DTS Dialogue: Media & Technology In Ministry

October 9, 2008

Mark Yarbrough:
Welcome to DTS Dialogue - Issues of God in Culture. I'm your host, Mark Yarbrough. It's my privilege to serve as the executive director of communication here at Dallas Theological Seminary, and our topic today is Media and Technology.

And I am joined here at the table with some colleagues and good friends, and I would like to introduce those men to you. To my left is Mr. Wayne Walker. Wayne is the director of media production at Dallas Seminary and has been here for five years and oversees a variety of things at the seminary. Wayne, thank you very much for coming today.

Wayne Walker:
Thanks for having me.

Mark Yarbrough:
I really appreciate that. Directly across from me is Don Regier. Don Regier is associate professor of Christian Education and also the director of special projects, which means he does a little bit of everything in a variety of formats and departments. And Don is the seasoned veteran among us, he has been here for how many years, Don?

Don Regier:
Thirty-nine years this week.

Mark Yarbrough:
Thirty-nine years this week. Wow! Congratulations on that. Thanks for your time today. I greatly appreciate it. To my right is Mr. John Dyer. John Dyer is the director of web development at Dallas Seminary and he has been here since 2001.

John Dyer:
2002.

Mark Yarbrough:
2002. Okay. And John has been involved really with the seminary's presence on the web, our website in particular, as well as some of the subsidiary sites that we utilize for online education and things like that. So John, thank you very much for your time today.

John Dyer:
It's a pleasure.

Mark Yarbrough:
In fact, all of you, again, just let me say thanks. Your areas of expertise are felt here at the seminary and really throughout the world, and so I greatly appreciate your time.

Fun topic for us today, media and technology. Obviously, we have some focused questions that we're going to deal with, but it's an enormous topic, enormous topic when you talk about media and technology because it is involved in so many things. It's involved in what we do here at the seminary. Obviously, it is a global communication discussion, it has impacted the church, it impacts all of our lives in many ways.

So what I would love to do is to start off, Don, with a question for you. Again, you are the seasoned veteran among us, and you have seen some great change in regards to media and technology not just here at the seminary, but really throughout the world in your perspective, but how would you open this discussion up since you've been working with media in its various forms for quite some time?

Don Regier:
Well, we've always used media. We have in our archives a letter from C. I. Scofield that he wrote to Lewis Sperry Chafer in 1912, and in that letter he gives him detailed advice about fixing a chart that Lewis Sperry Chafer, who became the founder of Dallas Seminary, had made. He gives him graphic ideas about how to make the chart more understandable and appealing.

We have an article from Dr. Chafer in 1928 in which he says we have fearlessly adopted some 1928 methods of communication here at Dallas Seminary. So we've always used media. When I came here to work 39 years ago, we were really excited about overhead transparencies and 35-mm slides, and that was the media of our day.

John Dyer:
Cutting edge technology at...

Don Regier:
Oh, yeah.

John Dyer:
...the time, right? Okay.

Don Regier:
With an X-Acto knife (Laughter). Yeah.

John Dyer:
Literally cutting edge.

Don Regier:
Right. The use of media in the churches was mostly a Sunday night phenomenon. I remember my dad preaching from the pulpit on Sunday mornings, "Thus sayeth the Lord," but on Sunday nights it was charts strung across the front of our Mennonite Church and it was object lessons, and those were the things you did on Sunday night. Now it's pretty much central to any worship service.

I was in a small town in Kansas this last weekend where media was very much a part of the Sunday morning worship service. And we call it worship technology. There are worship technology magazines, there are worship technology conferences. It has pretty much become a stable part of most of our church services. I know one thing it's done is it has opened up ministry opportunities for people who before didn't have many opportunities to minister. If you couldn't stand in front of people and talk, you pretty much couldn't minister, but now creative people, artists, musicians have all kinds of opportunities they didn't have in the past. So it has really opened up the field of what you can do to serve the Lord.

Mark Yarbrough:
It has changed drastically. I mean...

Don Regier:
Yeah, it's changed.

Mark Yarbrough:
...let's just talk about the change. I mean, you've already referenced things of overheads to – everybody chime in on this one. I mean, what is technology today? How – what does it encompass?

John Dyer:
You know, I was at – I attend Irving Bible Church and a speaker here, Mark Matlock, came to speak on Sunday, and he had everybody open up their cell phones and text message him to sign up to receive text messages throughout the week that would remind us about things that he had spoken about in the sermon. And so it was really terrifying to have to continually think about what he taught and try to actually apply a sermon in our lives during a week. So that was a really different way of experiencing a message.

Mark Discoll and Mars Hill in Seattle has people text message questions related to the sermon, and he will take them live on stage. Without seeing them, the questions will come up live. His staff will put ‘em up on the screen and he'll answer ‘em. He started doing that this spring. I've been listening to his podcast. And just that level of interaction provided by the technology has really changed the way that we teach. And like Don said, someone who might be afraid to raise their hand in a church service could send a text message.

Mark Yarbrough:
Well, Wayne, let's move to you and I want to ask a couple of questions about primary concerns for churches today when they're working with technology. In particular, I want to talk about video because more and more churches are using video, video clips or pre-recorded illustrations, if you will, that are videos that are setups and things like that. I know you do a lot of video production here at the seminary, but you also are involved in your ministry on the side that you work with and consult with churches. What are some of the things that you see going on today and what are some – what is the advice that you would give a church as they're talking about the utilization of video?

