Congregation-Fatigue
Congregation-Fatigue. Notice, it’s not ‘congregation-al fatigue.’ We aren’t talking about church attendees who are trying to stop sleeping during the sermon. That’s a different article. The congregation itself is the thing of which there is a tiring. In addition, we shouldn’t think of pastors experiencing burnout; we should think of anyone and everyone who might flag in their willingness to be invested in the serving of, or enduring with, and living amongst the congregation, especially in the gathering of the Lord’s Day assembly. One of the main things people are tired of is being preached to.
Marshall McLuhan said, “We shape our tools, and then our tools turn around and shape us.” This could not be more true than in the case of digitized communication. McLuhan’s and others, like Jacques Ellul’s work on technology’s absolute deference to efficiency, a transition which will continually require a movement from the word to the image, is seminole and has influenced, to some degree, almost everyone who has written on the subject. Both men were Christians. Even though he died in the mid 1990s, Ellul saw the formative power of our technology most at work in its reshaping us into a people who, like Israel in the wilderness, are quick to abandon the word in order to be indulged with the image.
In Romans 1, the Scriptures say that arrogant people desire images and this combines with the abdication of the proper use of language (praise and thanksgiving in this context); consequently, unbelief and sexual immorality run rampant. In addition, pride shows up in an abdication of the proper use of language (praise and thanksgiving). This couples with a desire for images, which then culminates in sexual immorality and idolatry. Sexual immorality isn’t always the tree that needs to be cut down; in this case, it’s the rotten apple.
For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen. Romans 1:21-25
The pattern of desiring the created rather than the Creator runs parallel with desiring copies rather than the original. There is a radical aspect to what we’re talking about . . . as there always is with reformation. While I don’t believe we have to become Luddites, if digital technology has the objectifying and enslaving power all the data seems to suggest it has, then perhaps we need to start softening a little corner of our hearts for the Luddites. I have neighbors who have an ongoing conversation in which the husband says, “I’d like us to consider going off-grid.” The wife then replies, “I’d like more grid.” In light of our conversation, maybe we need to examine what churches toss out in order to make room for grid. Back to the image.
Why is the desire for acquiring images to worship arrogant? Because it is rebellion against God. Ellul says that the injunction to not bow down and worship graven images is preceded by an injunction against making images for ourselves. So what? That means that, as we are told in Exodus 20, our affections will gravitate toward images . . . and simultaneously, away from God. There is an exchange that has always gone on, and is going on in our own day: we do not want a God whose primary medium is word, who commands that we hear, and who refuses to show Himself. We’d much rather a dead image we can see, than a Living Voice we can’t. Remember, our word idol comes from the Greek (εἴδωλον), eidolon, which means an image or appearance. It is inescapable that idolatry is etymologically linked to images.
When we think of the core values of Protestantism, a repudiation of images and simultaneous return to the proclaimed Word is right at the center. That is Protestantism. Ellul said, back in the 70s, that if the Church was not careful, he could foresee a day, in a not-so-distant future, when a new reformation would be needed . . . one that would call the Church, yet again, out of its complex relationship with images and would need to do the work of reformation in order to bring it back to the centrality of the plain old ministry of Word and Sacrament. Most church folk, he argued, will buck against every attempt of reformation as being novel. They will charge it with the obvious truth that those who are calling for a return to the Word from images will be a rebellious minority.
D. Martyn Lloyd Jones would regularly argue that the Church must stay true to its course, which is to keep the proclamation of the Word unadulterated. In the event of preaching, the minister is not just delivering a sermon . . . but he is delivering a sermon TO a specific people. And this is where the congregation-fatigue comes in. Image-based communication, like what happens on most of the internet, accustoms people to communicating with an anonymous audience. This blog post is a great example. I don’t know who will read this. I don’t point my finger at a specific reader and say, “Rachel . . . are you listening?” And while a preacher may not necessarily do that during a sermon anyway, he should be preaching to a specific people. Usually it is his people. And the hearers of the preached Word should not tire of being fed bread through their ears.
