The Value of Visual Worship
We Live in A Visual World
But Worship Mostly with Sound
Often our worship traditions are based on state-of-the-art thinking or at least what was state-of-the-art decades or centuries ago. Unfortunately, traditions sometimes become so embedded that we don’t realize that the reason we did things the way we did them 50 or 100 years ago is that this was the best we could do with the tools available at the time.
Stained-glass windows served an educational purpose in the Middle Ages when few could read and the worship service was conducted in Latin for people who didn’t speak Latin (another example of tradition outliving any value by centuries). Window artisans outnumbered printers back then. Other way around today!
In the New World, we kept creating stained glass windows because they were the state of the art in the lands of our heritage. They are still beautiful but they are a bit limiting. Our visual expectations are much different today. And while some traditions (Orthodox, for example) value meditation on imagery, that has never caught on in other denominations. We like our attention focused on pageantry.
There was a time when hymnals were the church bulletin. A church bulletin from the 1950s typically had little but a the bared-boned order of worship. No one expected much from a mimeograph machine. (I used to watch my preacher father make the stencils and attach them to the cylinder and crank away.)
Around this time church publishers realized they could add to the visual experience by publishing colored bulletin shells with an ad for a national church program on the back. (Designing them was my job back in the 1980s.) By this time, the mimeograph had been mothballed and photocopying became the norm.
By the late 1990s, color laser printing became more affordable and available. New printers could handle different sizes of paper, too. Many churches realized this is something they could manage without purchasing the shells. There goes a source of revenue for the national church!
Despite new possibilities, almost no churches are exploring the development of the church bulletin as a worship/teaching tool. (Redeemer was doing this!)
We live in a visually driven era. How things look makes a difference in how we learn, think and make decisions. Worship, however, still focuses on the ear. When churches say they are holding a contemporary worship service it usually extends no further than the choice of music. Everything else is right from the Middle Ages.
We’ve lived through the age of architecture being the visual communicator, to black and white printing, to pre-formatted color printing to the capabilities of custom-color printing and the exciting medium of the internet which encompasses word, image, and sound with unlimited potential and practically no cost! Really, no church has to print a bulletin anymore. Members can pull them up in cost-free living color on their smart phones or pads! But we are still telling people to turn them off during worship instead of using them to enhance worship!
Traditions are the priority. As far as visuals go, we are still preaching in Latin!
It’s time to consider how to communicate and express ourselves visually.
We worship the God who created the rainbow.
That’s why 2×2 features collections of images to accompany worship. It’s the tip of an iceberg!
Here’s a link that discusses the power of the visual in our decision-making today.