Wayne Walker:
Well, I would start out by asking – and I ask churches this all the time – just because you can doesn't mean you should. We have a lot of churches – we have a lot of people in ministry that think that because everybody speaks in the culture of media that we need to immediately integrate it as deep as possible, up to our eyeballs in the church. And in some churches and some cultures, that would not be acceptable.

My degree here at DTS was in cross-cultural ministry because I think it's most important that we be culturally relevant. And in some cultures, even in some small churches and small towns, putting an HP projector and a camera crew, everybody would turn around and leave. So I would say first from video, should you, then as we step into that realm, I think we need to look at some of the latest technology and see how it applies to this facility. First off, podcasting has really changed the way that we distribute media at churches. You know, it used to be it was a wire – we have original wire recordings of Chafer here on campus, and I think there's two wire players in all of Dallas.

We have reel-to-reel, we have half-inch, we have one-inch. We have all kinds of different formats of tape and then we go to video and now we're podcasting it, capture direct to disk to podcast. What that enables us to do is to distribute media in such an authentic and quick way. I mean, we can actually record a service and have it on line for people to podcast and download within an hour, and I've got a lot of churches that are doing that. Some of them will have two or three services and they'll film or record the service and make CDs or DVDs and by the time the people leave the second or third service, they're passing out discs in the lobby. It just enables the distribution of media so much better.

And what that really – how that really changes the church, the local church is it enables them to have a broader impact than just the people that are sitting inside the building. So the first implementation for video and media in church, I think, is just the way that we distribute the content. I think we have the most important message the world has ever heard, obviously, the Gospel of Christ. And how do we distribute that message to people that aren't in the pews?

We've got a lot of people – I've got a neighbor, he's 63 years old, he sits in his living room in a suit with his wife in a new dress, she gets all dressed up with makeup and her hair done so they can sit in front of their computer and attend church. He's got MS and he doesn't feel comfortable walking and stumbling in front of people, so he attends church in his living room watching it live on the Web. We have so many people that are attending church in this way, and it enables us to get the message out there to a much broader audience.

I was doing some research back in the fall for a presentation and came across a new Gospel track. You know, for years we've been passing out these little books, and a company has produced a track that is actually on an iPod. It's an animated story of Christ and because it's animated, it's hand-drawn illustrations that they can translate it into multiple languages. So you take a kid – a group of kids to Mexico for the summer, they get the Spanish version and on a video iPod they're basically sharing the Gospel presentation and it's being translated into languages all around the world.

The use of technology to spread the most important message the world has ever heard. Now, as we take that in a church and we say now, how do we implement technology to make what we do better or more effective, that's where we get into the use of presentation media, we get in the use of video clips, we get in the use of animations ____ and all these charts and how do we dig deeper into the word and how do we explain it to a visual culture and visual society? And that's where we often can step on our own toes, we can embrace technology that's not ready to be embraced, but also we can be very effective.

Like Don was saying earlier, we can take people who have an amazing gift in creativity and allow them to use that for the glory of God. They can step in, you know, design beautiful websites, create awesome illustrations, create animations on the screen that can really bring together the life of Christ and bring the stories and the maps of Paul's missionary journeys and charts and illustrations to really bring the Gospel to life.

Mark Yarbrough:
Right.

Wayne Walker:
I think we also can step on our toes in a lot of ways. Obviously, copyright's a big pet peeve of mine, copyright violations particularly. And, again, it's kinda just because you can doesn't mean you should.

Mark Yarbrough:
Right.

Wayne Walker:
You know, a church copyright is not a gray area and a lot of people live as though it is. And it's very specific to law and the way it's legally written. And I know a lot of facilities who are really doing a great job in maintaining integrity in what they do and I know a lot of facilities that are not and could care less. You know, without going into specifics, and we're not here to give legal advice, but the law says that – CVLI says you can use it. That doesn't mean you can copy it, that doesn't mean you can rip it, that doesn't mean you can pull a clip off and throw it up on the screen without written and paid for permission licenses. And churches claim fair use, which applies to educational institutions; it does not apply to churches. And they step on a lot of toes.

And in the way that we implement technology, we can do it in such a way that we actually ruin the name, we ruin the name of Christ. We do it in an unethical way. I was at a church one time – I used to work at a church and lead a big media team and after church I had a copyright attorney come up to me and say I know you didn't have permission for those graphics because my client created those. That's a copyright violation and I will never attend this church again. True story. And it really just smacked me in the forehead of, "You know what? We lost the opportunity to minister to that guy because we just stole from him." And it's a huge issue.

Mark Yarbrough:
Yeah.

Wayne Walker:
It's a huge issue...

Mark Yarbrough:
Don't you...

Wayne Walker:
...when you get into technology.

Mark Yarbrough:
...think that especially early on with – when technology, this kind of technology and the ability to utilize video and graphics in a more aggressive manner, when it kinda hit the market to where the end user was more proficient and could do it, in other words a layperson, if you will, could learn how to do this and utilize this, there was such a flurry of activity and excitement and there were new resources coming out and how you could – you know, you could rip a video down and use the portion of it that people just almost lost all sense of whoa, whoa, it's not just, you know, the issue of should I, but even is this legal? Is it right? Is it ethical? All of these kinds of questions.

Because you're right. I mean, it was a real big discussion even in some of the more progressive churches. It was almost after the fact. It was catching up three or four years down the road after all this was being done because I can remember for years you'd see sermons start and you had all of these video clips that were being utilized and now we're looking back at all that going we know that wasn't right. We didn't have permission to use all that. Now, were they great teaching points? Yes, you know, without question. I mean, were they very strategic? Yes. Did it make a point? Yes. But was it right? No, you know.

