I ran across an article which was just too thought-provoking to leave alone:
For those who don’t want to dive into the whole article, it basically focusses on the exploding market of multimedia and high-tech devices for use in church services.
Now, I’ve been aware of this for a little while. The LDS church recently spent $512 million (IIRC) to build a massive conference center in downtown Salt Lake City replete with state-of-the-art lighting, presentation, and digital recording technology. I’ve heard of other sects spending smaller, but still substantial amounts in order to preserve the attention span of their audiences.
Maybe I’m just a jaded skeptic, but this seems, to me, to be a sign of competition. Churches have noticed their declining numbers (a small percentage of the US self-identified as being non-religious 30 years ago; today, that number is 12-15%), and have to fight to gain the attention of increasingly attention-deficient viewers. Marketing people long ago figured out what attracts and keeps the eyeballs of viewers, and those channels to the primitive parts of our brains are so abused by marketeers that it takes ever more “glam” to keep us glued.
Now we can have presentations webcast, podcasted, burned to DVD and delivered to our doorstep on the weeks we don’t worship. We can ship a sermon around the world, as a friend of mine recently did for me, so that people can sample what worship services are like in our home town before moving or visiting. For around $30,000, the smallest church house can have a multiple-camera rig manned by volunteers which can preserve in order to proselyte.
What does it really buy? It seems as if churches that are jumping on the multimedia bandwagon are growing. Many churches which resist such advances find their congregations in the USA dwindling, or only expanding due to a prodigious birth rate.
Does the price of spreading one’s Good News require a substantial investment in glitz these days? Do you think it’s a case of “adjust or die”? Could it just be a case of “keeping up with the Joneses”? Or could it be that the price of technology has finally dropped to a point where it’s affordable, on a small parish budget, to drop a few bucks to improve the quality of the sermons and music?