We live in an entertainment-crazed society, one where people get more excited about the next big blockbuster coming out of Hollywood than about church on Sunday morning. The solution, many say, is to change the church to appear more "friendly" and exciting. One solution has been the incorporation of video projectors into the sanctuary (or multi-purpose room) of a church (or "worship center"). The idea is that, since so many people these days are visually-oriented, the only way to communicate to this type of person is through video projection. So to accommodate to this emerging form of learning we make sure that a video projector is present. In Preaching magazine (May-June '05), Michael Duduit observes the following:

As churches seek to communicate with new generations that are increasingly visually-oriented (and less and less literary), many have discovered the power of a visual image in communicating divine truth. That's one reason why the most consistent trend of contemporary church architecture is the presence of projection screens - we may or may not include a pulpit in a new church, but almost every new worship center has one or more (usually more) screens for use in projecting visual images. (italics mine)

What does this suggest about the nature of the "contemporary" movement in the evangelical world? Does the replacement of the pulpit with a video projection system indicate a shift in principle as well as approach? Is the church's answer to the multimedia bombardment from Hollywood a removal of one of God's primary ordained methods of communicating truth - the spoken word - and replacing it with an inferior form of communication that all too much resembles the world? Maybe Duduit is not suggesting, or even observing, that churches need to forsake the spoken word. But is this not what seems to be taking place in contemporary evangelicalism? Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems as though our emphasis has shifted from the Word of God to anything that might appear as "relevant."

More on this issue to come.