And, I mean, so now I think you hear a lot of dialogue about this question of intellectual property rights and how to do this legally. That – let's just – let's hone in on that discussion just for a second. We'll come back to resources at the end a little bit, but just on that, do you have any recommendations of if somebody is dealing with just that topic, if they're listening to this discussion and saying hey, whoa, we need to make sure that we're doing this right, where would you send them to even start on this, you know, opening the Pandora's box here to hone in on this topic?

Wayne Walker:
I've heard a lot of really good discussions on copyright, been to some conferences, read some books and emailed a lot of copyright attorneys and spoken to some in person and without a shadow of a doubt they tell me that the media team at a church is usually the most educated in a church when it comes to copyright because they are the ones who have usually done any research. Most people don't do any research they just assume because I can copy it, rip it and steal it, it's legitimate.

And as we look for resources and places to go, I really think a church needs to invest in an attorney to do some research for them because they really need to be protected. There are churches who have been sued, there are tons of case law that shows opportunities where churches have stepped over the bounds and the court system has tried to come in. You know, we had even small copyright issues turn into big ones when you have churches that – you know, you remember a year ago when churches were showing the Super Bowl and charging admissions and the NFL found out and they started shutting down churches from doing that because of NFL licensing and rules. You know, some of those issues.

It – the flip side of this is there's a lot of people, and Don you can speak very well about this, who really believe that if they can't use this one piece of media, this one clip, this video clip, then their illustration's gonna be lost. They lose all creativity because they can't take something creative from somebody else.

Don Regier:
Well, the copyright law was originally written to protect creativity, and that's the beauty of it. I remember chafing under copyright rules when I discovered that it was wrong for us to be stealing pictures and stealing music and putting it together and calling it a music video. I discovered that it was wrong to do that and suddenly I woke up and said, wait a minute. Somebody created that original material in the first place. I bet I could become better at creating original material. And so I worked at that. And rather than allowing copyright law to shut us down, we should allow it to free us to become originators.

Mark Yarbrough:
Wow! That's great.

Wayne Walker:
And you got to think about the guys that are creating this stuff. I know a lot of producers that are producing really great Christian media. Those guys have to buy groceries just like the rest of us and if we're taking their media and spreading it out and sharing it and making copies and ripping it off, those guys the way they minister to the body is through media and so they need to be paid just like everybody else.

Mark Yarbrough:
Yeah. And so what I hear you saying is that, first of all, churches in particular would be wise to, you know, get somebody in their body, and it's probably the person that's already working with technology, and to send them on a little mission to find out and say hey, investigate, do some reading, talk to an attorney. But the reality is, is that if it's original work, you can use original work so that might push us in our creativity. And as the Lord has gifted various ones in the body, maybe that's a great opportunity to utilize resources that are right there sitting in the pew that are attending – and all of a sudden it's a whole new part of the body that is able to utilize what the Lord has gifted them with the ability to do. So that's kind of an exciting thing in and of itself.

Something also that we ought to point out just as a quick division is that there is a difference between what educational institutions can do. We at Dallas Seminary we are an educational institution. We are not the church. And as a para-church organization and as a degree-granting institution, we fall under certain rights as an educational body that we can do things that a local church cannot. Do you want to just briefly make that clear division?

Wayne Walker:
Fair use was actually written for educational institutions just like DTS for schools that want to use media to teach, they want to show a little piece of a video in a classroom or maybe were teaching a class on video editing and we need some video to edit. So if we want to, you know, pull something and edit it, we can. Fair use was created specifically for that. We want to teach a class on Christian art, we want to show pictures of art and not have to ask permission for all of them to put them in PowerPoint, that's what fair use was created for.

Churches are not educational institutions. Although they do educate, by the legal definition they are a religious institution, they're a nonprofit, but not an educational institution nonprofit. So there's a very different distinctive there. And actually here at DTS one of the challenges we've had is uses of media outside of the classroom. Just because we're an educational institution, does that now give us a free – "get out of jail free card," we can do anything we want with media? Well, no. If it's not in a classroom, part of that class, required by that professor, you can't do it. That – and when we step out of the classroom, we start falling under the same rules as everybody else.

Mark Yarbrough:
Right. And for our listeners, here's how the rubber meets the road on something like that where we have the student services department that might want to have a family movie night and show a movie versus a professor who might want to use a video clip in a classroom. Those are two different opportunities to utilize media, and one would fall under the educational fair use topic and the other one would not, and so we're having to put in and have put in the evaluation of policies and things like that so that in one environment it's okay and we know we're okay there and in another environment we have to clear it.

Wayne Walker:
Let me also talk about the use of movie clips. Sometimes when you use a movie clip, some of the problems – and, you know, your people don't see this until there's a problem in a congregation, but a lot of times when you show a movie clip, what you're communicating by the use of the media to your congregation is that you approved this movie. And sometimes we show movie clips from movies that we don't approve. And I've worked at churches and with churches who've shown movie clips and then people come back and say you showed the clip, so I showed the whole movie to my family and that movie was horrible. Or to show the movie clip you've got to spend 10 minutes setting it up. You have to tell people what the movie's about.

You know, years ago everybody was showing Brave Heart clips. Well, there's a certain section of our culture in our congregations who don't watch Brave Heart, have never seen it and so out of context, the movie clip means nothing. And so sometimes taking advantage of the sources that are available, and we'll talk about sources later, but there's a lot of companies that are producing some really great media and as well there are ways to legally show movie clips, but you just got to make sure that all the T's are crossed and the I's are dotted and you've taken care of all the legal licensing obligations.

