Would Paul have used PowerPoint?

As the final chord of the hymn dies away the congregation sits and, to everyone's surprise, the lights go out.

The voice of Buddy Holly singing 'That'll be the day' comes through the PA. The front projector screen lights up and starts scrolling through photo after photo of famous faces, each dead, with the date they died displayed underneath. Albert Einstein, April 18 1955; Elvis Presley, August 16 1977; Princess Diana, August 31 1997; Jill Dando, April 16 1999.

The penultimate slide is a photograph of Buddy Holly himself with the date February 3 1959 followed by words from Ecclesiastes 3: 'There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot' (vv.1-2).

As the song fades away, in the hushed silence that follows, the preacher opens his sermon with these words: 'There is only one day every one of us can guarantee we will live to see and it's vital we're ready for it when it comes, because none of us knows the day we will die.' As the sermon progresses, key Bible references and headings appear on the screen behind him. Sermon illustrations are accompanied by appropriate pictures or photographs.

The use of presentation software and projection facilities is becoming increasingly familiar in church services. But is this trend towards the visual a good thing? Are there any guidelines from God's Word with regard to this? What are the dangers and opportunities? Is it possible to make a case for the presentation? Would the apostle Paul have used PowerPoint?

The Word and the heard

Throughout the Bible primacy is given to the verbal proclamation of God's Word. Time and time again we read in the Bible of a God who speaks. 168 times in the Old Testament alone we read the phrase: 'This is what the Lord says'. Even when David referred to creation as a visual aid to God's glory in Psalm 19, he used speech as his governing metaphor, underlining the primacy of God's Word in his self-revelation.

Both James and Peter state that the new birth comes through hearing and responding to God's 'word of truth' (James 1.18/1 Peter 1.23). Paul argued that: 'Faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word of Christ' (Romans 10.17). He also insisted the Word of God is the primary means of building up believers (Acts 20.32 / 2 Timothy 3.15-16). At Pentecost it was the preached word that gathered and constituted the church.

There is, therefore, clear precedent for insisting that the spoken word should be the dominant means of communicating God's truth today. Hearing the gospel is vital. The Bible nowhere gives examples of those converted solely through what they see, rather it is as unbelievers hear, understand and then respond to God's Word that the Spirit of God works.

No visual aids?

Does this mean that God's truth must never be accompanied by visual stimulus? Not at all! The Bible is full of examples of visual aids accompanying the Word of God and the communication of his truth.

The prophets were often told to visibly act out God's Word to communicate God's truth with greater power and memorability. Among many examples: Hosea was commanded to go after his unfaithful wife, Amos was invited to ponder a basket of summer fruit, Jeremiah was commanded to observe a boiling cauldron and a potter's wheel, and a delivered Jonah became a visual aid to the Ninevites.

Warren Weirsbe has observed: 'The prophets were seers as well as speakers, and what they spoke depended a great deal on what they saw.' Alec Motyer has summarised the relationship between the seen and the said like this: 'Without abandoning the spoken word, the prophets frequently "supported" what they said by what they did... Plainly these actions of the prophets acted as visual aids, supporting their spoken words.'

In the New Testament the great climax of redemption history was the coming of Jesus: the Word made flesh. In him the invisible God became visible in order that we might see 'the glory of the one and only' (John 1.14). According to John, the visibility of Jesus was integral to the glory of the incarnation: 'No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father's side, has made him known' (v.18).

Moreover, Jesus's ministry was accompanied by many visual demonstrations of his claim to be the Messiah. He healed diseases, he gave sight to the blind, he even raised the dead! Who could claim that watching a four-day dead, mummified Lazarus, staggering from the tomb didn't have stunning visual impact! It added all the more to Jesus's claim to be 'the resurrection and the life' (John 11.25).

Like the prophets, Jesus also often used commonplace sights as visual aids or object lessons to add impact and memorability to his teaching. In some cases it is highly likely that these would be in sight as he spoke. Among the familiar sights he used: a sower scattering seed in his field; ripe crops ready for harvest; a city shining on a hill; the temple; a lamp on a stand; little children gathered around him; vines and vineyards; a wedding banquet and a widow's offering.

Most significant of all is that Jesus instituted a supper with bread and wine as visual aids to remembrance and the early church used baptism as a visual representation of the new birth. In Athens, Paul used a statue to an unknown god as an accompanying visual aid for his message.

My point is simply that there is no Scriptural justification for arguing that the visual is unimportant, irrelevant or just plain wrong when accompanying the proclamation of God's truth. Truth must always be pre-eminent, and the seen must never overtake or distract from the spoken, but appropriate use of visual accompaniments is not without biblical precedent. In each case the visual aid was not an end in itself, but it was used as a powerful tool to aid understanding, arrest the attention of the listener, increase memorability and add impact. We might, therefore, conclude that, with careful use, visual stimulus can be a helpful accompaniment to convey spiritual truths.

In a pagan culture

As believers living in post-Christian Britain, we are missionaries in a pagan society. As a secondary school teacher I was constantly amazed at the lack of understanding my students had about the Bible. Most would struggle even to pronounce the names of the books, let alone understand the truths within them! If we are to effectively reach and then disciple the majority who are now biblically illiterate we therefore need to recover a Pauline mindset in the way we think about church today.

Where is the willingness to forgo our cultural or personal preferences in order to 'become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some' (1 Corinthians 9.22)? More often than not new or non-Christians who come to our churches are required to conform to our evangelical sub-culture in order to fit in. Is this one of the (human) reasons that we see so few converted who have totally pagan backgrounds?

Great challenge

The great challenge of evangelical Reformed churches today is to keep on reforming - to be as culturally accessible as we can be without compromising core truths. This is where the use of visual aids can be so helpful.

The fact is we already use visuals in the presentation of spiritual truths in other contexts. The object lesson has been used in church services for many years. Sunday schools, children or young people's groups and beach missions all use visual aids to support verbal communication. We do so because the attention span of these particular groups is short and we know they take in more when visuals are used. I would argue that in our TV-driven age, the same is increasingly becoming the case with adults today. The average attention span of an adult is now between 10-15 minutes. This presents a huge challenge for those of us who treasure preaching. How do we retain the sermon and at the same time reach the average adult we have been commissioned to evangelise? Perhaps rediscovering visual aids is part of the answer. Like everything we do in church, we have to be wise and balanced in their use, but there is no biblical principle that forces us to abandon visual stimulus.

Part 2 next month.

Richard Lacey is assistant pastor at Kensington Baptist Church, Bristol.

© Evangelicals Now - January 2005
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