Even though he probably never read Jacques Ellul, you can almost hear a shared concern in Lloyd-Jones’ voice. He warned about the difference between preachers who believe they are working on a sermon, but are actually working on essays. These men communicate with the end goal of them being read rather than God being heard. Lloyd-Jones accused these men of forgetting that the congregation was a gathering of men and women with names. Walter Ong and Jacques Ellul would regularly tell us that the speech/hearing event has people with names, not merely audiences. This makes preaching worlds apart from even writing, which is almost always aimed at the anonymous. This is not to disparage writing (obviously), but, it is rather to renew the primacy of preaching. Lloyd Jones, from Preachers and Preaching:
Why go on preaching when people are starving and in need and are suffering? That was the great temptation that came to the Church immediately; but the Apostles under the leading and the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and the teaching they had already received, and the commission they had had from their Master, saw the danger and they said, ‘It is not reason that we should leave the Word of God and serve tables.’
The proclamation of the Word is of such importance, that even significant needs take a back seat to it. If this is true of people, as in Acts, who are hungry and not being treated fairly, how much more is it true of people who are not being entertained? The Church isn’t in danger of wandering from the importance of the proclaimed Word because widows aren’t having their needs met, but because adolescents will start to play with their phone if we don’t keep it short and sweet.
Ellul says that in the desert, the people of God rose up to play and in doing so they rejected the preacher in favor of the image. He cites the French theologian Fernand Ryser, when he says that the children of Israel constructed their image at the expense of the adornments of their ears. Their earrings are melted to make the cow. They starve their ears to feed their eyes. They move from glory to false light, from wine to water. This is compounded even more when we realize that Jeremiah, David, Moses, and Jesus all have unending praise for what happens when the people of God eat the Word of God. When we eat what comes out of God’s mouth, we live. When Moses grinds up the golden calf, spreads it on the water, and forces them to consume it, they get sick. In many churches today, man shall not live on bread alone, but on every image in the public domain that seems to get the point across. “Techinique”, says Ellul, “Turns everything into an image.”
The more increased our dependency on images and digital communication, the more degraded our language becomes. In Lloyd Jones’s day, he and Ellul both warned about the slipstream of jargons and cliches. We are post-cliche. In our day, we have been reduced to grunting and monosyllabic sounds . . . sounds that aren’t even uttered but are represented digitally in image-form. OMG.
Some critics have blamed the Reformation on the printing press. It’s undeniably a major part of the secondary means that the Lord saw fit to use; however, in the Te Deum, there is a line that goes, “When Thou tookest upon Thee to deliver man: Thou didst not abhor the Virgin's womb.” In the same way, God was humble enough to use the printing press. But it has to be noted that the printing press did not single-handedly create the Reformation. One of the greatest and longest-lasting legacies of that movement of God was the faithful preaching of the Word in local congregations all over Europe. Those sermons moved from the live space/time event into a mediated event for us: we access them through writing. But, God-willing, we are inspired from them to return to the primary event of preaching . . . or at least we should be.
Anonymity is a classical tool of propagandists the world over. If it is possible to de-humanize an enemy, then the people will gladly get behind a campaign against them. After all, they aren’t people who have friends over for dinner; they are an axis of evil. They aren’t people with names; they are terror. In a much lesser sense, both pastors and congregants are in danger of losing the plot for why they gather in person. It is absolutely essential that we gather in person at a local level under the authority of local office-holders in the church because that is the real event. That is the assembly. A pastor can ask someone, by name, later in the week, “Judah, did you understand what we looked at on Sunday in Galatians 5?” The real event of gathering in person in order to be preached to is one of the national treasures of the Church. We mustn’t ever trade it in, not for a doubling of audience size if we move to a Zoom platform, and not for all the background music and filters we can employ if we post it to Vimeo. When we see the Lord’s Day gathering as a wholistic event in which the people of God are washed and clothed and invited to eat at God’s table by faith, we should grow in our appetite and attentiveness, not drift off under the heaviness of fatigue. On Sunday, we are let into the future Garden, and we call one another by name.