Mark Yarbrough:
Right. Right. Well, we've talked about media technology at large and how it's changed. I mean, it's changed here at the seminary. We've talked just briefly about media and technology in the church and copyright issues. John, let's turn the attention to one of our areas of expertise and that is – that's the Web. As the director of Web development here, in many ways that's a lot of what you do, but wow! That has changed too...

John Dyer:
Yeah.

Mark Yarbrough:
...because if we were to go back to that original discussion of flip charts and graphs and things like that and video, you know, we've got this thing out there called the web and that's funny because if we were to go back a decade ago, it wouldn't be as prevalent of a discussion as we would have to talk about it today. On a real practical front, we see that here at the seminary on a regular basis because of the fact that today's student they want to know everything about the seminary and while they once got it in a brochure or in a catalog and things like that, most of us, I know these, you know, guys here at the table, what's the first thing that we do? Well, we Google™ it and we go and go and find the website and we want to get all of the details there. And we see that in our web presence as well.

So let me turn the discussion to web development. And how are churches using the Internet? I know we talked about podcasting and we're doing that here a little bit. So how are churches using the web? And what have we've seen in our culture at large, how does it reflect itself?

John Dyer:
Yeah, there's just a ton of new things going on. I think some of them are just extensions of something old so that you have – the podcasting is sort of the new tape ministry and we're making resources available. And there are things like just great websites with a lot of resources like Bible Gateway© would probably be the biggest example of a resource that a church could ever provide in and of itself and all the websites where you can get a lot of video and audio and clips. And then there are also areas where churches are able to do something new. For example, a pastor may be having a blog and being able to really connect with the audience on a daily – or the congregation on sort of a daily or more intimate level, sharing things that he might not share or might not be able to work into a sermon or having follow-up questions and all of that.

And the area of social networking is another really big area that really in a way changes the way that people look at an institution. So the main, say, seminary website is more of an institution where you come to it to find out information, but in a social networking environment, you know, DTS has a Facebook© page and a Facebook© profile and people want to be DTS's friend and then they want to kind of talk to each other and find out about DTS in the more social environment rather than finding out the line from the company, in that sense, but finding out what people think and kind of creating a more – in a way a little bit more of an authentic person-to-person relationship.

And then, you know, with our alumni we created kind of a little mini Facebook© for them. And there's a lot of alumni that are out in the middle of nowhere, kind of serving in a small church or being missionaries that don't have a lot of connections. And so there the use of technology is able to enable them to connect and relate in ways that they couldn't have before. And I think that – most technologies that allow you to – that enable relationships that couldn't happen otherwise are really, really positive.

And then the other more dangerous side of it is when it really begins to replace relationships. I've been in a room of people where everyone's on their computer doing Facebook© to somebody else somewhere else or text messaging somebody else and kind of missing out on the close relationships they might have

Mark Yarbrough:
Yeah, that's kind of the down side of technology. I mean, you know, there are many, many positives. There are many, many negatives and that's one of them that you're describing that as the world has become closer because of technology, and we could talk about the role of technology in missions and things like that, it's a communication device and you've got people that are finding out, but also at the same time the potential is there that it's not as close. And you have people that are right there beside one another that now no longer are talking because they're texting one another, you know, the age-old joke of, you know, two siblings, you know, rooms beside one another and they don't talk, but they only text, you know, and they're right there. There's a great danger in that and that can happen as well. So I'm glad you said that. Yeah.

John Dyer:
Yeah, I had a professor make a statement that said, "Technology's not neutral." And I thought, "What?" That seems weird. I always think of it as just being neutral and it's just what – if the message coming through it is good or bad, then that makes it good or bad. And I think really that every technology communicates something in its very nature that comes alongside of the message so that a really simple example would be if a college student breaks up with their girlfriend and says, you know, I just want to be friends, it's not you, it's me. But if they say that, you know, in person versus on the phone, versus an email, versus a text message, the thing that the person on the other end hears is very much different, and the technology itself says something about how they value that person.

And so when we're thinking about implementing a technology in a church, we need to consider what that technology itself communicates and the use of video, the kind of video, things that we buy, or the way that we communicate to people. Sometimes we can communicate something that we didn't really intend. And so it takes some thought to sit down and wonder what this technology is gonna – what it might replace and what it might enable and then what it might also allow us to do where it's amazing that I can get on the Internet and listen to sermons from a variety of different pastors from all different kinds of walks and hear all kinds of neat things.

At the same time, there's a possibility that I might think that – either, one, that the sermon is the whole Christian life or that I would sit at home and not go to church when I'm able to go to church. Wayne mentioned someone who's not. But if I just sat at home and I never actually connected to real live people. And I think, you know, we would talk about whatever the Imago Dei, the image of God means. We know that we're relational people, we know that we communicate with a language and that technology really changes the way that we experience language, the way that we experience relationships.

And when there's that technological barrier between us, it changes the way that we relate and it also changes a little bit about how we are. So I think when technology enables us to relate to someone that we couldn't relate to before, that's awesome, but sometimes we just need to be careful that we don't replace a relationship we might have had.

Mark Yarbrough:
Right. That's great. You know, we've struggled with that here on campus. We have had in our recent years online courses, and there have been many, many good things that have come out of online courses. We have students that are taking classes literally, you know, in their tent in Iraq. We have folks that are in other continents, in other countries that would never have an opportunity. Right now we have online courses that we're translating into Chinese and many of these students would never have an opportunity to come to Dallas and to study or at one of our extension sites. And so we are reaching new people.

