spoken messages that require 15 or 20 minutes to make their point.
 
Perhaps the key is striking a new balance between word and image in this icon-driven age. Bob Kaylor, the pastor of Park City Community United Methodist Church in Park City, Utah, tells me that he once did a whole sermon on living life with a deeper perspective, using 3-D slides. At the appropriate time in the service, the members of the congregation were given 3-D glasses to view the slides as he made the point that we need to move toward a fuller vision of life. "I don't do that sort of thing often," he says, "but it was extremely effective." I can certainly appreciate that the use of 3-D would memorably illustrate what it means to catch a new vision.
 
Ministers do need to be creative in their methods of communication, using fresh anecdotes and imagery, just as Jesus did, without compromising the richness of the biblical message. Jesus was a master at using verbal pictures to make his points, whether he compared the kingdom of heaven to a mustard seed, a treasure, a merchant or a net thrown into the sea.
 
Though it goes against hundreds of years of tradition in the Protestant churches, and despite my concerns, I do recognize that "Show, don't tell" is an old writing rule that we religious leaders need to keep in mind as our culture becomes increasingly image-oriented. I was reminded of this on a recent Sunday, when I discovered that I was preaching on the very same Scripture text I had used three years earlier, during my first sermon at the church. I asked the congregation if they remembered that Scripture, and they laughed -- no one did, of course. But then I reminded them that I had brought some stones with me that day, and had built a dry stone wall during worship to illustrate the kind of church we needed to be: One that was made up of "living stones" that could stand together and also shift together.
 
They remembered the stones, but not the particular Scripture of the day, or even my specific preaching points. The image remained, long after the words were forgotten. While this may seem a shame to those who focus only on texts, for me it was at least a partial victory. Knowing how quickly words can be forgotten, I was glad that the memory of my "living stones" had survived almost three Christmas seasons. It may be that longevity, rather than complexity, is the gift of an increasingly visual faith -- and this is a trade-off I'm willing to make, as I continue to search for new ways to make God visible to my people.

© 2003 The Washington Post Company

Henry Brinton is pastor of Fairfax Presbyterian Church.

Author's e-mail: hgbrinton@aol.com

Link to Henry Brinton's Washington Post Articles Index Page

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