On the other hand, we believe in face-to-face and flesh on flesh discussion and eye-to-eye contact in that format and we're never gonna lose that. So it's a question of how much can you do to reach the new without damaging what it is that you value most? And so I think churches have to wrestle with that as well with the use of technology and that's really what you're talking about. Here at this table we've already had an illustration of an individual who physically can't get out and we would say wow! What a neat opportunity. But we don't want to allow that to be the norm for those that can, that also need that live environment because we are created for community and that gives a great opportunity for us to stress the importance of that as well. So what else would you talk about?

Wayne Walker:
Well, you know, like you mentioned the online education, some of those people that are maybe staying in a church for a little while and able to still minister to their congregation while getting education, that ends up being a wonderful, wonderful thing. And I think that DTS has done a great job of making sure that people are still connected to communities even though they're doing things on line.

Mark Yarbrough:
And that's the interesting thing because, you know, when we talk about – well, we could talk about e-community in general. I mean, you know, when – with dating services and e-Harmony® and, you know, just a variety of other places that you could talk about. There is a level of dialogue that does transpire sometimes in a greater way, but boy, we just can't lose what it is, how we are created and I think you've phrased that correctly. Boy, that'd be a whole other topic in and of itself that would be fun to get some folks around the table and just have an hour or two discussion on that and what is e-community and its implications upon who we are as humans created in the image of God. That would be a fascinating topic.

John Dyer:
Yeah. There's a person at our church that I was leading a small group and he decided to send me a message through Facebook©. And I thought it was kind of fun because I knew that he was – you know, he's probably in his 50s or 60s and he was meaning to meet me where I was. And then, you know, at the same time there was wanting to then go meet with me somewhere else. That was kind of one of the points of the message. And so it was neat that he could find me where I was, but then also draw me out into, you know, a real life relationship, and I thought that was a really neat way of him recognizing that I live in, in a sense, a different culture that he grew up in, but he could meet me there and then draw me into sort of the universal community. That was a really neat thing.

Mark Yarbrough:
Right. Right. Well, guys, let's talk about resources for a little bit because we probably have a lot of folks that are listening to this and have – you know, we're scatter shooting and we admit that. We've got a lot of things that we're talking about because we've already identified the size of this topic, but in terms of creativity and graphics and art and how church is using that, Don, let me point back to you and ask the question of what resources would you recommend, things that you do in the classroom?

We still have required components of our curriculum for our degree programs and you're involved in teaching our students. What are some of the things that you see and some of the things that you would encourage and recommend and maybe even resources to folks that are out there saying hey, I want to be involved in these new areas of ministry that have now opened up, I can just pick one issue and say okay, on a regular basis you go into "church X" and everybody has a PowerPoint, every message has some type of a visual structure that goes with it? If somebody – what would you think about that?

Don Regier:
Well, if you go into a church and see a PowerPoint presentation, you have the strange feeling that you've seen it before because most people will use the standard templates that come with the program, they'll use the clip art that's built into the program, and it looks vaguely familiar. And I would recommend that you might start by trying to make your presentation – whether it's PowerPoint or Keynote®, try to make it unique.

I like to think of it as gift-wrapping. In class I use an example of a gift that comes unwrapped with all the stickers the sale prices on it, you know. It was $29.99 and it ends up being on sale for $1.99 and you don't receive that very gladly. It marks the gift as something not very significant. You want to gift-wrap it.

Professional gift-wrapping carries a message with it. Wow! She loved me enough to spend some money to have it gift-wrapped. But then I get to thinking Wow! It looked just like everybody else's gift. And that's the problem with presentations that we see in churches today; they all look alike.

I also use the example of a gift that my daughter wrapped for me when she was five years old. She made the gift-wrap. She put her heart and soul into it. She sent it to me with love, and that's the way I think our presentations ought to look. They ought to be unique to our church, unique to our personality, unique to our audience. It ought to be something that we create that sends a message hey, I love this content, I love this message that I'm preaching. I'm excited about it. I went through the extra work to gift-wrap it in a way that'll make it attractive to you, my audience, because I love you, my audience.

And so the place to begin doing that is to look for unique ways to gift-wrap your presentation. And it might be "Google™-ing" free templates for presentation software like PowerPoint, it might be a matter of creating unique things with your own photography, your own graphics. And we certainly have enough gifted people in the church that can do that.

Mark Yarbrough:
Right. Right. Well, I can remember some of the things when sitting in your classroom as your student listening to you talk about "Do it with excellence" and "It takes time." I think that's one of the great things that somehow technology – you know, we joke about that even on campus. There's a perception of it, it can always be done quickly and, you know auto magically, as we talk about on a regular basis. And once you get in there, it takes time. And also that allows the creativity to come forth in that process.

Some of the things of folks that I have a great opportunity, you gentlemen, but others as well, folks that are on campus that are just very gifted in this area, highly creative, and to watch what they do and to see what the Lord does through them is just an amazing thing, but it does reflect them. So what a great opportunity that gives us, even in the church today, to reflect the Lord in that regard. So that's kind of fun stuff.

Wayne Walker:
Now, if we can just keep going on that for a minute.

Mark Yarbrough:
Sure. Go ahead.

Wayne Walker:
You know, often times in a church – now, in an institution like we are is a little bit different, but in a church you have these great ideas, but you may not have those who can implement them that well. There are those who can preach amazing sermons and there are those who can create presentations, and usually the two don't reside in the same box–two different individuals. And so I think it's real important that you find those individuals who are gifted and talented in those areas and use them and implement them as well.

In a church, a lot of times you have a lot of volunteers and you have a volunteer-led ministry, you have volunteer graphic designers, you have volunteer video editors. I think it's also very important that we don't over burden those people with creativity. And the way we do that often is Saturday night – or Saturday morning we call somebody and say hey, I have this great idea for tomorrow, Sunday (Laughter), can you make me this video, can you make me this presentation? And, you know, you wouldn't do that to the pastor the day before, "Hey, it's Saturday, can you preach on Ephesians 4?" Now, wait a minute, I'm going to call you Saturday night. "I want you to preach on Romans 4."

You know, I think it's very important that we find those who are very gifted in those areas of creativity and who can step outside the box and go beyond just the basic templates in all areas of technology and media, but also give them an ample amount of time and resources to do that. We can't expect it all for free. You know, we can't expect the Sistine Chapel on a "Cracker Jack®" budget. We just can't.

Wayne Walker:
Yeah, that's fabulous because I have seen that non-creative people – if I can – I hate building camps here because I think we're all creative in our own ways and how the Lord's designed us, but for those who are highly gifted in art and design and that type of thing, non-creative people sometimes can abuse creative people. And it can happen because non-creative people don't realize that it takes time for thoughts to germinate and then to be expressed.

And that's real common at churches and you'll have folks that are, you know, the "type A" go-getters and the presenters and that type of thing, can call somebody up, oh, I just had this great idea and said – yeah, your great idea may mean my demise, you know. I'm going to blow up right here because there's no way, there's not a timeframe that I can do this in. So that certainly is an encouragement to the body at large.

When we're talking about a local church, a local group needs to learn how to work together. And so that's part of implementing the strengths of one another so you can help one another in that regard.

Wayne Walker:
And find those...

Mark Yarbrough:
I hear ya.

Wayne Walker:
...who are really good at doing it, you know. And in a church you're going to have a 14-year-old who's better at video than anybody else. You're going to have a 14-year-old who can create a website better than anybody on staff. And take advantage of some of those resources. Let those who have those gifts and those talents and that creativity. At our church we have a 15-year-old kid who runs sound and he is amazing at it. And we picked him because he can text and use his iPod and plays with gadgets like nobody's business and he has talent in that area, and we allow him to serve the body in that area.

Mark Yarbrough:
Yeah, and, Don, that's what you were talking about of new areas of ministry that have opened up. I mean, that's a great opportunity to bring people along and to use things that they love to do and can help the local church. That's fabulous.

Don Regier:
Yeah, and it's a great discipleship tool.

Mark Yarbrough:
Oh, yes.

Don Regier:
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

John Dyer:
When I was a youth pastor, I – it was right in the age when video was becoming available and I started making videos every week. And I probably spent 10 to 20 hours and I was only a 20-hour intern (Laughter). So I was spending all my time on this stuff. And the kids would love it, but it was a three-minute product. And so I eventually kind of got smart and learned that I could have kids help do these things because I was really missing out on spending time with them. I wasn't going to games and I wasn't having lunch with the kids because I was spending all this time making video.

So allowing them and that offered me opportunities to disciple and spend time with them. And then figuring out that there are great ministries that have put things up that you can use. So if you are a small church and maybe you don't have a lot of people who are really that media savvy or you're not that media savvy and you've been saddled with those responsibilities that you can get – like Don said, you can get templates and website templates and things like that that really are professional, they're not just junk templates. And then you can be using – buying something that's relatively cheap to enable you to have more time to spend with people.

I think that's the bottom line is that if you're spending too much time working on these things and not on what your gifting is and what your calling is, then you want to find somebody else who can do it or find a few bucks to find something.

Mark Yarbrough:
Right. Right.

Wayne Walker:
Sure. I've worked on video projects where each second of the finished product took hours, multiple – sometimes 10 or 15...

Mark Yarbrough:
Oh, yes.

Wayne Walker:
...hours for each second of the finished product. So a two-minute video, you know, was taking you weeks. And someone's going to pay for that time. And if you're trying to minister to people and meet with people and have lunch with people and – then you have to hand that project to somebody who likes to sit in a dark room with a bright computer.

Mark Yarbrough:
Right. Right. Specifically are there any resources that you'd recommend, any websites that you would send people to? And I know that's an open-ended question because we could be sending them to websites in regards to intellectual property rights and things like that, but in regards to web development, John, I'm thinking of things that you would – you know, churches are out there still saying hey, we want to have a better web page and we'd like to evaluate what we're doing and resources that are on our page. What – where would you send them to look at some things?

John Dyer:
You know, some things that are individual that have a finished product like making a video, often having someone in your church do that can be great. With websites it's a little bit harder because you need someone who can maintain it over time. And so sometimes, you know, finding someone who will only work on it for six months can be a little bit negative in that regard.

So there's several websites out there that allow churches to quickly and easily make a church website, so you can buy a domain, enter in a few pieces of information, pick a template and you're done. And one of those that does a really good job at that is advancedministry.net and DTS has a little bit of a relationship with them from years past, but they just do a great job. They have a lot of really professional things where you can put your sermons on there, have your calendar and events and all those kinds of things. And someone who basically can use Microsoft Word® can do that. And there are other ones that can do things like that.

You can also use very simple free blogging tools to create a really simple website. Like Word Press® allows you to have a free website, and you can start there and get something up that looks professional, that does what it needs to do. And just, by the way, most – some churches kind of forget that there are things they need to have on the front page or, you know, contact information and address and service times. Almost everything else people aren't usually going there for, but they're going there for the address and for the service time.

Mark Yarbrough:
And the phone number.

John Dyer:
And the phone number. Put those three things, address, service time, and phone number prominent so that people can find that quickly and easily.

Mark Yarbrough:
You know, that's so frustrating when you go to a site and that's the one thing you want and you cannot find the phone number anywhere.

John Dyer:
Exactly. Yeah.

Mark Yarbrough:
Right.

John Dyer:
So if you can do those well, then you can do probably 90% of your web task.

Mark Yarbrough:
Right. Right. Wayne, do you have any...

Wayne Walker:
Yeah, for videos...

Mark Yarbrough:
...sources that you...

Wayne Walker:
...you know, definitely if you're gonna buy a video to use in your church, I definitely think you want to look at places like http://www.worshiphousemedia.com/, a local group of guys that they have a – it's a plethora – it's a store different video products developed by all different kinds of production houses. Another one will be http://www.bluefishtv.com/. Those guys as well. Bluefishtv.com has $1.99 videos. So you need a cute, funny video for your youth group, you buy it for two bucks, $1.99, download it and use it that night. And it's in a format you can use in http://www.easyworship.com/home.php or http://www.mediashout.com/ or PowerPoint or Keynote® or play it on your iPod, whatever you want to do with it.

Another would be http://www.sermonspice.com/. Those guys create videos or sell videos or produce videos or have this huge repository of videos that you can search from. Adult bible studies to – you know, to youth, to mission oriented, to seasonal. They're – I just got emails this last few weeks about all the Father's Day videos that they've all created. You want something short and sweet and you don't have the video production team or the time or sometimes the talent, you can spend a few bucks, spend, you know, five, ten bucks and buy a good video you can show at church.

John Dyer:
You're not just supporting those big websites. A lot of local – you know, a kid might make a video and they can actually put it on some of those websites and sell that. So I know a professor here whose son does that and it's a great way for him to make a little bit of extra cash. So you can be supporting people and the body at large by buying those videos.

Mark Yarbrough:
Right.

Wayne Walker:
And as well – and I'll give a few more here. For church media production there's a lot of huge communities of people. The largest one is gonna be churchmedia.net, and they're actually have a conference here in Dallas pretty soon. http://www.churchmedia.net/ is basically a forum where you have people working in media and churches from web design to video production to running sound, to running lights, to leading worship and they're all on there asking and answering each other's questions, sharing resources. They have a media exchange. They share graphics and PowerPoint and video clips, but they also share advice.

I'm on there all the time. I'm commenting and contributing as much as I can, but it's a great resource because you have people that are doing the same job that you're doing that have already been there. And everything we do in technology we're standing on the shoulders of somebody else.

Mark Yarbrough:
Sure.

Wayne Walker:
You know, there's no much new created. It's a new implementation of old tools usually. Like John was saying, the podcast today is yesterday's tape ministry. You know, we're just distributing in a new way. We're always standing on the shoulders of giants. So if we can find people that are equipped and gifted and skilled in those areas, take advantage of those guys and bend their ears.

Mark Yarbrough:
Okay. Hey, let me ask, and I'll go around the table here, John, I'll start with you and just say – just give us a sound bite on this one and say what would be, you know, just one thing that you'd want to say, just one piece of advice? Maybe it's related to your area, maybe it's your philosophy of technology. You know, whatever it is, something that you see just in this. And we'll go around and we'll hit you and then Don and Wayne.

John Dyer:
I would say, going back to what Marshall McLuhan said in the '60s, that the medium is the message and you always need to remember that the medium itself communicates that the technology is not neutral and that whenever we implement something new, we need to just think through how that will actually communicate not the words that we say, but the technology itself and consider that before we jump into something. And that would probably be it.

Mark Yarbrough:
Hmm. That's great. Don?

Don Regier:
Don't become dependent on it.

Wayne Walker:
Ah, yes.

Don Regier:
Let it – let media support you, not supplant you. What happens when the power goes down? You don't want to be shut down completely.

Wayne Walker:
That's right (Laughter).

John Dyer:
And it will. The fire alarm will go off something crazy.

Wayne Walker:
That's right.

Don Regier:
Yes.

Mark Yarbrough:
The bulb always blows some how, some way, doesn't it?

Don Regier:
Have something up your sleeve besides starch and return by Thursday.

Mark Yarbrough:
That's great (Laughter). That's great. Wayne?

Wayne Walker:
Just in light of that, I was running an event with a speaker's PowerPoint. His laptop went dead, his battery died and he didn't bring his power supply. He was done. He didn't know his material. He couldn't continue and he had no backup. For me I would say be culturally relevant in what we do. You know, when we're trying to reach the 14-year-old in the pew and the 64-year-old in the pew and communicate well, we need to be culturally relevant. We need to speak in a way that meets them where they are and communicates the Gospel clearly.

Just like Gutenberg created the printing press, he stood on the edge of technology and created something new to deliver the most important message the world has ever heard, we have some of those tools available to us today to be able to do the same thing, deliver the most important message the world will ever hear using some of the greatest tools that God has gifted man to be able to create. And we can marry those two together and see people come to Christ.

Mark Yarbrough:
That's great. That's great. Well, guys, thank you very much for your time today. I want to state here even in recording my great privilege to work with each one of you. The Lord has gifted you uniquely and has sent you here for a reason and you're able to roll your lives into the lives of our students here. And as they go out, there's a piece of you that's invested in them and that's a fun thing. That's why we all do what we do, including our listeners who have a great opportunity to disciple others, even in this area.

Wayne Walker:
There are a couple questions on here we didn't talk about, you know, why does it always appear that churches are always behind the times.

Don Regier:
I don't think they are. Let's see. I had a comment on that. Yeah, some of the worst use of media that I've seen has been at media conferences, not in churches. We used to do some of the worst things with missionary slide shows, but we've come a long way.

John Dyer:
And I don't know that it's the church's primary role to be the absolute best at every technology just because most technologies in some way are related to entertainment and I don't think that we're in the entertainment business. And that's not necessarily our role. So if things are a little bit behind we wait for things to become maybe a little bit less expensive, I think those are all wise decisions.

Mark Yarbrough:
Yeah, you could just as much argue that it's a stewardship issue because, you know, we all know what it means to be on the "bleeding edge" you know, where you've spent lots of money and you're an early adapter of a technology and if you'd have just waited a year, you could have saved, you know, $5,000, $10,000, which at a lot of churches that's big bucks, you know. So, I mean, that's a fair argument that it's even one of stewardship. Yeah.

Wayne Walker:
And I think it's important that as we look at stewardship, we also look at our people. I think it's primary that we equip the saints, the saints that are doing the work. It's a shame that we would require more out of someone than we would be willing to invest in them. So we need to be sending our AV people, our volunteers to training, we need to get them books, we need to get them videos, whatever it takes to equip those guys – how to administer that new website, how to create those PowerPoint's® and use the new version of Keynote® when it comes out, what's the updates, do they have the latest software, do they have the training? They need to spend a week, you know, with the developers. Whatever the technology is, do we equip those people, do we allow them to be ready for Sunday morning so that we don't have many errors, we don't have a lot of problems?

I went to a church in Chicago last fall and the pastor told me, he said, "The biggest problem we have, Wayne, is five minutes before the service if we give them a change, it never works." Well, that's easy. Don't give them a change five minutes before the service, you know. We don't – and their staff had had no training, they didn't know what they were doing. They had no manuals for the equipment. They were using equipment that was five or six years old and they were not investing well into the people that needed to run it. Give them a break, let them actually attend service every once in a while and not always sit behind a computer. And give them software. Give them training. Pay for them to go to a conference somewhere to learn something.

Mark Yarbrough:
And that's hard. And then they still also had the expectation level that's way up here.

Wayne Walker:
Oh, yeah. We want...

Mark Yarbrough:
Sure. Sure. That's the way it...

Wayne Walker:
...CCN, we want...

Mark Yarbrough:
...always is.

Wayne Walker:
...ABC News. We want it to look like that every Sunday. We want it to be the Super Bowl, but we're gonna give you, you know, leftover pieces that we bought off of Craig's List.

Mark Yarbrough:
Right. Right.

John Dyer:
And, you know, we spend – we left pastors spend years learning in seminary how to preach and how to teach and how to say the scriptures and for missionaries we have them spend years learning a language so that when they go into a culture that they can be, in a sense, culturally relevant or be able to contextualize the message into that language. So I think we should spend some time on contextualizing with media as well and learning that and investing into people that are gonna be doing that just like we do with pastors and missionaries, that we do that with our other kinds of media producers.

Wayne Walker:
Right. Sure. And then like you said, Don, as well, the pastoral staff needs to know what's gonna happen when there is a mistake. You know, the Lord's blessed us all to be able to work with some amazing people. And I remember a few years ago I was working with Tony Evans and I asked him, I said, Dr. Evans, where's your PowerPoint? And he said, Wayne, what's PowerPoint? And this wasn't that long ago. You know, some of those guys who communicate extremely well don't use media. They don't need it because they know how to preach. They know how to deliver really great messages.

When Dr. Swindoll comes here to DTS, he uses no PowerPoint. Some of the greatest speakers that come use no media, no illustrations because they can hold the audience captive, and yet sometimes we create an idea that someone has to be able to wow us, dazzle us with brilliance on the screen because their content is not there, it's not – it's kind of shallow, or they use it as a crutch like you were alluding to earlier. You know, we need to be able to use it well when it can be used. And then have a realistic expectation.

You know, when – every church, and I don't care how big or small you are, you're gonna have a technical difficulty sometime. How are you gonna deal with that? What are you gonna do when the bulb on the projector breaks and you don't have a spare or you do have a spare and it breaks as well or the power goes off? I was at a church one time, I was producing a service, and the fire alarm went off. And then the pastor stood up in front of 2,000 people and asked me to turn the fire alarm off. The fire alarm's going off. We need to leave the building. You know, this is not – you know, yes, you're gonna lose your point, but how do you maintain sense and order and how do you still...

Mark Yarbrough:
This is not a technological...

Wayne Walker:
...teach

Mark Yarbrough:
...inconvenience. It's the fire alarm.

Wayne Walker:
That's right.

Don Regier:
I was in a church where the fire alarm went off, it was one of those talking fire alarms, and it could not be shut off and the fire department did not come.

Wayne Walker:
There is a fire. Please exit the building.

Mark Yarbrough:
That's right. That's great. Thank you for your time today. I know it's busy. And I appreciate you spending some time with all of our listeners on this valuable topic. So why don't we have a word of prayer and then we will be done.

Lord, thank you so much for this topic, which gives us opportunity to talk. And we have made great errors in this area and we have great success stories to talk about as well. Help us to constantly assess how we can take a tool and use it and what that means even in the process. We want to represent you well in all facets and even in this area, so help us to that end to reflect the glory of your son, Jesus Christ. And we thank you for the salvation that we have in Him and we ask all of this in His name.

Announcement: For more information about Dallas Theological Seminary, please visit us on the web at www.dts.edu.

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